As the Discourse editorial team determines its next steps, we hope you’ll follow us for new content and updates about what’s to come. You can click here to subscribe.

Today marks the end of an era—the end of Discourse magazine as we know it. And I don’t feel fine: To say I’m heartbroken is truly an understatement. Being a Discourse editor has been the most creative professional position I’ve been in in my entire career, allowing me the freedom to pursue ideas and thoughts down many delightful rabbit holes. I’m endlessly proud of what we’ve been able to create and publish over the past few years, and knowing that our time doing that at the Mercatus Center is coming to a close makes me extremely sad. What we have done here matters, and there’s no taking away from that.

But there’s one thing about Discourse that matters like no other: While Discourse has always been a magazine of ideas, it’s really about the people.

One thing I’ve always loved about editing for Discourse is how I get to pick the brains of great thinkers who are truly experts in their fields. It’s kind of like going to a professor’s office hours: I get to ask smart people questions, and they in turn put their hearts into explaining why their chosen issues matter. But what’s been so delightful is developing such strong connections with them over my three years with the magazine. Our Discourse authors have turned into my trusted advisers, lunch buddies, confidants and friends. We’ve become brothers and sisters in arms in this great effort to keep discussion and respectful debate alive when those in power seem to be doing everything they can to thwart these things.

And of course, there are my closest colleagues, my fellow editors, David Masci and Christina Behe. We’ve been Discourse’s small-but-mighty editorial team, the “three musketeers.” They are my family, and they always will be. Our editorial meetings have been famously long, often stretching to far past an hour—but it was because we’ve enjoyed each other’s company so much. I’ve never imagined a team that could care so much about one another—about what we think and bring to the table work-wise, but also about who we are as individuals.

I’ve felt so able to be myself, and that in turn has helped me become a more confident version of me. I remember one time very early on in my time at Discourse, I brought an article idea to David, something I thought would be good to find an expert to write about. And I’ll be honest, as the words escaped my mouth, I steeled myself for pushback and criticism—not because of David, but because of my own past experience with less-than-encouraging team leaders. Imagine my surprise when David not only liked my idea, but encouraged me to recruit authors and develop a Discourse series around the idea. Spearheading the development of this series—on historic preservation—became one of my proudest moments as an editor, and it never would have happened without the support of the two best colleagues a person could have. I am so very thankful for them, and until we are colleagues again, I am very happy that I can call them close friends.

This is what Discourse (the magazine) and “discourse” (the very concept) are all about: talking to each other, getting to know each other’s thoughts and motivations, learning how to communicate about how to make our country and world better, caring about one another and our future together. The loss of a media space where we can do those things is surely a loss for a healthy and functioning society.

Some will say that in the media world, artificial intelligence will be able to take the place of human discussion, that magazine articles and essays should ultimately be written by machine and that nothing will be lost in the process. I couldn’t disagree more. Humans—writers, authors, thinkers—are unpredictable, and that is a virtue, particularly if we value creativity. People are smart and haughty and messy and late on deadlines and shocking and caring and infuriating and beyond amazing.

I am mystified by the capabilities of the human mind, though I understand that in all likelihood, many of those will be ultimately matched by AI. But it is the capabilities that can’t be matched—and even some of the smartest folks in the AI space believe that those exist—that are most fascinating to me. AI sentience is far from a foregone conclusion, and the emotional side of being human is an unsung hero in essay writing. Essays are not written just to inform, but to make the reader feel—and certainly, our writers have done that for me. I have learned, yes, but I have also learned why so many things in our lives matter and felt the passion authors feel right through the laptop screen. I don’t believe that will ever be something a machine can match.

I have loved getting to do this work. Thank you for allowing my colleagues and me the opportunity to do it. Working with such wonderful authors and colleagues has done so much more for me than scratching an intellectual itch. It’s been the kind of work that renews your faith in humanity—and makes you believe in it more than ever.

Vox’s Zack Beauchamp recently published a plaintive lament about the absence of ideological training and career promotion for young “liberals”—by which he means opponents of the current trend toward authoritarianism:

Last week, two young liberals [at a conference for liberals] asked for help finding a job in the ideas industry. And I didn’t have a great answer…. What’s really missing are programs of a specific kind—ones that help college students and recent grads engage with Big Ideas and connect with Important People.

This observation really resonated with me. I was at the same conference and found myself next to someone who worked with a big foundation, so I spontaneously pitched exactly the kind of training and development program Beauchamp is talking about. But the guy I was talking to seemed a lot more interested in getting people to make TikTok videos than in spearheading any training on big ideas and how to think and write. Yet it strikes me that being a charismatic talker on social media is downstream from the more difficult task of having something to say.

Beauchamp argues that the problem is that liberalism is a victim of its own success: “There wasn’t much of a need for liberal donors to create programs to cultivate liberal thought, as people interested could simply go get a Ph.D. or an entry-level reporting job.” He criticizes the narrowness of the kind of professional training you would receive as an entry-level reporter. But you might also notice that such jobs for reporters have also largely disappeared—as have many other jobs involving the intersection of politics and ideas.

The Great Disintermediation

There was once a whole media industry centered on the world of writing. It was an industry of books and newspapers, of course. But for the kind of ideas we’re talking about—the ability to connect current politics to philosophical arguments about the nature of government and our ideals for how a society should work—the central forum was the magazine. The magazine article was a format that allowed for timely commentary on the news of the day, but also for some degree of intellectual depth. A magazine could also create the kind of connections where a young writer would work with seasoned intellectuals who were his or her editors and could join a fellowship with other contributors that would open up new opportunities.

This system was not just for young people starting out. For the established professional, it meant that there was a varied industry of ideas, and if one magazine went under—as they occasionally did—there were plenty of others to turn to. But that industry is dying and has been for a long time.

This is partly due to the impact of the internet. My career as a writer, spanning from the mid-1990s to today, coincides neatly with the impact of the internet on the ideas business. I’ve found that it had two positive impacts and two negative ones.

On the positive side, the internet knocked flat the barriers to entry. The old world of newspapers and magazines contained many strong institutions—but to get a foot in the door, you had to get past a lot of gatekeepers, and if you were like me and a little bit outside the mainstream or the usual political categories, that could be difficult. Now anyone with a cheap laptop can go online and publish. And if you have any talent, there’s a good chance you will get noticed.

The internet also made the ideas business more open to those who live outside the big media centers. There was a time when, if you wanted to be taken seriously in talking about the big issues, you pretty much had to work in New York City or Washington, D.C. But if you work “on the internet,” you can live anywhere, including a lot of places where it’s much cheaper than in the big cities.

These advantages are counteracted by two big costs. The first is that everyone got used to getting all their information for free—and they lost the habit of paying for the words they read. Of course, they weren’t necessarily eager to pay writers in the old days. We like to think people bought newspapers for our cutting insights and deathless prose. But more likely, they bought them to look at the job postings, the classified ads, the sports scores or the movie listings. These are the things that brought in the money to pay the writers, but the “Great Disintermediation” of the internet era decoupled them from the ideas business, depriving it of its biggest and steadiest sources of revenue.

Poisoning Your Brain on the Internet

But perhaps the worst impact is that people became used to hearing only what they want to hear. The audience became slaves of the algorithm, which would make sure to feed back to them a steady stream of affirmation of whatever they already believed. Many writers became the algorithm’s slaves, too, chasing after whatever seemed like it would give them greater reach in Google searches or on social media.

The feedback loop created by the automatized yes-man of the algorithm tends to push people into positions that are a more purely distilled version of wherever they started out—and then, eventually, into a distorted self-parody of them.

In a development worthy of fiction, the most prominent examples of this are some of the Silicon Valley moguls who helped create the internet in the first place—then promptly poisoned their brains on it. Hence the spectacle of Marc Andreessen, who helped write one of the first web browsers, radicalizing himself on group chats. Or there’s Peter Thiel, in an unhinged Financial Times op-ed, celebrating the prospect that the internet will re-open all of the conspiracy theories, from Jeffrey Epstein back to the Kennedy assassination.

Perhaps the most poignant example is Mark Zuckerberg, who bought Instagram and since then seems to have been personally colonized by it. As the New York Post summed it up, “He’s grown his hair out into a modified mullet, ditched the hoodie for trendy Balenciaga T-shirts and prominent gold chains, and taken to wearing a $900,000 Greubel Forsey watch.” All things that are more worthy of being posted on the ‘Gram.

These men are all just a few steps behind the guy who literally poisoned his brain on the internet. According to a report in a medical journal, this unnamed patient asked ChatGPT for a substitute for salt in his diet. It recommended sodium bromide, a toxic chemical that eventually induced “paranoia and hallucinations.” This is where we are all eventually headed if we’re not careful.

The Calvinball Commentators

The other reason for the decline of the ideas business is the very same authoritarian moment that it has enabled.

I noticed this while working as the token classical liberal at a conservative magazine during Donald Trump’s first term. Normally, the victory of a Republican president would be a boon for such publications, because they would have the prospect of being able to catch the eyes and ears of people in positions of actual power. An idea hatched at a think tank could make it through a magazine article to someone in the administration or Congress and be turned into policy. But that was back when people in power actually read the magazines.

The strange thing I noticed about Trump, by contrast, is that he was bad for conservative magazines. Why? Because he didn’t read them, he didn’t care about them, he didn’t need them and he viewed them as a threat. After all, National Review had attempted to circle the wagons against him in the 2016 primaries. Magazines are full of people who care about facts and ideas and logic and consistency, and that makes them dangerous for someone as mercurial as Trump, who can declare a policy one day and reverse it the next. Ideas don’t follow his whims.

Donald Trump doesn’t need intellectuals with ideas. He needs sycophants. He needs people willing to spin a rationalization for whatever he did this morning, then spin a totally contradictory rationalization for whatever he decides to do in the evening. In a recent Supreme Court dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson came up with the best term for this, comparing the majority ruling to “Calvinball,” a fictional game from the Calvin & Hobbes comic strip in which there are no fixed rules, but one constant imperative: that all the rules will be interpreted to benefit Calvin.

This is the sense in which Beauchamp is wrong to envy the intellectual infrastructure of the right, because its actual ideological content is very shallow and dispensable. The Trumpist right needs TikTok and social media, but it doesn’t require much in the way of sustained argument just to declare that Mussolini is always right—excuse me, that “Trump Was Right About Everything.”

Can the Ideas Business Be Revived?

What do we have today as a center for the revival of the ideas business? Certainly, Substack has taken up much of that role, but it is atomized and siloed. Everyone has his own newsletter behind his own paywall, usually with no backing from or connection to a larger organization. We are missing much of the role of the magazine, which was not just a platform on which to be published, but a regular source of income and audience, and a community that could pull its readers together and bring its writers into conversation with each other.

I can’t say that I know for sure what the solution to this problem will be or how to put the pieces of the old fragmented “liberal” media system back together. But we need to at least confront the problem.

In this era of rising authoritarianism—with federal troops now literally occupying the nation’s capital—the fundamental rebuilding we need to do is not just political but intellectual. As the old institutions fade, so does our ability to think about the big picture and deliberate about our world. We’re already feeling the consequences, and we need to rebuild that capacity.

I come to praise Discourse, not to bury it. There’s no need for mourning. The wisdom and humor and unwavering moral compass Discourse bestowed on us for the past five years will live on in the magic of the internet and in the minds of its readers—and, as in my case, in the fond memories of its contributing authors. In a world oppressed by the pressure to conform, Discourse was unique. In a media environment characterized by noisy posturing, Discourse was calm and—the word is almost heretical now—straight.

For a writer, contributing to Discourse was an amazing experience. Writing is easy. Being edited by someone who may or may not share the author’s stylistic preferences—who may or may not even understand what the author is trying to say—is excruciating. I speak from experience. Yet writing for Discourse was invariably a creative process. I hesitate to use that word, creative, because it’s been pounded and trivialized into meaninglessness. To me, it means something important is added to the world: Out of a tiny mustard seed, a mighty mustard tree is grown. Being edited by Discourse made my articles smarter and better. Something good was always added, and it was done in a spirit of spontaneity and fun.

Much of the credit goes to the chief editor, David Masci. David and I didn’t know each other before we came together over the digital pages of Discourse. We ended up fast friends. David turned out to be one of those persons who knows everything about anything—but it never showed unless you asked. He can see all sides of a controversy, and as an editor is driven by a rare sense—I hesitate to call it old-fashioned—that, for the benefit of the reader, all sides must be heard.

This attitude was reflected in Discourse’s content. It disdained tribalism. It certainly wasn’t liberal or conservative—or particularly libertarian, even though its sponsor leaned that way. Every article in Discourse was an attempt to understand some portion of the world from an interesting perspective. The sum of all the articles approached my definition of insightful analysis: viewing a subject in the round, good and bad, for and against, from every possible perspective. Implied was a tremendous respect for the reader’s capacity to judge.

Is there space in our fractured, fractious media landscape for such a catholic approach? I will let others speculate on that. Here the business side matters less to me than the substance. Being old if not wise, I have learned that the moments of high achievement and understanding must be savored and enjoyed because, like a fine meal, they cannot last. For me, contributing to Discourse was such a moment. I confess that I enjoyed it immensely.

So farewell to Discourse. Although its moment is done, the content and the experiences remain—and my lunches with David, I expect, will continue.

As the Discourse editorial team determines its next steps, we hope you’ll follow us for new content and updates about what’s to come. You can click here to subscribe.

For the past five years, Discourse magazine has been a source of thoughtful, nuanced, nonpartisan commentary on issues that matter to society and to humanity. It has championed the ideals of classical liberalism such as pluralism, individual rights, free speech and free markets. It has been a place, as its tagline indicates, “where ideas meet.” Now that Discourse will no longer be publishing (at least for now) and its team is moving on to new opportunities, I want to offer a brief reflection on all the magazine has meant to me.

First, during my time at Discourse, I’ve grown professionally in so many ways. I came to the magazine from a copyediting background, and I was used to working on fairly academic and technical papers. Discourse was very different: Not only were its articles shorter and more conversational than what I was used to, but it required an entirely different style of editing. I got to engage more with the substance of the pieces I was working on, and in so doing I learned more than I ever expected about topics ranging from U.S. military readiness to portable benefits to AI policy to Renaissance art.

I also had the opportunity to develop skills beyond editing, such as initiating and maintaining relationships with Discourse’s many talented writers; generating and pitching story ideas; writing my own articles for the magazine; and even doing a bit of fundraising. I’ve learned so much from this job and am incredibly grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to try new things and grow professionally.

And speaking of gratitude, words can’t express how truly thankful I am for the past five years working with the Discourse team. Editor-in-chief David Masci took a chance in bringing me on board, since I had no previous journalism experience, and I hope I’ve been able, at least in part, to repay his faith in me. He is one of the kindest, friendliest, most generous people I’ve ever met, and he’s been the best champion of this magazine—and this team—I could have asked for. And executive editor Jen Tiedemann brought so much to the magazine, from her enthusiasm and creativity to her media and PR experience. But more than that, she’s sharp and snarky and excellent company; I’m lucky to call her a friend. Working with these two has been an absolute career highlight for me, and I know we’ll keep in touch as friends if not as colleagues.

Finally, to Discourse’s amazingly talented writers, freelance editors, designers and readers: “I can no other answer make but thanks, / And thanks, and ever thanks.” Together we built something great. And even though this chapter is over, I hope we’ll meet again someday.

Every major religion teaches us not to put too much stock in the things of this world, that moth, rust or theft will eventually take all that we have. Still, I had hoped that Discourse would survive long past next month, when the magazine was slated to celebrate its fifth anniversary. Alas, it will not.

After nearly five wonderful years, Discourse will stop publishing at the end of this week. I know I speak for the editorial team when I say that while the decision to shut down the magazine greatly saddens us, we’re also extremely grateful to have had the opportunity over the years to publish more than 1,500 thought-provoking essays on a wide array of diverse topics, to have worked with some of the best thinkers and writers around and, most especially, to have reached millions of readers.

The reason for the magazine’s demise has to do with the ever-shifting sands of Washington, D.C.’s think-tank world. For the past year, the Mercatus Center (which has generously provided funding for our magazine since its inception) has been in the midst of a major reorganization. As a result, a number of programs, including Discourse, have been handed their walking papers.

Mercatus gave us roughly a half a year to find a new institutional home for the magazine. But while my colleagues and I had literally dozens of conversations with people from a host of different organizations, and while a number of them expressed genuine interest in taking on or supporting Discourse, no one agreed to provide enough financing to keep us afloat.

We still have a number of active prospects. So, who knows? The break in publication may turn out to be temporary rather than permanent. I certainly hope so. But if this turns out to be goodbye, the Mercatus Center will continue to host the website and all its content, which means readers like you will continue to have access to everything we’ve ever published, entirely free of charge.

A Debt of Gratitude

At the end of last year, I published a piece in Discourse in which I paid tribute to the many editors, writers and others who worked so hard to help us build a great magazine. And while I won’t repeat everything I said in that essay (and will instead encourage you to read it), there are a few special people I’d like to thank again, starting with former Mercatus Center executive director Dan Rothschild. Discourse was Dan’s idea, and so you would not be reading this—or anything we’ve ever published—if he had not hatched a plan to create a new magazine and hired me and the editorial team to implement his vision. What’s more, for most of the magazine’s life, Dan was our de facto publisher, offering not only financial support but invaluable advice.

I also want to pay special tribute to my colleagues on the Discourse editorial team, Christina Behe and Jennifer Tiedemann. Christina came on board in the fall of 2020 just as we were preparing to launch the magazine. Her tremendous talents and creativity helped us to not only get the project off the ground, but to go from strength to strength as we moved forward. A few years later, Jen arrived and injected a whole new level of energy and enthusiasm into the magazine. Since she’s come on board, many of our best ideas and writers have come to us as the result of her tremendous talents and efforts. As I have told these two wonderful people on numerous occasions, I feel supremely blessed to have had the opportunity to work with both of them.

I also want to thank our freelance editors and writers. Amy Stern and Mary Horan have copy edited virtually all of our pieces with great skill and aplomb, helping to keep us on the straight and narrow. And while I don’t have room to list all of our wonderful writers, I’d like to call out just a few of our best, starting with Martin Gurri. Martin has been with us since the very beginning, quickly becoming not only our most popular contibutor but also a great friend and consigliere. I also want to send a special thank you to Michael Ard, Chuck Blahous, Garrett Brown, Robin Currie, Addison Del Mastro, Veronique de Rugy, Jon Gabriel, Nathan Goetting, Sahil Handa, Dan Kochis, James Lileks, John Mac Ghlionn, Christine McDaniel, Andrey Mir, Natasha Mott, Michael Puttré, Jack Salmon, Timothy Sandefur, Christian Schneider, Lyndi Schrecengost, Rob Tracinski and Weifeng Zhong. Each of these people routinely turned in wonderful work only to later surprise us with something even better.

Finally, let me thank you, our subscribers and readers. Everything we’ve done would be but a small tree falling in a vast forest if it were not for you. So, thank you all for giving us your most precious commodity, your time, and for coming along with us on this five-year journey.

Something Special

A couple of weeks ago, the editorial team and a few friends of the magazine got together for drinks at a local bar in Arlington, Virginia. It was a bit like an Irish wake, a time of sadness and mourning but also of joy and celebration. Extra-long hugs were exchanged and a few tears were shed, but mostly we just laughed and talked, remembering all of the fun we’d had doing this wonderful and important work. Each member of the editorial team got up to say a few words. At one point I told everyone that editing Discourse had not only been the best job of my life, but a five-year love affair. Implicit in everything my colleagues and I said was our sense of great pride: We knew we had accomplished something special.

Discourse was founded at a time of great social and political turbulence, a time of intense polarization, when the loudest, most extreme voices commanded the most attention. Our magazine was created to push against these prevailing trends, not by taking one side or another, but by publishing different and sometimes competing perspectives. We often ran pieces that I vehemently disagreed with, and that was not a bug, but a feature. And even when authors forcefully advocated for ideas, we insisted that they treat those on the opposing side with respect. That was a feature too. As I wrote in an essay published on Sept. 29, 2020, the day we launched the magazine: “No one was ever insulted into changing their minds.”

It’s hard for me not to think that Discourse was at least partly a victim of its success in the sense that there is much more elite interest in pressing one set of arguments than in creating a place, as the magazine’s tagline states, “where ideas meet.” At the same time, if this truly is our last week of publication, I feel confident that someone, somewhere, will create another forum that not only tolerates different perspectives, but encourages them. That’s because Discourse was more than a great magazine; it was and is a great idea. And while good things do eventually come to an end, good ideas last forever.

Thank you for your readership and support.

David

David Masci

Editor in Chief

davidmasci@yahoo.com

As the Discourse editorial team determines its next steps, we hope you’ll follow us for new content and updates about what’s to come. You can click here to subscribe.

This is the third in a series of essays looking at the challenges of a commitment to free speech. The first, on what it means to be a free speech absolutist, can be read here, and the second, on obscenity and free speech, can be found here.

For a free speech absolutist, all speech and every speaker, no matter how repugnant, are protected by the First Amendment. That principle even extends to someone as exasperating as Xavier Alvarez.

Alvarez couldn’t be trusted with the time of day. He lied ceaselessly and compulsively. He hungered for attention and unearned admiration. The life story he dreamed up for himself was so far-fetched that it could’ve been the subject of epic biographies: He’d been a professional athlete, married a “Mexican starlet [who] caused paparazzi to swoon” and performed great feats of international heroism. Each of his claims was as spectacular as it was false. He wound up lying his way straight into a prison cell for insurance fraud and theft.

The Supreme Court tells us that some lies are protected by the First Amendment and some aren’t. Alvarez told all kinds. After years of contentious litigation, his place in history has been secured not by the lies for which he was ultimately punished, but for those the Supreme Court chose to protect.

On July 23, 2007, while attending a local water board meeting, he announced that he was a retired Marine, wounded in battle, and had won the Congressional Medal of Honor. These deceptions violated the Stolen Valor Act, which sought to preserve the prestige of military honors by punishing those who dilute their value with lies about winning them. Alvarez was sentenced to probation, community service and a fine before his conviction was overturned.

One can’t be blamed for asking why someone like Alvarez—who even stood for a picture wearing a fake military uniform with pretend medals on his chest—should be protected by the same Constitution many of the servicemen he insulted died defending.

The Supreme Court failed to give us a clear answer. There was no majority opinion in Alvarez’s case. Instead, a fractured coalition of six justices left two minority opinions striking down the Stolen Valor Act, both firmly rejected by three justices in dissent. The plurality opinion, which got four of nine votes, argued that the Stolen Valor Act is unconstitutional because, while many kinds of lies can be punished, those Alvarez told hadn’t caused any “legally cognizable harm”—the type of harm that provided a basis for a legal claim—and involved mere “falsity and nothing more.”

However, the three justices in dissent—Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas—described his duplicity in dire terms. We were living through an “epidemic of false claims,” they announced, “[that] were undermining our country’s system of military honors and inflicting real harm on actual medal recipients and their families.”

How could four justices see mere falsehood and three see an epidemic of harm against “only the bravest of the brave”? There’s no evidence that either side of this debate considered ruling that even the worst fibs—as long as they’re just fibs—don’t require police intervention.

Lies are always at least a little harmful, because even at their most benign—even when they’re comforting—they steer listeners away from the good that comes by learning something that’s true. Most lies do far worse. They often destroy friendships, break hearts and sow confusion. By perpetuating the court’s longstanding tradition of balancing free speech against other social interests, and drawing arbitrary lines between lies that the Constitution does and doesn’t protect, the court has invited Congress and state legislatures to pass laws that turn law enforcement agencies into truth detectives with confusing, irrational mandates—and they’ve accepted that invitation.

The text of the First Amendment reads that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” In an opinion dealing with illegal falsehoods written more than 50 years ago, Justice William O. Douglas explained that “Unlike the right of privacy which, by the terms of the Fourth Amendment, must be accommodated with reasonable searches and seizures,” the First Amendment contains no such temporizing language. Its promise of free speech is absolute. Because lies are speech, it protects them absolutely—even when, to most of us, doing so seems unreasonable. None of the other justices joined Justice Douglas’ opinion, and none has adopted his view on this issue since.

This absolute protection is beginning to meet a new challenge. Artificial intelligence programs are suddenly everywhere. They amplify malicious fiction disguised as news, and social media gives the bad actors who spread it an unprecedented audience. How many of the virtually infinite online deceptions will courts find “legally cognizable”? The Supreme Court could’ve given us a clear answer in the Alvarez case. Instead, this area of the law is a land of confusion.

Lying and the Law

It makes perfect sense that governments should want to regulate lies. Not only are they harmful, they’re ubiquitous. While most of us aren’t pathological fabulists like Alvarez, research shows that we lie with alarming regularity. According to one famous study, the average person bears false witness at least once per day.

Within fluctuating limits, courts have always allowed legislatures to regulate falsehoods. Perhaps the most notorious example is the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to publish “false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States.” In short order, President John Adams, whose signature enacted the law, converted his administration into an aggressive ministry of truth. Prosecutors convicted newspaper publishers and a sitting congressman who spoke “falsely” about the government with a 100% success rate.

One author was fined and sentenced to nine months in jail for publishing that Adams was a “repulsive pedant, a gross hypocrite, and an unprincipled oppressor.” In anticipation of the act’s passage, an editor was arrested after his paper referred to the president as “[o]ld, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” While the Supreme Court never heard any appeals from these defendants, and eventually denounced the Sedition Act in a 1964 opinion, the federal judiciary did nothing to curb the government’s effort at the time.

While his views on free speech may not have been altogether consistent throughout his long life, Adams’ political rival, Thomas Jefferson, whose Republican supporters were being imprisoned as liars, had a radically different view of the First Amendment, especially during this period. “Libels, falsehood and defamation … are witheld from the cognisance of federal tribunals” by the Constitution, he wrote.

After defeating Adams for the presidency in 1800, he decided to repudiate rather than imitate Adams’ abuse of power. He welcomed the expiration of the Sedition Act and pardoned everyone who’d been convicted under it. In his inaugural address, he promised reconciliation and an administration that would tolerate falsehoods directed against it, no matter how objectionable or incendiary. “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists,” the address reads. “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

Notice that Jefferson refers to “error of opinion,” not fact. State legislatures and Congress understand that matters of opinion are protected by the First Amendment. For that reason, the text of the Sedition Act, like that of the Stolen Valor Act and every other truth-policing statute, prohibited only false assertions of fact.

However, in practice, the line between fact and opinion can be impossibly blurry, as Jefferson learned first-hand during the Sedition Act prosecutions. Was John Adams really “bald,” for instance? Or was that just publisher Benjamin Franklin Bache’s opinion? How many hairs can one have on one’s head and still, as a matter of fact, be bald? To Jefferson—and the Constitution—whether the president is or isn’t bald should always be up to individual citizens, not courts, to decide.

Instead, under the court’s current categorical approach to First Amendment interpretation, some lies “are of such slight social value as a step to truth” and so apt to cause harm that they fall outside the protection of the First Amendment. Defamatory lies, for instance, aren’t protected because they both attack truth-seeking and injure the reputations of their victims. This is what happened when The Saturday Evening Post falsely reported that University of Georgia football coach Wally Butts had fixed a football game against rival The University of Alabama, resulting in an embarrassing 35-0 loss.

It only seems fair to require that, in cases like this, liars pay for the harm they cause. Throughout our history, the Supreme Court has carved a section out of the First Amendment to give victims like Coach Butts a legal remedy.

However, this isn’t how justice is served in a society that prioritizes free expression above every other social interest, as the First Amendment requires. Instead, each of us should get to decide for ourselves what’s true, what isn’t and whom to trust without being issued unchallengeable instructions from a state authority.

The cost of this freedom is shared social and political responsibility. As Justice Louis Brandeis once explained in an opinion that reads like literature, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” We have a civic duty, he tells us, to persuade our fellow citizens to correct the bad speech we hear with good speech. “Outrage” over lies, Justice Anthony Kennedy explains in one of the better passages of his plurality opinion in Alvarez, should “reawaken and reinforce the public’s respect” for truth.

The Constitution presumes an intellectually curious and conscientious citizenry that honors its truth-seeking responsibilities. “The greatest menace to freedom,” Brandeis writes, “is an inert people.” It’s the job of a free press, staffed by fearless investigative journalists, to get to the bottom of every story and disabuse the public of any falsehoods, like those spread about Coach Butts.

Determination, counterspeech, social pressure and the stigmatization of dishonesty, not the proclamations of politicians or judges, is the remedy “those who won our independence” had in mind for us. To the extent news media, whose problems are real and well-documented, are failing at their task, we should restore them rather than give their responsibilities to the judicial system.

This worked in Alvarez’s case. Even before he went to trial, he was exposed, discredited and shunned by those around him. The public didn’t need a judge to tell it he was a liar. The marketplace of ideas corrected itself.

From Tech Anxiety to Censorship

Throughout history, every invention that has amplified human communication has been accompanied by anxiety and the urge to censor. It was true of the printing press, movie camera, television, the internet—you name it. When radio listeners suffered a collective meltdown after listening to Orson Welles’ broadcast of “War of the Worlds” in 1938, wondering if Martians really had invaded Earth, the Federal Communications Commission launched an investigation. While it took many years to adopt, the FCC has since imposed a “rule against hoaxes” that limits free speech on the radio.

Politicians have been beset with similar fears about social media for the past several years. Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence programs, fear has exploded into panic.

About 10 years ago, many of America’s most credentialed legal experts began ringing alarm bells for more censorship. Some wrote as if a latent “War of the Worlds”-type hoax existed on every Facebook page. Nothing less than our “democracy” and “national security” was at stake, they insisted.

The quintessential example of this type of article is Columbia University Law Professor Timothy Wu’s “Is the First Amendment Obsolete?” Wu argues that, in light of new communications technology, the unregulated exchange of ideas is no longer advisable and that criminal laws are necessary to protect the “channels of online speech” from “fraud, deception, or harassment.” Wu values freedom of expression, he assures us, and finds rereading the “canonical” Supreme Court opinions that describe a robust First Amendment “stirring and exciting.”

”Unfortunately,” he writes, “there is reason to fear it is entering a new period of political irrelevance.” It’s with more sorrow than anger, as if thanking them for their service, that he counsels the abandonment of fundamental speech rights. Instead of trusting the people, as the authors of the “outdated” canonical opinions did, Wu would bring in “law enforcement,” which, he tells us, “has its work cut out for it.”

By 2024, Wu had abandoned the question mark in his article’s name: He wrote an essay for The New York Times that year titled “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.”

In 2022, former President Obama presented a popularized version of these scholars’ renunciation of free speech principles to a thrilled audience at an event co-sponsored by Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. “I’m pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist,” Obama assured the crowd, as he delivered a lengthy address on the pressing need to censor the internet. A Russian menace of state-sponsored trolls, he warned, “could almost guarantee that whatever disinformation they put out there would reach millions of Americans. And that the more inflammatory the story, the quicker it spread.”

Obama didn’t use the words “censor” or “censorship” in his speech, though. Instead, he spoke of “content moderation” and “managing toxic content.” What he was urging, though, was censorship. When a social media company removes your post or deletes your account, you’ve indeed been censored.

Whenever someone replaces a perfectly good word with a vaguer one that sounds less frightening and has more syllables, he’s either a bad speaker or up to no good—and Obama’s an excellent speaker. The only meaningful difference between “censorship” and “content moderation” is that those using the former might be trying to warn you about what those using the latter are trying to do to you. Whichever term you prefer, they both mean that someone is forcibly silencing someone else.

The greatest political writer in our language, George Orwell, and our greatest stand-up comedian, George Carlin, explain how politicians assail us with these euphemisms more eloquently than I can.

Thanks to some intrepid reporters, we’d later learn that the site of Obama’s speech, Stanford University, was one of the hubs of a vast “Censorship Industrial Complex.” Researchers at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center had been working closely with federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to scrub and de-amplify what they believed to be disinformation, misinformation and “malinformation.” The latter, journalist Michael Shellenberger explains, “is when accurate facts are used to ‘mislead’ people through ‘false narratives.’”

Our leaders didn’t trust us to distinguish fiction from falsehood, so they decided to do it for us. CISA Director Jen Easterly announced that her agency had jurisdiction over our national discourse. “[W]e’re in the business of protecting critical infrastructure,” she announced at a conference, “and the most critical is our cognitive infrastructure.” She helped lead the effort to pressure social media companies to censor what she and her colleagues in the federal government deemed false speech, especially on the COVID pandemic but on other issues, including political elections, as well.

She couldn’t have been clearer about her motive: “We live in a world where people talk about alternative facts, post-truth, which I think is really, really dangerous if people get to pick their own facts.” Easterly and her colleagues decided it was time to pick them for us.

According to Shellenberger, CISA “deputized” Stanford Internet Observatory Director Alex Stamos, previously Facebook’s chief security officer, as the government’s “domestic ‘disinformation’ flagger.” The Internet Observatory was part of Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center. Stamos attended Obama’s Stanford speech and helped explain its urgency to the public on MSNBC.

President Biden didn’t merely regard the problem of internet lies as urgent. He publicly announced that social media companies were “killing people.” The White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies worked largely in secret with universities and private organizations to scour the internet for falsehoods they could silence. The states of Missouri and Louisiana fought back, claiming in Murthy v. Missouri that the administration was pressuring social media companies into targeting conservative critics in particular.

Supporters of the Biden administration have described the Supreme Court’s decision in Murthy as having cleared the president’s team of censorship charges. That’s untrue. In that case, the court merely ruled that, for complex jurisdictional reasons, the censored plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring their suit. It was a procedural, not a substantive, decision. To have standing, they’d need to more convincingly show both that social media companies were acting as government surrogates while censoring them and were likely to do so again.

Just two months later, with additional information, a federal judge in Louisiana ruled that the plaintiffs, including current Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, had met the standard the Supreme Court announced in Murthy. However, that decision was overturned by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and sent back down to the lower court in Louisiana for further consideration. Trump’s electoral victory and Kennedy’s appointment as a cabinet secretary have complicated the case. The upshot of this complex jurisdictional odyssey is that no court has ever ruled on the essential question of whether the Biden administration violated the First Amendment.

The courtroom drama in this case has given us a welter of legal opinions thick enough to fill volumes. The legal issues are complex, but the factual story the opinions tell is clear and easy to follow. They describe, in detail, the most comprehensive federal censorship apparatus in American history. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to have resented how he was pushed around. He largely confirmed the core claim against the Biden administration recently when he acknowledged in a letter to Congress that government officials “repeatedly pressured” his company to take down content that challenged the administration’s COVID policies, “including humor and satire.”

“I believe the government pressure was wrong,” he explained in his letter, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Zuckerberg’s quote underscores two eternal truths about censorial regimes: They always indulge in more of it than necessary to achieve their stated purposes and they always target jokes, even when, as with COVID, people need them most.

“President Joe Biden is the most anti-free speech president since John Adams,” law professor and television pundit Jonathan Turley writes. His comparison to the Adams administration is especially apt. Both presidents claimed to be censoring false factual assertions, but instead targeted dissenting opinions, especially those of their political rivals. Just as Adams only targeted Jeffersonians, Biden’s censorship efforts focused primarily on Trump supporters.

Perhaps no one has written about the Censorship Industrial Complex more eloquently and exhaustively than journalist Matt Taibbi, who noticed some parallels between the Biden and Adams administrations in testimony to Congress, as well. “You cannot have a state-sponsored system targeting ‘disinformation’ without striking at the essence of the right to free speech,” he testified. “The two ideas are in direct conflict.”

Just as the American people rejected Adams for Jefferson, they rejected Biden for Trump—though Trump has hardly been as gracious to his political opponents, or as unwilling to censor, as Jefferson. Expression using artificial intelligence and deep-fake technology, especially on social media, where most Americans get their news, has already resulted in deeply intrusive state and federal speech regulations, including a major bill signed into law by Trump.

Again, it’s easy to see why. Machine-generated sounds and images have never looked more real, spread so quickly or been a bigger part of our national discussion. They’re doing a good job of tricking us, too. A Utah Valley University study shows that deep-fake videos fool Americans more than half the time.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, satirist Christopher Kohls posted a deep-fake video depicting an exaggerated version of Kamala Harris looking foolish and making embarrassing statements. The video was re-posted by Elon Musk, went viral and got lots of laughs. Failing to recognize a joke when it saw one, Harris’ home state of California responded by passing a “deceptive media” law punishing deep fakes that harm the “electoral prospects” of political candidates and undermine “confidence in election results.”

The satirist who posted the video just won the first battle of the litigation war to decide whether the law is constitutional. While California argued that the law “falls into the possible exceptions [to the First Amendment] recognized in Alvarez,” the judge cited a 1964 case that gave special protections to lies told about government officials, like Harris.

More litigation is coming—fast. As a result of the Supreme Court’s fractured and confused response to the fake Medal of Honor winner’s case 13 years ago, it’s anybody’s guess what the next court is going to say.

The Cure Is Worse Than the Disease

New technology doesn’t require the abandonment of our nation’s core ideals. To the contrary, it’s precisely those ideals that will protect us and keep us free.

If allowed, Americans will solve the problem of online fakery without government interference. We don’t like being lied to. We resent it and are apt to take action against it. Necessity breeds invention, and in this case, it may do so in the form of new fraud-catching technology. AI-detection programs are already proliferating. The more we practice catching and exposing high-tech liars and their techniques, the better we’ll get at it.

Not long ago, a friend sent me a poignant photo of a battlefield that, after who knows how much bombing, had become a desolate hellscape devoid of life. I found it so compelling that I showed it to my 15-year-old son. Unimpressed, he instantly recognized it as AI-generated. He then began teaching his clueless middle-age dad what to look for so he doesn’t get tricked again. I then informed the friend who sent it to me.

Like everyone else in a free marketplace of ideas, the government may share its views on what’s true and what’s false. However, it can’t lawfully use force to win political debates against its own people, as the Adams administration did. Nor can it suppress claims on important issues of public concern, as the Biden administration did. Politicians who presume to eliminate lies always wind up doing so in ways that promote their own interests. The cure is always worse than the disease.

When it comes to the law, there are always exceptions—even for absolutists. There are, in fact, certain kinds of deceptions that are so inseparably connected to criminal conduct that even the most adamant free speech defender would concede that they aren’t protected. In these exceptional cases, the lies are treated like conduct rather than speech because they both cause harm and are themselves the harm they’re causing.

Those who impersonate police officers, lie to federal investigators or, to quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “falsely shout … fire in a theatre and caus[e] a panic” are examples. Shouting “Fire!” is a particularly good example because the speech is virtually indistinguishable from the physical act of pulling a fire alarm. In cases like these, where speech is devoid of intellectual content, inherently harmful and “brigaded with action,” it isn’t considered “speech” at all for First Amendment purposes. Just as a mob boss can be punished for ordering another to kill because his words are an inherent part of the murder, a perjurer can be punished because his lies are inherently injurious to our system of justice. Most lies don’t fit into this narrow—and admittedly complex—subcategory.

At bottom, lies and censorship inflict the same injury: They push those seeking the truth further away from it. Healthy societies reduce both to an absolute minimum. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, there’s still no need to call the police.

As the U.S. Navy struggles to catch up with the People’s Republic of China’s rapid expansion as a growing maritime power, yet another frontier must be added to its responsibility for the ocean’s surface, subsurface and the sky above them. A vast undersea infrastructure, spanning the world in the form of telecommunications cables and resource pipelines, for the most part lies unmonitored and unprotected on the ocean floor. Increasingly, these assets are coming under attack.

Undersea fiber-optic cables have become the backbone of the global communications network. A report from the U.S. Naval Institute says about 97% of intercontinental communications carrying $10 trillion in transactions daily occur via undersea cables, with satellites picking up the balance. Meanwhile, about 20,000 miles of undersea pipelines carry huge volumes of natural gas and oil.

Just as satellites are no longer protected by virtue of their location in low-Earth orbit, underwater cables and pipelines are no longer safe in the deep. Infrastructure on the floor of relatively shallow seas and coastal waters is within reach of nonspecialist vessels, such as merchant transports dragging anchor chains. And increasingly, swaths of the ocean depths are coming within the range of specialist submarines and surface vessels operating deep-diving manned and unmanned submersibles.

In other words, the means for damaging undersea infrastructure are becoming more widely available. China has reportedly patented an anchor design for cutting cables, potentially turning any vessel of its vast merchant marine into a seafloor predator. Private builders and operators of deep ocean submersibles are proliferating. As undersea cables and pipelines come within reach, political expediency becomes the deciding factor in whether a hostile power will choose to attack them. And recent history has shown that sabotage of undersea infrastructure carries little if any blowback for its perpetrators.

Gray War in the Deep

Samuel Byers, senior national security adviser at the Center for Maritime Strategy, said the importance of undersea assets to commerce, civil life and the military is increasing just as the complexity and expense of reaching those assets is coming down.

“What you once needed a billion-dollar submarine for can now be accomplished with an operation you can put together for a hundred million dollars or so,” Byers said, specifically citing the destruction of the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in 2022. The pipelines enabled the sale of Russian natural gas to Germany. Investigations point to possible covert action by Ukraine to forestall Russia, but sabotage has not been conclusively proven.

In addition, a number of telecommunications cables have been severed in the Baltic, either accidentally or on purpose. Several Chinese merchant vessels, possibly acting on behalf of Russia, have emerged as suspects. On the other side of the world, Chinese commercial and military ships are also suspected of cutting cables near Taiwan. China says all such incidents are due to either common maritime accidents or the naturally harsh conditions on the sea bottom.

If it is possible to sabotage pipelines and fiber-optic cables in some of the world’s most heavily traveled waters with impunity, then the entirety of the world’s undersea infrastructure is at risk.

“We don’t have clear visibility on particularly critical segments of undersea infrastructure, like junctions or nodes where cables and pipelines come together,” Byers said. “On top of that, there is a level of deniability that is not possible in a lot of other ways that a state could pursue aggression.”

At the outbreak of World War I, Great Britain cut Imperial Germany’s transatlantic undersea cables, restricting the latter’s ability to communicate outside mainland Europe. Germany came to rely on the cables of neutrals, including the United States. Ironically, the infamous Zimmermann Telegram, seeking a German compact with Mexico in the event of war with the U.S., was sent encoded over U.S. cables. British intelligence secretly intercepted and decoded the message and found a roundabout way to alert Washington, thereby (along with other factors) inducing America to join the Allies.

Messing with the enemy’s communications infrastructure has a long and proud tradition. Cable-cutting exploits featured in the Spanish-American War of 1898. A relatively new wrinkle is damaging or even destroying undersea infrastructure without a declaration of war.

Historically, other nations’ property has not been automatically sacrosanct in times of peace. U.S. military and intelligence services engaged in a long campaign of cable-tapping and listening in on Soviet undersea cables throughout the Cold War. However, the purpose of these operations was to gather intelligence without being detected, so the targeted infrastructure remained fully functional. To accomplish this, would-be eavesdroppers had to build or convert submarines carrying specialist diving crews to operate in harsh underwater conditions of extreme depth, dark and cold.

The rewards for tapping a rival’s cable outside wartime were arguably worth the expense and risk of discovery, but sabotaging these cables—or, worse, pipelines carrying strategic resources—during the Cold War would likely have become a major incident. However, the end of the superpower confrontations of the 20th century has made would-be vandals of undersea infrastructure more willing to take the risk. Given the deliberate, legalistic approach to investigations of suspected sabotage, where conclusive proof is hard to come by, the rate of such incidents can only be expected to rise.

Everywhere, All at Once

Deterring saboteurs or catching them in the act is hard because Western navies in particular are already stretched to the point of breaking down with ongoing assignments. In the U.S. Navy, deployments are extended to cover trouble spots such as the Red Sea and flare-ups in the Middle East. Allied ships are not available or not capable of participating to any useful degree. Routine “show the flag” deployments by European allies draw American grumbling that the ships could be more usefully engaged closer to home. European patrols against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea are practically nonexistent.

Even the U.S. Navy, now the world’s second-largest fleet, doesn’t have enough hulls to cover existing responsibilities due to misguided procurement programs and anemic shipbuilding and maintenance capabilities. It is hardly in a position to assert dominance over the seafloor, which is evolving into a new theater of war nearly as remote, vast and technically complex as near-Earth orbit.

The problem, as maritime strategist Byers sees it, is that while the Navy is the most logical service to respond to undersea challenges, it is getting the job without a commensurate increase in funding to accomplish it. This means the Navy must either compromise its other priorities or seek other solutions.

“The scale of the undersea infrastructure problem has leadership demanding that the Navy protect it now,” Byers said. “That’s fine. But what are we going to do less of? Are you going to ask us to do less power projection? Because that’s where our money goes. And right now, there aren’t enough aircraft carriers to provide a constant presence in the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Western Pacific. When the political leadership asks for a carrier strike group to support a combat command ashore—like they have done repeatedly over the last year and a half in the Middle East—they get mad if the Navy isn’t able to do that immediately. And now they also want us to be responsible for all this stuff on the bottom of the ocean?”

In short: Which missions is the leadership going to allow to fail in order to protect the seafloor? The answer, of course, is none of them. Byers points out that the Navy has already vastly increased the amount of money it has allocated for building submarines, which are earmarked for supporting carrier battle groups and other sea control missions and can’t be expected to monitor fiber-optic cable junctions.

Submarine acquisition and shipbuilding in general have become national priorities, and money is being made available to achieve them. At the same time, it is the nature of evolving threats that new priorities arise without a commensurate budget increase.

“Naval powers in general have to worry about things like protecting undersea infrastructure and policing fishing fleets,” Byers said, adding that the generally low priority of the threat means it can be done in concert with other activities. However, the threat is changing: “Facing China, you now have their huge merchant fleet, which is turning into a maritime militia, not to forget the malign activities from their fishing fleet.”

Ultimately, all of China’s shipping must be regarded as an adjunct of military operations, which are ongoing in one form or another even in times of nominal peace.

Hoist the Black Flag?

Writing in the Center for Maritime Strategy’s online journal, national security analyst Mike Daum reports that, according to U.S. officials, Chinese vessels are conducting espionage operations on undersea cables to identify vulnerable U.S. military communication links. Furthermore, he says Russia is particularly focused on honing its ability to target critical undersea infrastructure during a crisis.

Daum writes, “The limited capacity of U.S. and allied fleets cannot safeguard the approximately 750,000 miles of undersea cables around the globe. Allocating more ships, whether through the Navy or the Coast Guard, is only a piecemeal approach to addressing the threat. Instead, policymakers should lean into American innovation to meet the challenge.”

In this age, it should not be surprising that much of the looked-for innovation is in the form of unmanned air, surface and submersible systems that can conduct patrols and persistently monitor infrastructure. At the Sea-Air-Space 2025 naval technology exhibition in Maryland last spring, a number of contractors were showcasing equipment for improving “domain awareness” of the seafloor.

For example, California-based newcomer Anduril Industries showed its Dive-LD and Dive-XL autonomous underwater vehicles, designed for long-endurance patrols of coastal and deep ocean regions, with the XL model being larger and more capable. Both systems have a variety of internal sensors. The Dive-XL is able to deploy the company’s Seabed Sentry sensors, which can provide optical and acoustic monitoring of underwater infrastructure while being unattended for months or even years at a time.

While unmanned systems may help extend coverage of seas where hostile saboteurs are suspected, the oceans are more expansive than any number of systems and sensors can monitor. At best, the U.S. and its allies may be able to focus on choke points where multiple cables or pipelines come together, such as the Malacca Strait near Singapore and the Bab-el-Mandeb between Yemen and Djibouti. However, the watchers can’t be everywhere, and crafty saboteurs will always find an opportunity to inflict damage.

Russia has created a so-called shadow fleet of tankers and cargo vessels to move oil and other resources in a bid to evade sanctions imposed after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. At least one of these vessels is now suspected of conducting covert cable-cutting operations. The fear is that a desperate Russia may turn to such “hybrid war” techniques as a means of pushing back against Western opposition to its hot war in Ukraine. On top of this threat is the aforementioned possibility that China will use its extensive merchant marine to undertake similar operations, either against Taiwan or in support of its Russian ally.

For this reason, some have floated the idea of bringing back letters of marque and reprisal, authorizing owners of private vessels to essentially hunt pirates and other illegal operators on the high seas. While most nations have eschewed the concept of privateers, the U.S. has never formally relinquished its right to make that designation. In practice, the closest thing to a privateer today is a private security guard aboard a commercial vessel. If hostile nations are surreptitiously using commercial vessels to inflict damage on Western infrastructure, however, then the concept of deputizing an armed naval auxiliary could become more attractive.

Of course, what is amusing as a thought experiment is in the real world fraught with danger, explosive diplomacy and the potential for military escalation. If one of China’s cable-cutting or pipeline-breaching vessels is seized, whether by uniformed forces or privateers, the PRC will likely retaliate with its significant navy.

Perhaps the only effective way to deter sabotage of undersea infrastructure is not to allow it to become normalized in the first place. Consider the internet, another example of international infrastructure that has become vital to the global economy and is regularly used as a conduit for attack by rival countries and affiliated groups. In the cyber domain, the West seems resigned to suffer hacker incursions and data breaches conducted by agents of Russia and China without any obvious repercussions. We hear of the breaches but next to nothing about official responses or retaliation. No amount of cybersecurity seems able to prevent the breaches.

Likewise, it is not possible to guard every stretch of underwater cable or pipeline all the time. This being the case, nations that rely on this infrastructure have to be willing to retaliate in other venues. The offending countries must have other chips on the table that they value. You don’t necessarily have to destroy something in response. Cut a cable, get a 5% tariff. Blow up a pipeline, lose your airline landing rights.

Tit for tat, in a modified form, may be the best way to keep undersea infrastructure safe.

Years ago, I overheard a college classmate joke about wanting to go to Concord, Massachusetts, and visit Walden Pond so she could spit in it.

Her contempt for Henry David Thoreau’s classic book “Walden: Life in the Woods” caught me by surprise, but because I trusted her literary tastes, I decided I could set the book aside, having only skimmed a portion of it in high school. It turns out that she was far from alone in her low opinion of the book. The negative reviews for Walden on Goodreads excoriate Thoreau for being a “squatter,” a “moocher” and a “self-righteous hippie” whose few useful ideas are drowned in an ocean of pretentious sentences. Or as Kathryn Schulz wrote in The New Yorker a decade ago, “The real Thoreau was, in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself.”

But in 2024 I came across one quote by the man that grabbed my attention: “The cost of a thing is the amount of … life which is required to be exchanged for it.” That insight struck me as very true, and I wondered if Walden held more wisdom than I suspected. So I finally decided to sit down and read Walden… Thoreau-ly.

To be honest, I can understand my college classmate’s joke about desecrating Thoreau’s hallowed waters and the invective in the book’s negative reviews. Thoreau’s smug superiority often made me roll my eyes. And sometimes I had to pause the audiobook to take a break from his over-detailed self-congratulations.

But the author’s shortcomings are less than half the story. I also realized why Thoreau’s writing has stood the test of time and inspired so many people. He moved to Walden Pond just over 180 years ago, on Independence Day in 1845, and his book reads like a personal Declaration of Independence. Written in an age witnessing the dawn of everything from mass industrialization to railroads to the telegraph, you can read Thoreau’s “Walden” as one American’s attempt to break free from the uncompromising march of modernity. It’s a freedom many of us are still searching for today.

And while Thoreau might ultimately have fallen short of the ideals he set forth in 1845, that could be said for many provocative thinkers and writers. I don’t think we need him to rise to all those ideals, though. We read “Walden” today not to admire how Thoreau could survive out in the wilderness or live alone in the woods without losing his mind. We read “Walden” because Thoreau asked questions about how we live and how we should live, questions that resonate nearly two centuries later. Despite nearly two centuries of dramatic social change and technological progress, human nature today is in many ways very much the same as it was when he built his cabin at Walden.

And so, there are still lessons we can take from this very American classic. Here are just a few:

Debt and Freedom

During one fishing trip, Thoreau was caught in a massive thunderstorm. He found shelter in the small home of an Irish immigrant named John Field. The farmer talked about his financial situation, earning $10 for preparing one acre of land for planting, but spending all of that money on rent, tea, coffee and meat. Beneath a leaky roof, Thoreau urged Field to simplify.

“I tried to help him with my experience, telling him … that I lived in a tight, light, and clean house, which hardly cost more than the annual rent of such a ruin as his commonly amounts to,” he wrote. “And how, if he chose, he might in a month or two build himself a palace of his own.”

This anecdote reveals Thoreau at his most insufferable ― like a hitchhiker who lectures the driver who’s picked him up about his car payments. Thoreau detested debt and harshly judged anyone who had accumulated it. He observed that most farmers in his region “have been toiling 20, 30 or 40 years” to pay off their mortgages. He believed “many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box” than what is truly needed. He was serious when he used the word “box,” once suggesting that people could take up residence in recycled wooden toolboxes like railroad workers used to store equipment. They might not have a fireplace, but at least they’d be debt-free.

But maybe more people should have listened to him. Americans seem addicted to debt. In 1845, the United States government held about $16 million in debt. Today, adjusted for inflation, that would be about $540 million. The national debt is more than 60,000 times that much today. On top of this, Americans currently have $18 trillion in consumer debt. Sure, that debt has allowed us to buy a lot more stuff, including things we need. But judging from the popularity of decluttering books and documentaries, many of us clearly think we have way too many things we don’t need.

In this respect, Thoreau reminds me of Dave Ramsey, the author and radio host who coaches people on “financial freedom,” who often says that “We buy things we don’t want with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” I’m not advocating the same sort of spartan lifestyle that Thoreau celebrated, but he was onto something. “The only true America”—the only true freedom—“is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these.”

Becoming the Tools of Our Tech

Thoreau relished in the ability to live without conveniences that others viewed as necessities. In her New Yorker piece about Thoreau, Schulz called “Walden” “the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods.” But you also could consider “Walden” the first “stunt memoir,” the genre in which an author takes on an unusual, temporary challenge, whether that’s living by every injunction in the Bible, cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s most famous cookbook, or living without the internet or electricity.

Like the authors of these books, Thoreau did not want to escape technological progress, but its unintended side effects. Specifically, Thoreau argued that technological progress creates as many, or more, onerous obligations as it does benefits. “Men have become the tools of their tools,” he wrote. A farmer became rooted in place, losing the ability to freely wander, and perhaps the ability to freely wonder, too. A homeowner must spend time on maintaining their home, time that could have been spent on something more fulfilling. Inventions “make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.”

This seems especially appropriate for many inventions of our time, each with its own drawback. Email makes us slaves to the inbox, where hundreds of messages pile up each day. Social media makes it easier to connect with people across the country than with someone sitting across the table. Smartphones let app developers pester us with notifications that disengage us from the world around us. Given that these distractions often serve the purpose of luring our attention in order to sell us something, they really can make us the tools of our devices.

The side effects of these technologies are more than personal headaches and distractions, though. The sociologist Matthew Facciani, author of a new book about misinformation, recently told me that many of the challenges we face with false information and distrust in institutions stems from disconnection. “We’ve gotten away from connecting with people on a local level in person,” he told me. Perhaps rather than sharing a fact check on social media, we should go bowling with someone who might disagree with us.

Of course, each person can make their own choices about the tradeoffs and set their own boundaries. The same smartphone that delivers notifications to you also allows you to turn notifications off. But “Walden” reminds us to actually do that rather than rush to buy new technology without thinking about it.

“Resistance is Futile”

Another feature that “Walden” and today’s stunt memoirs have in common is the eventual return to normal life. After two years, Thoreau left his cabin by Walden Pond and spent many of his remaining years working in his father’s pencil factory, although he also published his book about life in the woods. It reminds me of those who write books about swearing off social media and then return to social media to post about their books.

You could look at this as hypocrisy, and you would not necessarily be wrong. Thoreau looked down at those who read newspapers for gossip, but he frequently “strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there.” He eventually leaves Walden Pond because he had “several more lives to live and could not spare any more time for that one.” Was he living a double life all along?

But another way of seeing the ending in “Walden” (as well as in the stunt books) is to think of it as the closing chapter of what Joseph Campbell famously called the Hero’s Journey, when a mythical hero returns from the journey with the valuable lessons learned along the way. The hero doesn’t have to be perfect, nor does the entire story need to be true, for us to receive those gifts.

In Thoreau’s case, his falling short of his ideals and his eventual return from the woods teaches us how challenging it is to live simply in a complicated world. You can build a house in the wilderness and even live there, but you can’t stop the world from coming to your door. You can go offline, but you might need to log on again for everyday tasks like paying bills or registering kids for school without waiting in traffic. Even the most devoted luddite may be forced to get a smartphone if landline phones and flip phones are no longer available. As the Borg in Star Trek’s say, “Resistance is futile.”

In Thoreau’s words, “Wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society.” Rather than a hypocrite, perhaps Thoreau was someone who ran from modern vices and eventually gave up. One lesson we learn from him, however, is that \ it is worth trying to escape.

Finding Walden Today

When I decided to dust off this unfinished article and send it to Discourse Magazine, I wondered whether I needed to make a pilgrimage to Walden Pond to bring my experience with this book full circle. I glanced at directions on Google Maps. It’s a 14-hour drive.

But then I remembered what Thoreau wrote about the economics of travel: He could walk 30 miles in less time than it would take to earn the money for a train ticket. Transportation is much more affordable today, relative to wages, but his point still rings true. Often we are “spending of the best part of … life earning money” to enjoy something we could get more simply.

Instead of trekking to Walden, I went for long, moonlit walks in my neighborhood. My wife and I hiked around a millpond in a nearby state park. I packed my phone away for hours on a family outing to a lake. I stayed later than usual at my writing group meeting, munching M&Ms and talking with friends about our writing projects.

It turned out that I didn’t have to travel 900 miles to find Walden; it was only a quick walk or car ride from my house.

This article is the last in a three-part series on the worker classification debate. The first and second articles can be found here and here.

Previously in this series, I’ve discussed a way to end the ongoing disagreement over independent contractor classification, as well as some of the unseen industries that get overlooked in the debate. Regardless of whether someone is in a “traditional” contracting position—such as being a real estate agent or a financial adviser—or works as a delivery driver in the gig economy, the threat of forcible reclassification as an employee looms large across the American economy.

More than any other factor, American workers care most about flexibility when it comes to their jobs—even exceeding salary and benefit concerns. Given that working as a 1099 contractor provides some of the most flexibility and autonomy of any working arrangement, it’s safe to predict that interest in contracting status will only grow in the years ahead. But with the criticism coming from the political left about the dearth of benefits available to contractors, these roles are under constant threat.

As previously noted, however, this “employees-with-benefits” vs. “contractors-with-no-benefits” dichotomy is a false choice. In fact, there’s a way to protect independent contractor status while at the same time providing a system for these workers to obtain access to more benefit offerings. But what once seemed like a promising bipartisan road out of this seemingly intractable conflict has now run into a political buzzsaw.

The concept has been called a portable benefits system. It could take various forms, but one version uses SEP-IRA style accounts that both companies and contractors can contribute to. These funds can then be used by the workers for things like paid sick leave, retirement plans or even health insurance.

While many gig companies like Uber have actively endorsed the idea of a portable benefits model, there remains a problem under the law: Providing such a benefits system to workers could be used as legal fodder to argue that these workers really are employees after all. Therefore, the best way to enact a portable benefits system is to couple it with a legal “safe harbor” for independent contracting status, which clarifies that a company that voluntarily agrees to participate in a portable benefits system does not automatically convert any contractors that receive such benefits into employees.

For the past decade or so, the idea of tethering independent contractor protection to portable benefit offerings has percolated in the pages of opinion journals and think tank land. But today, this concept no longer remains confined to white papers, since numerous states have recently enacted portable benefits pilot programs or legislative packages.

One of the most notable examples has been Pennsylvania, in which Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro partnered with DoorDash in July 2024 to launch a portable benefits pilot program in the Keystone State. The program applied to all DoorDash drivers who had made at least 100 deliveries and earned over $1,000 in a three-month period prior to the pilot’s enactment. These drivers then became eligible to receive up to 4% of the amount they earned on the platform during a 12-month period. These funds were deposited into accounts managed by Stride, a portable benefits platform. In turn, workers could use these funds for things like retirement saving, health and dental insurance, and paid time off.

The early returns are in from Pennsylvania’s program, and the news is quite positive. A report commissioned by DoorDash, which surveyed workers who participated in the program, found that two-thirds of participants gained access to benefits they otherwise would not have had, while 77% felt more financially secure (this number would rise to 91% if the pilot were permanent).

In the same month that Pennsylvania’s program launched, Utah became the first state to enact portable benefits legislation. Since then, Tennessee and Alabama have followed suit legislatively, while Maryland and Georgia have launched pilot programs of their own.

What these states have in common, ironically, is what they do not have in common. Maryland is one of the deepest blue states in America; Alabama and Tennessee are two of the reddest; Georgia and Pennsylvania are purple swing states. (In Massachusetts, another deep blue state, a portable health insurance benefit fund was established as part of a 2024 settlement between Uber and Lyft and the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.)

But despite this clear bipartisan support and promising start, it sadly appears that the political left may be suddenly aligning itself against the idea. In Congress, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) recently introduced a portable benefits bill, which by all rights would have seemed destined to garner its own bipartisan support. After all, in recent sessions of Congress, Democratic senators such as Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Michael Bennet (D-Co.)—as well as Maine independent Angus King—have cosponsored versions of portable benefits bills.

But so far, Cassidy’s effort has met unanimous Democratic opposition in committee. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), in a committee hearing on the bill, gave away the real rationale behind the left’s sudden about-face, stating: “These bills are about giving corporations the freedom to deny workers the right to form a union.” (Independent contractors are generally ineligible for unionization under the National Labor Relations Act.)

Bipartisan momentum for portable benefits may abruptly be stalling in the states now, too. Wisconsin’s GOP legislature recently passed portable benefits legislation, which now sits on Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ desk. But because the legislation was passed by a Republican-led legislature, Evers is expected to veto the bill as of this writing.

Americans have grown increasingly dour and cynical about politics in modern decades. Examples like the left’s switcheroo on portable benefits for contractors show why. After all, in our system of democratic governance, the rise of the portable benefits model seemed like an example of the system working.

Nonpartisan think tanks and other policy wonks thought deeply about the problem for years, seeking to find a way to help both companies and workers. After a period of time marinating in the policy petri dish, the Overton Window gradually shifted to the point where lawmakers across the country—and across the political divide—began enacting the idea into law. What started as a groundswell at the state level—our “laboratories of democracy” in action—seemed to be making its way to Congress with promising political winds at its back.

And then, suddenly, momentum stalled, an about-face occurred, and we are seemingly back to ground zero. Sadly, in the end, it’s the workers who will suffer most.

C. Jarrett Dieterle is a nonresident senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a legal policy fellow for the Manhattan Institute.

There was a time when proponents justified funding for NASA in part by all of the wonderful new technologies and societal advances taxpayers could expect from it. And there is still a tendency for government websites to extol the benefits of spinoffs from their space activities.

But we’re now living in a different universe. Society has been transformed by cheaper, more capable rockets and burgeoning satellite services that are largely owned and operated by private companies.

Meanwhile, private investment in space has shot up in recent years. New York-based venture capital firm Space Capital recently issued a report saying total equity investment in the space economy has amounted to $357.8 billion across 2,247 companies since 2009, with $29 billion coming in the last 12 months alone. Not only is more private money flooding into the industry, a growing number of companies are vying for it.

Investors are backing technology, systems and services geared toward the Earth market, which is understandable because there is no other option at the moment. The Earth is the center of the space economy universe. However, recent discoveries and exploration goals are building the framework of a future solar system economy where Earth is sidelined by its inconvenient location deep down a gravity well.

From Ptolemy to Copernicus and Beyond

Bankable opportunities in a space-based economy are grounded in a geocentric model of the solar system. As ancient astronomers exemplified by Ptolemy observed, all celestial bodies seemingly revolve around the Earth. The so-called Ptolemaic system and its precursors were useful for thousands of years for accurately predicting the movement of the planets, allowing for epicycles and a few other kluges.

As the Space Capital report shows, the current space-based economy with Earth at the center works just fine as a model for the purpose of making money. According to another report from consultancy McKinsey & Co., the global space economy will be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023, and almost all of it will be connected to providing Earth-based services.

The skyrocketing value of the global space economy is why near-Earth orbit (NEO) is a going concern. This is also why it is attracting the private investment that has created companies like SpaceX, which has brought new life to what was a moribund, largely government-controlled industry.

At this moment, the vast majority of economic value generated from space comes from NEO satellites. NEO includes low Earth orbit, where the most satellites and space stations operate, out to geostationary orbit about 22,000 miles above the planet, where specialized telecommunications, weather, navigation (e.g., GPS) and some national security satellites dwell. NEO is where all the money is.

Visionaries are looking beyond NEO to the limitless potential of the solar system as a source of resources, knowledge and livelihoods. Lunar and Mars colonies, asteroid mining and scientific examination of outer planet moons and non-planetary objects have the attention of governments, academia as well as entrepreneurs and their financial backers. Unmanned probes have undertaken exploratory missions in all of these endeavors, not to mention NASA’s Apollo manned moon program of the 1960s.

There is general agreement that all elements found on Earth can be found in space in even greater abundance. It has become almost obligatory to mention in the context of space resources that asteroid 16 Psyche is calculated to contain $100,000 quadrillion or some similarly inconceivable figure's worth of precious metals, including gold, platinum and nickel. U.K.-based startup Asteroid Mining Corp. has a two-part mission statement: “Use space technology to disrupt Earth markets; use Earth revenue to unlock space markets.”

For the sake of example, a standard 20-ft. shipping container, which weighs 2,200 kg empty and has a volume of 33 cubic meters, has a launch cost of $3.3 million at Space X’s Falcon Heavy rates ($1,500/kg). You can fill it at your 16 Psyche mines with about $35 billion worth of platinum at $50,000/kg. Of course, this doesn’t count the container ship, crew and supplies, or reentry back to Earth, not to mention the cost of the asteroid mining infrastructure, but the returns still sound astounding and well worth the investment.

According to precious metals dealer APMEX, about 10,000 metric tons of platinum has been mined throughout human history, an amount that would be worth nearly $500 billion in today’s market. Realistically, though, prospective asteroid mining entrepreneurs disrupting Earth markets by bringing bus-sized nuggets of platinum back is not the real opportunity in tomorrow’s space economy. For one thing, the market would crash with the first platinum shipment's pending arrival. This makes the second part of Asteroid Mining Corp.'s tagline more intriguing: Use Earth revenue to unlock space markets.

The distance between objects in space is not so important as the amount of energy needed to travel from one to the other. Even if launch costs continue to plummet, as James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute relates, the prospect of replacing Earth resources with space-sourced substitutes remains, in a word, far-fetched.

As science-fiction author Robert Heinlein supposedly said, “Once you get to Earth orbit you are halfway to anywhere in the solar system.” This means the real effort of space travel is getting off the Earth in the first place. Rockets must produce enough thrust to achieve a change of velocity in order to achieve low Earth orbit, burning a lot of fuel in the process. More is needed to get to geosynchronous orbit and more still to achieve a transfer orbit with the sun to head toward other objects in orbit around it, such as planets and asteroids.

An excellent way to visualize the effort is a delta-v map of the solar system produced by reddit publisher Curious Metaphor. As shown in the chart at the link, the delta-v needed to escape the Earth's orbit is 12.21 kilometers per second. Getting to Jupiter's gravity capture requires another 3.36 km/s of delta-v. It costs more getting into the gravity well of the Jovian system, as is the case for any planet with significant gravity. But getting around the solar system to asteroids and moons generally requires a lot less total energy than going to and from Earth.

However, if your space-based transportation infrastructure is already in space beyond Earth's orbit (having used Earth revenue to build it), then getting around the solar system is much easier in terms of fuel requirements, provided you don't make too many landings on other planets. It is possible to imagine a space station complex as a terminal in a solar-system-wide network reaching out to near-Earth asteroids and those farther afield, such as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where 16 Psyche and other resource-rich asteroids beckon. Even water is apparently abundant off Earth, and with water all things are possible.

In this heliocentric model of a space-based economy, Earth is just another stop. Over time, it may not even be a particularly essential one because all of the resources for manufacturing, fueling and provisioning activities in space are available off world. (Although all steaks in space would carry wagyu prices, at the very least.) The big question is, what's the draw?

Unburdened by Earth

Investment costs of entry aside, the difficulties of living in space for an extended period are well documented. If anything, the more space time and experience humanity racks up, the harder it looks. Radiation, microgravity and even the psychological effects of being confined in an artificial environment all the time must be overcome.

Time is one element that is often missing from this list of difficulties. Current calculations assume vehicles are using Hohmann transfer orbits that use the least fuel possible by taking advantage of the existing orbital velocities of the launch point and objective. But fuel efficiency doesn't mean time efficient: It takes many months with current engine technology to reach inner solar system objects, and many years to reach the asteroid belt and beyond. For example, NASA's Psyche mission launched in 2023 and is scheduled to arrive at the storied asteroid in 2029.

Life and work in space is a long-duration commitment, if not a lifetime one. In order for there to be a space-based economy to serve people, there need to be reasons for them to be there. Moreover, such people will have to be the sort willing to forgo much of the pleasure, abundance and security of living under an open sky.

However, it is a safe bet that when technology makes it possible, some percentage of humanity will be lining up to take the risk. In the beginning, there will be some payoff on Earth for those undertaking–and underwriting–space ventures beyond the moon. The majority of these missions will necessarily be for scientific investigation and geologic surveys with an eye toward future exploitation. The knowledge–pure science and practical–will have value on Earth.

Early missions will inform plans for resource collection from relatively “close” near-Earth asteroids. Rather than acquiring precious metals or building materials, the mission objectives will be those observed to be rich in water, carbon and volatiles for use in life support, fuel, fertilizers and other purposes. Ongoing operations in deep space, such as habitats and stations, would be markets for such consumables and would benefit from not having to go back down the gravity well to Earth for them.

The next stage of developing a persistent manned presence in space to support a Copernican economic model would be space-based manufacturing. It is worth mentioning that plans to move heavy industry off-world, as Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has proposed, have little to do with terrestrial consumption but are focused on mankind's expansion throughout the solar system. While the concept of space-based manufacturing is sometimes slyly positioned as a solution to pollution and environmental damage on Earth in order to deflect critics, the realities are that the enormous expense of moving heavy goods back to Earth from space factories makes off-world manufacturing a non-starter.

On planet Earth, about 80% of world trade by volume is carried by ship. In space, essentially everything would have to be carried by a vessel of some kind. While it might not exactly be instructive to make direct comparisons between cargo hauling in the two domains, it does provide some idea of the scale involved.

According to Atlas Magazine, there are about 60,000 cargo vessels plying the world's oceans, mainly container ships, tankers and bulk carriers. U.K.-based maritime services firm Clarksons says the huge bulk carriers number about 5,000, with Panamax types being popular because they can transit the Panama Canal. These classes have an unladen weight of between 11,000 and 15,000 metric tons. So, at the Falcon Heavy rates cited above, it would cost $21 billion to put the pieces of an empty 14,000 mt Panamax bulk carrier into LEO for assembly.

Nobody is going to be moving refrigerators and color TVs, let alone Teslas, from space to Earth.

Risk Is Our Business

Except for specialty high-value, low-weight items that benefit from microgravity and can be delivered by reusable spaceplane, what's built in space will stay in space. Thus, to have any sort of sustained space-based economy, cargo vessels and personnel transports would eventually need to be produced outside of the Earth's gravity well, ideally using materials obtained from sources requiring low velocity trips, such as asteroids. Again, making this an attractive investment would presume a large enough market for the game to be worth the candle.

There is a conceivable future with people under long-term contracts to set up mining facilities using skills, judgment and manual dexterity that are beyond robotic capabilities. The actual resource collection, refining and loading could be automated. Merchant fleets of automated bulk carriers would move in their serene, Hohmann transfer orbits to crewed receiving stations and ultimately onto manufacturing centers that would have a mix of technicians and automation. The supply chain would be regular and predictable, even if each individual hauler took years to reach its destination. Crewed maintenance complexes in deep space could shepherd flocks of asteroids, rocketing out to troubleshoot problems when needed.

After a 10-year stint in the outer system, workers could retire to Earth or some other attractive space habitat or domed development on Mars. Improvements in propulsion, even fusion power, may allow more direct – and shorter – solar system transportation services. Copernicus Express: When it absolutely has to get there this year.

People will go to space to explore, work and live for their own reasons. If early vessel and station crews and small populations in planetary and space habitats start as extensions of the mother country (or homeworld), the necessities of the space economy will gradually alter this perspective. As humanity becomes a solar system-spanning species, resources and travel time will become its primary concerns. Our current generation of space entrepreneurs have already set the celestial spheres in motion.

By Zachary Shore

This article is the third in a three-part series that examines the surprising, often overlooked phenomena that help explain how the natural world works. The series brings together an array of recent discoveries across the animal and plant kingdoms, showing how deeply, and unexpectedly, life is intertwined. The first piece in the series can be found here, and the second is here.

The idea that a hidden system within the body, possibly constituting an organ itself, could have existed without detection for millennia is shocking. Humans have engaged in dissection since ancient times. Since the invention of the microscope in the early 1600s, scientists have been scrutinizing specimens intently. We thought we had a fairly thorough inventory of the body’s parts. Or that’s how it seemed, until just nine years ago.

In 2015, two doctors, David Carr-Locke and Petros Benias, were examining a patient’s bile duct using a new tool called confocal laser endomicroscopy. While reviewing their results, they noticed some unfamiliar spaces that did not resemble anything in an anatomy textbook. They shared their findings with Dr. Neil Theise, a professor of pathology at New York University, who confirmed that they were indeed looking at something new.

Dubbed the “interstitium,” this series of dense tissues and fluid-filled cavities, made primarily of collagen, seems to extend throughout the body. Although research is still in the early stages, the system appears to be so vast that it might qualify as our largest organ, if indeed it’s an organ at all. Interstitium means literally the space in between. It defied discovery for exactly the reason to which the anatomist Thomas Myers had alluded nearly 25 years ago. Myers wrote that our whole understanding of human anatomy emerged from the butcher’s tools, later the scalpel and now the laser. He argued that our tools necessarily led to an emphasis on cutting, dividing and ramifying of the body.

At least in the case of the interstitium, Myers seems prescient. We missed it because our tools led us to believe that they could reveal all there was to find. But the interstitium is comprised of sacks of fluid, which cannot be seen once the body is sliced and diced and laid out on slides for viewing under the microscope. Cutting and treating with chemicals causes the cavities to collapse and the fluids they contain to drain away. The connective channel we are calling the interstitium can only be seen “in vivo,” inside a living person. In other words, it could only be found by looking at the body in a new and different way. That is exactly what Ida Rolf, Thomas Myers and Gil Hedley—the anatomists I discussed in part two of this series—all had to do as well; they had to consider the body in ways different from the standard view offered by modern Western medicine. They had to look where others had not.

A Challenge to Modern Medicine

Because the interstitium transports material, it could have implications for the treatment of certain cancers and the way they spread. It also suggests that the ties that bind us run wide and deep. This is a lesson that doctors in particular need to internalize. Their patients’ health depends on it, as Dr. Cynthia Li learned at a visceral level.

After Li gave birth to her first child, she began experiencing a wide range of strange symptoms: extreme lethargy, hypersensitivity to sounds and visual stimuli and pains throughout her body that seldom ceased. Though diagnosed with hypothyroidism, she found that no standard treatments offered any relief. She felt especially frustrated because she was a practicing physician, an internist who had never known severe, chronic illness herself. Being trained in Western medical practices, Li almost instinctively looked askance at alternative methods, especially ones that simply sounded “woo-woo.” But after several years of being mostly bedridden, unable to work and struggling to raise two children while maintaining her marriage, Li finally opened herself to trying anything within reason, from acupuncture to osteopathy and much more. To her amazement, several modalities helped her to finally “get off the couch,” as she put it in her memoir about this experience. Today, she has her own practice of integrative medicine, a field that combines Western medical techniques with nontraditional, alternative methods.

One of the early steps in Li’s healing process came when she explored the Japanese concept of “ma,” meaning the in-between spaces. Think of the emptiness between the branches in a Japanese floral arrangement, or the silence between the notes of a musical score. Ma incorporates the negative spaces in art, music, architecture and more, seeing them as essential to design. In Li’s case, fixating on those moments when she was not in pain, which were ample but were being drowned out by the intensely painful times, enabled a change in her approach to illness. This led her to consider some of the spaces that her Western training had underemphasized, such as gut health, environmental toxins and emotional state.

Now when Li examines patients, never for just 15 minutes but often for an hour-long session, she integrates all that she has learned from alternative practices with her traditional medical school training in order to see her patient as a whole being, not merely as an assemblage of parts with distinct, localized dysfunctions. Li is part of a small but ardent group of doctors seeking genuine alternatives to the standard Western medical model, which they view as inadequate to supporting true health. What makes integrative medicine both so challenging and so vital is that it is all about examining the complex connections between the body, the mind, the community and the environment. Its practitioners believe those connections are crucial to address.

The benefits of conventional Western medical practices have been extraordinary. No sensible person could deny the countless effective treatments they have produced. That said, the techniques of Western medicine are largely limited to the scalpel and the pill. We concentrate largely on treatments; far less on cures. Perhaps it’s time to expand our repertoire of tools in search of holistic solutions to health. In the process, we may need to look for connections in places we seldom expect.

Categorical Confusion

It is facile to declare that everything is connected. Platitudes cannot provide insights. We simply need to acknowledge that we have overlooked, and at times ignored completely, crucial links within complex systems, be they among animals, plants or humans. Only in recent decades are we paying more attention to the ways in which parts within a system communicate. Where there are connections, there is communication: signals, information or material being sent and received. But why, in an information age, have we been so slow to detect and understand connections and communications in the natural world?

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jason Roberts has offered us one possible explanation. In “Every Living Thing,” Roberts masterfully recounts the rivalry between two 18th-century European botanists. Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon each set out to categorize plants, animals and minerals, but by dramatically divergent means. Linnaeus sought to reduce every species into its distinctive component parts. In contrast, Buffon believed that the uniqueness of each individual creature limits our ability to make sweeping declarations about the nature of living things.

Linnaeus, as Roberts depicts him, was a self-promoting Swedish professor whose “Systema Naturae” provided the basis for modern taxonomy. His categorizations, however, often veered into the imaginative, and his convictions sometimes stretched credulity. He insisted that washing one’s hair caused epilepsy, that rubbing aquavit (a Scandinavian spirit) onto a puppy could prevent it from growing and that swallows spent the winter at the bottom of frozen lakes.

Linnaeus’ rival, Buffon, head of France’s national botanic gardens, was an aristocrat who inherited the equivalent of $30 million. He used his wealth in part to establish a private forest of diverse trees, simply to observe the results over decades. As Roberts puts it, Buffon saw the forest not as a collection of trees, but rather as an ecosystem. He understood that different thickets of trees could affect their growth. He noticed how the birds were essential for scattering seeds. He grasped that even the field mice played a role on the earthen floor. He understood the relational aspects of all parts to the whole. In short, he recognized the interconnectedness of the forest. And from that perspective, Buffon developed his ideas of nature as a connected web of life.

During his lifetime, Buffon became the most read author of nonfiction in France. When he died, he was venerated as one of the four greatest lights of his age, the other three being Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. Linnaeus died a far less vaunted figure. And yet, when the French Revolution came, Buffon’s aristocratic lineage made his ideas unpalatable. His great works fell out of fashion, allowing Linnaeus’ views ultimately to take hold. If Roberts is right, Linnaeus’ long shadow obscured nature’s complex ties from view.

Women, Science and a Holistic View

Could Linnaeus’ shadow truly bear the full blame for our slowness to perceive connections? If it were as simple as an Eastern versus Western worldview—one holistic, the other mechanistic; one seeing entities as whole units, the other peering at subdivided parts—then we could have expected breakthroughs in elephant communications, mycorrhizal networks and so on to have originated with scientists in Asia. But instead, it was Western scientists who made these discoveries. We also cannot blame the lack of technology. Modern science did not require sophisticated equipment for many of these advances. In some cases, new tools helped, as with the interstitium. But other discoveries simply required fresh ways of thinking.

One plausible reason for our slowness in spotting links might have to do with the dearth of young women scientists. Many breakthroughs in connections have come from young women. The female scientists I discussed earlier in this series—Ida Rolf, the anatomist and inventor of Rolfing; Suzanne Simard, coiner of the “mother tree” concept; Erica McCormick, who helped discover that trees draw water from rocks, not just soil; and Caitlin O’Connell, who showed that elephants communicate through vibrations in the earth—all approached their work by asking how their subjects might be connected in less obvious ways.

Recently, a young Ph.D. student at M.I.T., Pratyusha Sharma, and her team of researchers have taken an entirely different approach to decoding whale songs. Where marine biologists had previously seen only 21 types of sperm whale clicking patterns, which scientists call codas, Sharma visualized the data differently. In the process, she found that the codas contained variations not previously recognized. From this perspective, she identified 156 distinct whale songs. Suddenly, there is the possibility that whales have something akin to language.

The truth may, of course, not be as stunning as this. Perhaps the clicking sounds sperm whales make are merely a form of echolocation, as they spend long periods in the dark sea depths. But wherever the evidence ultimately leads, Sharma is one more example of a young woman seeing connections and communications in new ways. If there is any significance to gender and youth in this respect, then it is not only a further argument to encourage young women to enter the sciences; it is also a sign that we should be training young men to grow more conscious of connections.

But there is another possible explanation for why these findings took so long to emerge. We live in a highly visual world. Our attention is overwhelmingly devoted to what we can readily see. We focus on the images directly before us. Yet many alternative ways of thinking require exploration of the negative spaces, the places we seldom look, and engagement with senses we use too little. We had to listen for the sounds of plants. We had to feel the tremors of elephant hooves across the earth. We had to peer beneath the ground and into the body in search of less obvious connections. We had to recognize the spaces inside and in between. The Japanese use the concept of ma mainly in relation to art, but maybe we need more ma in science. If we would shift more of our attention to the spaces in between, maybe it would bring us closer to spotting the less apparent links existing all around us. And if we have missed all these crucial connections until now, shouldn’t we be asking what other ties remain to be found? Perhaps it’s time to close our eyes and wonder.

Zachary Shore is a professor of history at the Naval Postgraduate School, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies and a National Security Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of “This Is Not Who We Are: America’s Struggle Between Vengeance and Virtue” (Cambridge University Press, 2023). The views expressed are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the Naval Postgraduate School, the Department of Defense or the U.S. government.

Amid all the discussion of Iran’s nuclear program, and Israeli and U.S. efforts to destroy it, one fact remains largely ignored: Iran scarcely needs a nuclear arsenal.

To begin with, any detonation of such a weapon against Israel, which reportedly has hundreds of nuclear weapons and clearly has the ability and credibility to deliver them, would be a disaster for Iran. Israel’s inevitable counterattack would likely destroy not only Iran’s unpopular regime, but also the ancient Persian civilization in which it is embedded.

Second, Iran doesn’t need to keep a few nuclear weapons around to deter a nuclear attack initiated by Israel out of the blue. Israel is much more likely to apply its superiority in conventional weaponry, which, as has been seen of late, can be very damaging and much more focused. Israel would have no need to escalate to the nuclear level.

And third, the value of nuclear weapons to deter conventional attacks is severely undercut by recent experience. Although Israel (and the U.S.) might have hesitated if Iran had had nuclear weapons, they likely would have attacked anyway, relying on their ability to devastate Iran in retaliation for any use of Iran’s nukes. It is also relevant to note that nuclear weapons do not have an impressive record at deterring conventional attacks, as the United Kingdom found in 1982 when Argentina seized Britain’s Falkland Islands, leading to a short war fought entirely with conventional weapons. In the present case, Israel has repeatedly been attacked by non-nuclear countries and entities; its extensive nuclear arsenal appears to have been irrelevant to its responses, which have relied entirely on conventional weapons and methods.

The Deal

Accordingly, Iran and its regime might well be more secure if the country abandoned its nuclear weapons program, which has proved to be absurd, expensive, useless and ultimately the chief reason for (not a deterrent of) armed attacks by alarmed foes such as Israel and the United States.

One possible solution would be for Iran to accept a version of Donald Trump’s proposed deal. According to its terms, Iran would credibly abandon its nuclear weapons program (perhaps while retaining the “right” to publicly reverse that development) and would be welcomed, like Germany and Japan after World War II, into a global system that promises dignity and economic growth and is sanctions-free. As often noted, Iran has the potential to be a wealthy country. That goal seems to be genuinely popular with Iran’s population, some 80% of whom, some studies suggest, are restive over the current regime’s corruption and incompetence. And the process would likely also receive enthusiastic and productive support from Iran’s extensive and often well-heeled diaspora.

The deal might also involve some reduction or at least attenuation of Iran’s support for various anti-Israel proxy forces in the Middle East, such as Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Prospects for such a reduction are enhanced today not only because that policy has never been very popular in Iran, but also because the proxies (like Iran itself) have been severely discomfited by Israeli attacks of late.

Iran’s Potential Objections

For the deal to be consummated, however, negotiators are up against some deep concerns from the Iranian regime.

First, Iran has reason to doubt Trump’s reliability: After all, although a nuclear deal went into effect in 2016 under the Obama administration, Trump abruptly withdrew from it when he became president for the first time the following year. Trump might be more reliable now, however, because he would benefit greatly, both domestically and internationally, if such a danger-deflating deal were consummated. (He might even be successful in gaining the Nobel Peace Prize that he is said to covet.) Moreover, he seems to be sincere in his utter contempt for the absurdity of the Iran-Israel confrontation in which, as he recently put it pungently, “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Do you understand that?”

Second, the regime in Iran might be wary of the prospect that while a deal might eventually lead to prosperity for the country, it might also lead to the development of a theocracy-challenging middle class. Indeed, a deal seems the most likely route to successfully achieve the “regime change” in Iran that is so fondly desired by many outsiders.

A version of Trump’s deal seems a rational solution to Iran’s massive social and economic problems and only requires a clear concession from Iran to cease the costly development of useless nuclear weapons. The final problem in accepting this deal is that, as Thomas Friedman of The New York Times has recently suggested, Iran, like Israel, is “led by religious nationalists who think God is on their side.” This perspective could have negative consequences, as suggested by the reaction of the Iranian regime after being attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1980. Saddam quickly concluded that the attack was a mistake and sought to obtain a face-saving agreement allowing Iraq to withdraw. But that development, however rational, was quashed by Iran’s theocratic ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who piously (and spookily) declared: “Even our total defeat in this war shall be a blessing from the Almighty and a sign of His Wisdom which we cannot fully understand.” The war, disastrous for both sides, therefore continued for nearly a decade—though eventually Khomeini did overcome his fatalistic anxieties and agree to a deal, while declaring that process to be akin to drinking poison.

Trump’s deal, then, offers a rational solution to a problem that scarcely exists. But that doesn’t guarantee its acceptance.

A few months ago, Donald Trump held a special dinner at one of his golf clubs exclusively for the top buyers of his cryptocurrency, “meme coin,” as a reward for those who had collectively spent $148 million to line the president’s pockets. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced it as “an orgy of corruption.” I don’t often agree with the senator from Massachusetts, but she’s right. And it’s not just one dinner.

Donald Trump promised to be a pro-business president. But instead of getting government out of the way and setting clear rules that everyone in the market can follow, he has instead meddled personally in setting policy on trade and tariffs, deciding who gets prosecuted and who get off the hook, and doling out favors and punishments. And then he set up his businesses as easy conduits for favor-seekers to put money in his own pocket.

Get Out of Jail Free

The Financial Times recently reported that “An American financier invested $100 million in the Trump family’s flagship bitcoin project just nine weeks after a probe into his crypto business was dropped by the Trump administration.” To be sure, any pro-cryptocurrency president would be likely to reduce enforcement actions against crypto companies. But dropping this particular investigation is part of a wider pattern of Trump suspending enforcement and, in some cases, dangling the prospect of pardons for those who personally enrich him.

The most notorious example is Chinese crypto promoter Justin Sun, who was accused by the Securities and Exchange Commission of secretly paying celebrities to promote his crypto and engaging in “wash trading,” a kind of pump-and-dump scheme in which he rapidly buys and sells his own crypto tokens to create a false impression of massive public interest. After the election, Sun pumped $75 million into tokens from Trump’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial. And shortly after Trump took office—poof, the charges against Sun went away.

Similarly, the founder of the crypto firm Binance is reportedly negotiating an investment in Trump’s firms even as he seeks a pardon on money-laundering charges.

The rules of the game were established in a case where Trump gave a pardon for tax evasion to a man whose mother had just spent $1 million at a Trump campaign fundraiser. The judge who sentenced the man had intoned that “there ‘is not a get-out-of-jail-free card’ for the rich.” But there is such a card in Trump’s game of Monopoly.

The corruption isn’t just about money. Sometimes it’s also about political favors. Just as Trump uses his pardon power and prosecutorial discretion to make threats and dole out favors, so he also asserts direct political power over previously independent regulatory agencies. Then he uses this power to shake down media companies, both for money and for friendlier news coverage.

The most notorious case is Paramount, the parent company of the broadcaster CBS. Paramount had long been working on a big merger with a deep-pocketed production company. But the deal required approval from the Federal Trade Commission, which requires certification from the Federal Communications Commission. Trump has installed a loyal crony at the head of the FCC and went so far as to fire the Democratic-appointed commissioners at the FTC. These agencies held up the merger while Trump sued CBS for massive damages in a frivolous lawsuit.

Paramount recently settled that suit after top editors at CBS’s flagship investigative show “60 Minutes” resigned in protest against editorial interference aimed at softening their coverage of Trump. His regulatory control over the business side of Paramount has given him control over their editorial choices.

“I Own the Store”

Nowhere is Trump’s power to exact favors greater than in his assertion of arbitrary and unilateral power over tariffs. Trump has imposed tariffs, lifted them temporarily and threatened to apply them again, while also granting myriad small exceptions for very specific products that affect very specific companies.

Here’s what that exception-granting looks like, according to a report in The New York Times:

When President Trump’s steep tariffs threatened to send the price of iPhones soaring, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, called the White House—and soon secured a reprieve for his company and the broader electronics industry.

That’s one of the deals we know about—though we don’t know what Cook traded in return. The investigative outfit ProPublica provides a wider overview of suspicious patterns of exemptions.

One item that made the list is polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET resin, the thermoplastic used to make plastic bottles.

Why it was spared is unclear, and even people in the industry are confused about the reason for the reprieve.

But its inclusion is a win for Reyes Holdings, a Coca-Cola bottler that ranks among the largest privately held companies in the U.S. and is owned by a pair of brothers who have donated millions of dollars to Republican causes. Records show the company recently hired a lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump White House to make its case on tariffs.

Even an article in National Review concluded that imposing massive tariffs, then creating a huge list of exemptions, is a strategy of “rent extraction” from favor-seeking businesses.

Trump sees himself as owner and manager of the entire American economy, comparing it to a store and boasting, “I own the store.” It’s natural, in his view, to charge everyone a personal fee for their place in it.

Then, of course, Trump wields power to grant or rescind government contracts and subsidies. This power is something he is already using against universities, threatening to block millions in scientific and medical research funding unless they back his ideological agenda. He is also using it against Congress, using the DOGE commission to block congressionally mandated funding. While Elon Musk was still running it, members of Congress would have to beg for “Elon relief” to restore money for projects in their districts. Now, they will have to beg Trump.

In a totally predictable turning of the tables, Trump then threatened to use this power against Musk himself, retaliating against Musk’s critical comments by threatening to cancel his many billions of dollars in government contracts. Musk’s business empire was built on government subsidies, and without them his companies would lose up to $48 billion in future revenue. No wonder Musk backed down and issued an uncharacteristically timid apology.

Trump has made his own personal favor a necessity for being able to stay in business in the United States, forcing everyone to court his favor, either by backing his agenda—or simply by paying him money, which he has made far easier by embracing cryptocurrency.

The Perfect Use Case for Cryptocurrency

A man both serving in the presidency and owning such varied and active businesses would present a massive conflict of interest under any circumstances. It would be hard for him not to be influenced by the people who are making him richer. Thus, we’ve seen the spectacle of Trump’s sons following after him in his trips around the world and making deals for new Trump-branded hotels and resorts, often funded by foreign leaders. On a smaller scale, Trump has been selling spectacularly overpriced watches with his brand on them, which is a great way for a suppliant in the Oval Office to let Trump know, without a word being said, that he has transferred the better part of $100,000 into the president’s bank account.

But all that is old-fashioned. Trump has found the perfect modern way for petitioners to pay him off: cryptocurrency. This term refers to “currency” that isn’t backed by a physical commodity like gold, nor by the taxing power of a government or the financial reserves of a central bank. Cryptocurrency is backed by nothing but the mass psychology of online speculators. That’s especially true of the “meme coins” Trump has been issuing in his name and his wife’s name.

A meme coin is backed purely by the frenzy of speculators looking to cash in on the fame of a celebrity or a fleeting fad—and of course, by the enthusiasm of insiders who are trying to pump up the meme coin before they cash out and leave the suckers holding the bag. A big investor rushing in to buy millions of dollars of Trump’s meme coins has little expectation he will ever get that money back. By raising the nominal value of the meme coin, however, he can massively increase the net worth of the president and enrich the insiders around Trump. More to the point, he knows that they know he did it.

In effect, meme coins are a way to directly transfer money from a wealthy favor-seeker to the president, out in the open and apparently legally, since it is nominally an “investment” in one of Trump’s ventures. But it is obviously just a bribe. Hence the dinner where top buyers of Trump’s meme coin gathered in the hope of gaining influence over him.

Trump’s and his supporters’ crypto dealings have normalized the practice of the president blatantly profiting from his office and doing it all out in the open. So Trump has been emboldened to accept a $400 million ultraluxury “flying palace” from the royal family of Qatar, to be used as the new Air Force One—but to go with Trump to his presidential library afterward, for his personal use.

Other presidents have issued fishy pardons or gotten lucrative make-work jobs for their family and supporters. None have done it on this scale or so shamelessly.

The Perils of Personalism

Harvard scholar Matthew Stephenson has pointed out that the U.S. government used to be much more flagrantly corrupt in the 19th century—but it was also much, much smaller and had only a tiny effect on the economy. We are now moving toward the worst system: Big Government with its tentacles everywhere, but run on the personal whims of the president or anyone who can influence him. And it’s easier than ever to find quasi-legal ways to shunt money to him.

Yet the dynamism of the American economy is made possible by the fact that anyone with a good idea can start a business and succeed, and it doesn’t matter who you know or how much money or status you start with. Highly corrupt economies, by contrast, tend to be stagnant and sclerotic, because no one can do anything unless they first pay rent to a political sponsor.

We are going backward, creating a system of personalism that pervades our society and makes the economy run on the president’s will, not the rule of law. It’s an orgy of corruption in which innovation and initiative will be sacrificed to fill the pockets of political parasites.

Between Donald Trump’s rhetoric, the internal actions of the executive branch and many of its proposed policies, scarcely a day goes by without news of something illiberal coming out of the White House—to the point that there seems to be a near-constant assault on the very existence of liberal democracy. The Republican Party as led by Trump has not been acting in any meaningful way to put the brakes on any of these illiberal inclinations. A party that could once be counted on to oppose Russia and support Ukraine wavers on both scores. A party once firmly committed to free trade now supports protectionism. A party that once strongly supported alliances and the international order now embraces isolationism. Though there are a handful of warnings coming from within the party, the GOP’s shift toward illiberalism, brought about by Trump’s takeover of the party, is nearly complete.

So at first glance, there appears to be every reason for liberal-minded Americans on both the left and right to be concerned, and for their concerns to be growing. But this bleak picture I’ve painted does not mean classical liberals should despair. There are indeed reasons for hope; while our liberal democracy is under assault, it has not been defeated. However, this also isn’t a time for rose-colored glasses. Instead, liberals should forge ahead with a healthy dose of cautious optimism.

Here are the four—erm, three and a half—reasons for liberal hope as I see them:

1) Institutional reasons. Trump’s executive actions have not gone completely uncontested by the other branches of government. Institutionally, the main source of opposition to Trump’s extremism has been the judiciary. It is slightly ironic that the least democratic branch of our federal government has proven the most powerful defender of liberal democracy. But still, a defender it has been. The system of checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers is functioning, and that is undoubtedly a good sign for the health of America’s liberal democracy.

It’s important to acknowledge that the Supreme Court has been very cautious in opposing Trump. They have allowed deportations of migrants to countries that are not their home countries and green-lighted mass firings at the Department of Education. Still, even these perceived Trump wins are complicated. The contentious issue of birthright citizenship, for instance, has yet to be truly decided. In the decision that limited the ability of a single judge to issue nationwide injunctions, the court did not actually rule on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship. What is even more heartening is the way many Trump-appointed judges have upheld the limits on Trump administration actions. Judge Fernando Rodriguez, a Trump appointee, opposed the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of a Venezuelan gang.

But in a number of areas—firing officials, effectively shutting down departments, deportations, the importance of due process—lower federal courts have often acted as a check on Trump’s actions. For example, the courts have consistently told the Trump administration that its mistaken deportation of Abrego Garcia to his native El Salvador was not lawful, that his due process rights were violated. Belief in the rule of law has always been a cornerstone of liberalism. Thus, no matter what Garcia may or may not have done, the importance of due process in cases regarding potential deportations is paramount.

There are a few worrisome signs, however, that the Trump administration might simply ignore court rulings; Trump border czar Thomas Homan has even said, “I don’t care what judges think.” And Trump has offered up his own tough rhetoric. After giving Trump a stunning victory on immunity last year, the Supreme Court has shown some resistance to the full extent of the Trump legal claims; in response, Trump has lashed out at “radical” and “lunatic” judges. But to be fair, so far the administration is using the appeal process rather than outright flouting the law—a good sign that democracy’s guardrails will continue to hold.

Congress poses its own hurdles for Trump and his agenda. GOP majorities in both houses are rather narrow, and with the midterm elections looming in the not-too-distant future, and with Democrats holding an edge in generic ballot polls, Republican members of Congress may temper their support of Trump in the face of electoral realities in their respective districts. Though Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” ultimately did pass both houses of Congress and get signed into law, it faced a bumpy road in getting there, in large part because of uncertainty surrounding GOP support. Look for more of the same to happen as the midterms approach; at least for now, again, our system of checks and balances still garners respect from the players across the political spectrum.

2) Public opinion. The second reason for hope is that Trump’s policies have not proven all that popular. Across the board, Pew has found that Americans disapprove of many Trump policies; 55% of people strongly or somewhat oppose the spending cuts in the Big Beautiful Bill, while 59% oppose the increased tariffs. Gallup found that a whopping 89% of Americans believe Trump’s tariffs will raise prices. A majority of Americans also oppose ending birthright citizenship.

With the latest news of Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein, it will be interesting to see if the president’s popularity will take any hits, particularly among his base. Many polls show that Americans disapprove of the way Trump and his administration are handling the issue of files concerning Epstein’s clients; Reuters found that 54% disapproved and only 17% approved. (A sizable percentage were unsure.) Even notable minorities of Republicans are troubled, with three in 10 disapproving of Trump’s handling of the issue. What remains to be seen is whether that translates into a change in overall support for the president. After all, many Democrats’ disappointment with Bill Clinton’s sexual dalliances didn’t translate into disapproval of the president overall in any significant way.

The point here is that, as polling shows, the American public clearly disapproves of Trump’s attacks on foundational liberal beliefs. On the whole, Americans want greater security at the borders, but they have not abandoned their fundamental belief in the rule of law or their support for immigration more generally. They don’t like the idea of taking away birthright citizenship, and they don’t want deportations done brutally and without clear legal foundations. They want the president to obey the law. In effect, they support many fundamental liberal views and seem to be opposed to what they see as the extreme nature of some of the Trump administration’s actions.

Trump’s return to the White House should be seen not as a rejection of liberal democracy, but as a concern about some specific economic conditions and social issues. Going into the 2024 election, Americans were upset about inflation, and they feared there was chaos at the border—and the votes reflected these unsettled feelings. But now, as Trump pushes policies that go beyond solving specific problems and attempts to weaken some of the fundamentals of the liberal system, he faces pushback from majorities of Americans. Inasmuch as public opinion matters, this will be a check on Trump.

3) The new economic realities Trump is creating. There is ample reason to think that the economic world Trump is creating is going to be a less than successful one. Most economists believe that tariffs hurt a country overall; Trump’s own alma mater says that in the long run, tariffs will reduce GDP and reduce middle-class lifetime income. And these concerns are trickling down to the general public: Back in May, almost two-thirds of Americans feared a recession was in the making.

Already, the U.S. experienced negative growth in the first quarter of 2025. While this does not mean we are in a recession (economists define a recession as two quarters or more of negative growth), it is worrying. Trump’s constant hostility to allies—such as Canada—creates difficulties for our interconnected economy. His constant blustering has alienated much of the world, and that is beginning to affect certain sectors of the U.S. economy: International tourism, for instance, is down, with Forbes predicting an expected overall year-on-year economic loss of $29 billion in 2025 from these tourism declines.

And one wonders how people who like Trump will feel if the economy goes into a recession or their own individual industry suffers. A Reuters poll in late April found that just 37% of voters approved of his handling of the economy. And perhaps more troubling for the White House, recent AP polling finds that more than four in 10 Republicans believe that Trump’s policies have either had no effect on their lives or made things worse—not an ideal position with expected economic distress on the horizon. Trump’s antiliberal economic approach could end up costing his party come midterm time.

3 ½) Are Democrats coming to their senses? Finally, Democrats may be beginning to find their footing after the shock of defeat—emphasis on “may be.” While I find the Republican Party under Trump a singular threat to liberal democracy, there are also aspects of the Democratic Party that worry me as a liberal. While Trump’s Republican Party has hurt liberal democracy via threats to the rule of law, the electoral process and the civil rights and liberties of citizens, many Democrats, with their focus on identity politics and “wokeism,” seem indifferent, or even hostile, to freedom of speech and the diversity of opinion that is central to liberal democracy.

It appears that some Democrats are moving back from this precipice; at the very least, a few Democratic officeholders are questioning the woke rhetoric the party uses. Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, for one, has shown concern about how his fellow Democrats see and discuss most issues through the lens of identity politics. If they pull back from this impulse as Gallego and others have suggested, Democrats can offer a more robust and cogent left-liberal criticism of the Trump administration. Obviously, for right-liberals this is a mixed blessing, if electoral success is what they seek. Having a Democratic Party more clearly aligned with liberalism broadly understood is a good thing for the republic. Will they make that move, particularly with midterm elections a year away? It remains to be seen.

In the meantime, the Democratic mayoral nominations of Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis are enough to give anyone hopeful for an embrace of the Gallego strategy more than a little pause. Both are self-proclaimed democratic socialists—both see identity as a key part of political life, and both favor leftist policies (such as Mamdani’s support for city-run grocery stores and Fateh’s stated desire to pursue free college tuition as a state legislator). It’s apparent, then, that Democratic Party voters are not going to give up on a devotion to equality—a devotion that means identity is important and must be acknowledged. But at the very least, Democrats are going through a useful exercise in talking about what identity politics means and accepting that how they talked in 2024 hurt them and their cause. Again, the results of this exercise, well ... they’re still up in the air.

In her famous work “The Human Condition,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt discussed the idea of “natality”—that the new is inherently possible. Life has a wonderful sense of possibility. Just as the birth of a child invites us to imagine what unexpected things that person can and will do, we can start things anew. I believe that this concept is inherent in liberalism: Liberalism is about imagining a new, more interesting, better and more optimistic world. I argued last year in Discourse that especially in moments that might lead us to despair, liberals must be optimistic—that liberal democracy needs happy warriors. That optimism is something to be willed, not just a reflection of good or bad circumstances in which one finds oneself.

Thus, I believe that despite all the concerns that Trump represents, we must find, in ourselves and in our politics, the possibilities to will liberalism anew. Liberalism historically was born in much more trying circumstances than we currently face. Today, we need to look back to see what is essential to our liberal traditions and then use those resources to contradict whatever antiliberal forces have been set loose on our political world. While the security of human freedom is never perfectly realized, know also that the notion of human freedom is an immensely powerful one. Though often battered, it is not easily broken.

As those who disagree with Trump face the next four years, we need to counter the real threats and let those phantom threats pass by. There is a tendency in our highly polarized world to think reflexively—if our opponents did X, we need to do the opposite. That is just rigid party ideology—it’s not good liberal thinking. Let us not succumb to despair; let us not succumb to thoughtless reaction. Instead, let us focus on defending liberal policies and a liberal temperament. The liberal temperament is one founded in hope, humility and surprising optimism.

When hip-hop producer Timbaland introduced TaTa, the first AI “artist” signed to his label, it raised standard questions about creativity and the role of machines in art. But TaTa isn’t just a tool or a bot—she’s simultaneously the art and the artist, a recursive synthesis of past and present art/artists trained on archives of human expression. While hip-hop was born from sampling and remixing, sharing and (occasionally) stealing, artificial pop—or “A-pop,” as Timbaland is calling it—pushes this tradition to an extreme where intent, originality and authorship become difficult to identify.

This is just the kind of situation French literary theorist Roland Barthes seemed to anticipate in 1967 when he announced “The Death of the Author.” Barthes argued that the artist should not be viewed as the sole creator of a work’s meaning; rather, some control is relinquished to the reader, listener or viewer to co-create meaning. But how does this relationship apply if the artist isn’t human? Perhaps the art of listening must include considering the artist as an essential part of the art, and since we, as the listeners, are the only human component of the equation, we must declare that AI-generated slop does not count as part of the human conception of art. The founder of the AI tool Suno (TaTa’s digital parent), however, insists that artists of tomorrow “won’t just be human, they’ll be [fully autonomous] IP, code, and robotics.” Either we give in to this redefinition, excluding ourselves from our own creations and allowing art to become a posthuman construct—or we redefine what it means to make art, taking care to make ourselves indispensable.

Defining Art

The more we remove ourselves from the process of art, the closer art comes to extinction. While art has been pronounced dead many times throughout history, each time philosophers have conducted a postmortem analysis, dissecting its constituent parts such as intentionality, perception, medium, form, content, emotion and symbolism. This time we might stitch these parts of art together using tools like TaTa to generate every permutation possible, but I suspect we’ll find that what gives art life is the human assertion that it is art.

John Dewey, a pallbearer for art’s recurring funeral, conceded in his 1934 work “Art as Experience” that machines might do a better job of “mere perfection in execution,” but that human emotion is the “moving and cementing force” in art. Human emotion “selects what is congruous and dyes what is selected with its color,” binding artists and their experience into something that conveys meaning to both the artist and the observer. Dewey breaks down all the components of art, concluding that what makes art is not its components or its structure, but its lived-ness.

As a neuroscientist, I see parallels between the struggle to define art and the struggle to define consciousness. Both resist definition, and attempts to define them create tautologies. In trying to define art, we may unwittingly create it. In studying consciousness, we seem to employ it. One school of thought maps the neural correlates of consciousness: components of the brain (neurons, synaptic activity, etc.) that produce activity that aligns with conscious experience. But the map is not the territory; these correlates don’t explain why or how subjective experience arises.

Similarly, the components of art can’t define why or how something is conceived of as artistic. Only we can do that by making art, the process of which requires an “undergoing” and a “doing,” according to Dewey. A machine can code (“do”) and process (“undergo”), but it can’t experience. We can lay out all the component parts of Frankensteinian monsters like art and consciousness, and combine them endlessly via AI, but the bolt of lightning that makes them live is our human relation to the world around us.

First Art and Becoming Human

Our repeated attempts to define art might never yield an authoritative definition, but in every era, art has been exclusively made by humans, for human purposes. We’ve been making distinctions between “art” and “not art” for centuries, but from Dewey’s perspective, art is a special form of human experience that emerges from our activities, just as “mountain peaks do not float unsupported. ... They are the earth in one of its manifest operations.” And as human activities evolve over generations, so too does art. The flat, everyday plains we scroll through on our phones today may well be the sharp peaks of human experience exhibited in museums of the future. A century ago, film wasn’t accepted as art. Today we question whether lines of code might be art.

Whatever it is, art is an evolving project, an outgrowth from humanity, always progressing through a series of firsts. The goal is never a final artistic destination but a constant progression, which isn’t so much a historical discovery as a philosophical invention to mark human creative activity and perhaps redefine art in each human era. Whether we start with the ruddy pigments on the walls of Chauvet-Pont d’Arc or something even earlier, philosopher Ben-Ami Scharfstein argues in his book “Of Birds, Beasts, and Other Artists” that the evolutionary through line, “the esthetic universal,” evolved from our need for communication, expression and pattern recognition.

Symbols are baked into our very existence, and their expression moves from Egyptian frescoes, Greek sculpture, Roman mosaics and Gothic cathedrals all the way to TaTa’s anticipated mixtape. As Dewey notes, the “live creature” interacts with its environs to produce an expressive object. If we consider AI a new part of our environs, a tool that we’ve constructed, then TaTa is just another representation of first art. But this first is self-generating and autonomous, which threatens every first art hereafter. So we should ask ourselves, what symbolic reasoning do we have for creating AI media?

The Purpose of Art

Greek epics were performed to preserve collective memory and extol the virtues of a proper Greek hero. Egyptian tomb aesthetics secured passage to the afterlife and sustained dynasties. Medieval art glorified God, cementing the divine right of kings and queens until “Liberty Leading the People” toppled the hierarchy. Mapping and preserving art require resources and always serve a human purpose. But the movement to preserve fine art may also have begun the process of separating art from lived human experience, hastening the new AI-induced death of art and human artists.

Philosophers like Dewey and Paul Virilio, for example, didn’t view preservation as a neutral activity; they saw museums as tombs and social monuments. Museums remove art from the world, preserve it in a climate-controlled chamber and, in doing so, strip it of its connection to daily experience. Soon, it will cost you a bitcoin to view an iPhone doomscrolling targeted algorithmic ads behind a glass case. We’ll look for a minute and make our way through the hall of African masks before heading back to our homes to consume whatever everyday media is dumped into the trough.

Museums will likely continue educating schoolchildren and disseminating authority-driven narratives, but in the past few decades, trust in such narratives and institutions is on the decline as many have access to information and even to their own little slice of the art world. Art is increasingly individualized. We buy personalized handicrafts from Etsy and ready-framed prints that coordinate with our decor from TJ Maxx, wear ornate custom-painted manicures and the latest fashion microtrend to suit our style.

Every day, people crave deeply personal art, speaking to the meaning in their own lives. Even the wealthy collect art based on their individual interests; they look for art that will appraise well, hold its value for current tax breaks (if they lend it to a gallery that aligns with their moral, social and political views), appreciate for later resale—but the art must speak to them and their values, of course.

Dewey believed that the separation of fine art from everyday life wasn’t an accident of cultural evolution but a deliberate move to commodify experience. A gesture in sand is free; a framed version of that gesture, replicated in bronze or stored on a blockchain, can be invested in, owned, collected and sold.

If Scharfstein’s “esthetic universal” that pervades all art truly corresponds to human needs, perhaps it will guide us to what we need in the new world of AI-generated art. The institutions of the past played a central role in assigning value (cultural, economic and historical) to a piece of art, reinforcing their own legitimacy. For example, the Académie des Beaux-Arts was one of the first rubber stamps of aesthetic value, codifying taste, canonizing form, housing the gatekeepers to safeguard what constitutes art. But in 1917 Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal signed “R. Mutt” and nearly demolished institutional authority, because it meant that intention could be enough to designate something as art, even when it lacked execution and beauty.

Likewise, in the first half of the 20th century, artists disillusioned by two world wars needed to rail against institutional norms in search of meaning. On the heels of Nietzsche, meaning was in short supply, and absurdist art soon rose to the occasion, with movements like Dadaism giving us permission to live and create out of sync. Despite art being pronounced dead on arrival again and again by Duchamp, Warhol or an amateur historian on TikTok, we keep reviving it to serve our needs. But what do we need in the 21st century? New songs made from a process of AI amalgamation, paint-by-number “Starry Night” kits, NFT monkeys, leather handbags? Or do we need to redraw boundaries around art to prevent it from being used to exploit our insatiable hunger for novelty?

‘Now I Am Become Art ...’

Scharfstein’s conclusion about the universal esthetic is that the explanation of art, like the explanation of what is human, is enigmatic and always renewing, a similar concept to poet John Keats’ “negative capability.” Keats said that poets are “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Keats said it was the artist, not the art, that possessed this capability, but perhaps the art and the artist have always been the same. Perhaps we’ve been searching for a way to see ourselves evolving, and with AI we’ve finally fashioned a mirror that reveals the recursive, self-replicating nature of art and ourselves. We might begin to see what Dewey, Scharfstein and Keats saw if only we could focus on ensuring that whatever art is, a human is the one making it.

What Barthes didn’t anticipate was that the death of the author might lead not only to the birth of the reader, but also to the zombified corpse of art itself, propped up to perpetually produce a profit. Through TaTa, we may gain a clear picture of our commodification. If we erase the artist and the observer as divine co-creators in exchange for fully autonomous IP, we can maximize profits—and the last human artists can retire on a diet of slop. Either we accept our responsibility as artists, or we write yet another eulogy. If TaTa is a mirror, then perhaps we’ll see the body in the casket is our own. The question is, do we still have a pulse?

Short videos—from TikToks to Instagram reels to YouTube clips—have become a new digital obsession. Statistics show that short videos account for nearly 80% of all mobile traffic in North America. Even on originally conversational platforms, like Facebook, video viewing has come to account for more than half of user time, turning it into an increasingly video-based platform.

Demographics matter, of course. Older generations treat reels as residues of TV in the digital era—they’re largely consumers, mostly watching videos and rarely posting their own. But among youth, shooting their own reels and video stories has become very common. It’s not without reason that Gen Zers are called the TikTok generation. The format lets them become TV producers in their own right, pursuing “15 minutes of fame” with incredible ease of production and potential access to millions of viewers. Reels don’t offer the proverbial full 15 minutes—only one to two—but the affordance of countless attempts and the chance of virality keep the reeling machine rolling at increasing speed and volume.

Media is the hardware of society, and culture is its software. Short videos signify more than just a shift in media habits. Due to the addictive ease of posting, viewing and sharing, short videos have become a new global form of media engagement, finishing off the remnants of culture shaped by literacy, print and broadcasting media. Short videos unleash the creative energy of the masses—but they also readjust cognitive and social settings to suit the conditions of postliteracy. Short videos switch the detached and rational perception typical of literacy to the impulsive immersion typical of orality. Unnoticeable but massive, this shift reverses mass communication further from literate forms—toward folklore.

A New Environmental Force

People in the media might recall how a “pivot to video” was expected to save the news industry in the mid-2010s. The pivot did happen—but not in journalism. The rising trend was misattributed: It wasn’t journalists but social media users who pivoted to producing, sharing and consuming video.

YouTube has provided this opportunity since 2005; Instagram and other platforms followed. YouTube, however, emerged in the pre-smartphone era and inherited the legacy of the video camera, when making video required significant skill and effort. The advent of smartphones changed this; they democratized video production and sharing. Along the way, the “optimal” video length for social media—both for production and consumption—was found to be about one minute. Soon after this mobile-driven short video format proved popular, a platform built around it burst onto the scene. The real explosion of short videos began with the rise of TikTok in 2016.

Since then, TikTok has shown the fastest growth, bypassing many older and larger platforms, especially among younger users. Globally, Facebook still retains the lead in monthly users (3.1 billion), with TikTok in fifth place (1.7 billion). However, TikTok has already surpassed Facebook in average time spent per user—about 60 minutes on TikTok versus under 40 on Facebook.

Digital Media: The Emancipation of the Spectacle

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation,” wrote Guy Debord in his 1967 book “The Society of the Spectacle.” The book came from a time in which television was reshaping society. Life was increasingly becoming mediated by mass media imagery. Debord stated that capitalism reduced human life to possession and then, armed with mass media, transformed possession into mere appearance: being—having—appearing. He argued that “the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.”

The idea of an induced, consumerism-driven reality was common in postmodernist philosophy, which emerged in the television era. “For a long time, capital had only to produce goods; consumption ran by itself,” wrote French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. “Today it is necessary to produce consumers, to produce demand, and this production is infinitely more costly than that of goods.” According to him, marketing became more crucial than production, leading to the “ideological genesis of needs,” mirroring Debord’s concept of “pseudo-needs.” The picture of the world shaped by induced needs absorbed reality itself. This picture was a copy without an original—simulacra shaping hyperreality, as Baudrillard called it, echoing Debord’s metaphor of the spectacle.

These complex philosophical constructs are familiar to each of us through consumerist habits. Since the television era, we’ve increasingly bought things not for their practical use but for their socially induced value, reflecting the shift from “natural” to “pseudo-needs.” An old car, old clothes or an old device may still function, but many people buy new ones precisely because the symbolic value of things, induced by the society of the spectacle, has taken the lead. “Using” evolved into “appearing,” so that society kept funding capitalist production—now the production of the spectacle.

The only way to make people buy things they may not actually need is to induce an emotional connection with the symbolic value of those things. This is where the imagery of mass culture—especially television—proved highly effective. It triggered emotional attachment and served to attract, synchronize and package viewers into saleable audiences. These were the ideal political-economic conditions in which the society of the spectacle could emerge.

Media conditions made the spectacle of the TV era centralized and broadcast. The spectacle featured professional performers—journalists, public figures, TV hosts, celebrities, academics. But now digital media have flipped the spectacle. As economist Arnold Kling noted, “On the phone, our friends act like celebrities and celebrities act like our friends.” Digital media allowed ordinary users to feature themselves. No longer was the spectacle broadcast—it became crowdsourced. Everyone could become a content creator, a self-brander: Former spectators were offered the chance to become spectacular themselves, while also liking and sharing the performances of others.

The Folklore of Digital Society

The affordability of short video sharing reversed the industrial, elite-driven production of the spectacle into Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s medieval carnival, the village-fair balagan show, commedia dell’arte and the traveling circus—with their people-powered humor, folk bawdry and bizarre menagerie. Just as podcasters have become bards of the digital era, short videos have retrieved folklore in a new, digital form.

Reels did not just emancipate authorship—the carnivalesque of reels intercepted the role-modeling power of TV and freed it from elite control. Debord’s electronic spectacle flipped into a populist digital spectacle with an astonishing variety of genres. Some genres mimic TV formats, but many have emerged specifically for this medium. “TikTok dance” became eponymic for describing short videos, though video dancing remains popular mostly within narrow demographics. The genre variety of reels still seems to be in an early phase, yet it already entertains all kinds of people in all kinds of moods: sports and movie clips, life hacks and DIY tricks, comedy sketches and couples’ skits, cooking and recipes, fitness routines and beauty tutorials, unboxing and product reviews, motivational tips and their mockery, cute or deadly animals, parenting and family chaos, dating humor, travel snippets, fact explainers and “satisfying” visuals of tidying up or completing something—you name it.

Eroticism and profanity, cuteness and disgust, humanness and brutality, carnivalesque humor, satire and mockery drive these genres in the directions the public favors most. In the TV spectacle, elites knew better what to show, while measuring audience reactions for better targeting required serious effort. In the digital spectacle of reels—just like in the balagan theater at the village fair—the crowd is part of the immersive show. Users not only like and share what resonates most but can also jump on stage themselves and reproduce those genres and approaches they believe will provoke a response from the crowd.

Short videos display not just popular folk scenes but folks themselves. The most tempting part is that in the digital environment, users can replay themselves in a desired way. And so they do—in the digital spectacle, former spectators seek to make their digital selves spectacular. Acknowledgement—via likes, comments and other forms of engagement—serves as proof of worth. Digital media have reversed the society of the spectacle into a society of ostentation, where not only elite actors but everyone bombards everyone with their desired selves, presented in various forms—from silly GIFs and food photos to sophisticated Substacks and short videos. The question is: Why is the popularity of short videos growing faster than anything else?

Digital Orality of Short Videos

As a state of mind and society, orality differs from literacy not simply because one is spoken and the other is written. More importantly, literacy detaches humans from their environment, while orality keeps them immersed in it. Digital media recreate the conditions of full immersion, with their impulsive, oral-like reactions to the environment—that’s why it’s digital orality.

The cognitive and cultural effect of short videos can be compared to that of radio. In the first half of the 20th century, radio was the first truly mass medium—and the first that did not require literacy (in a society that was already largely literate). Radio began “deliterating” its audience, opening the era of post-literacy. First, it did not require reading at all. Second, it synchronized the worldview of the masses by delivering them all one “signal” simultaneously—it’s not without a reason that Marshall McLuhan called radio “the tribal drum.”

Nevertheless, radio was a technological product of literacy and relied on literate practices and institutions. Though performed orally, radio required scripts and budgets, institutional and educational efforts—all of which were products of literacy. The oral speech of radio hosts was literate speech, representing what Walter Ong called “secondary orality”—the electronic orality of cultures based on writing.

Short video is also based on technological progress enabled by literacy but requires no literacy at all. Short videos do not rely on anything literate—not scripts, professions, budgets, education, organization or institutions—nothing that used to underlie the broadcasting (centralized, top-down) electronic media of the late literate era. In both watching and making short videos, no literate skills are needed—not reading, writing or even texting. All that’s required is a connected smartphone, and you join the global carnival in the Global Village—an oral medium digitally recorded and delivered, extremely affordable to consume and produce.

Because of the incredible growth in time spent on short videos, their “deliterating” effect is escalating far beyond the postliterate “capabilities” of radio and television. TV and radio allowed for nonliterate consumption, but those who produced TV and radio shows were “very literate”—they had prestigious educations and employed sophisticated literate theories. They organized the world according to cognitive and social protocols set by books: TV and radio shows were linear, logically structured, logically complete in each piece.

Short videos have none of this. They immerse both their creators and viewers in randomly cut snippets of someone’s flow of reality—sometimes staged but never scripted, with no beginning or end, no structuring or organization. It’s just the same everyday flow of living that oralist tribal individuals would have—but cut and delivered by digital means. Not a single touch of literate cognitive organization—not in consumption, not even in production.

Hollywood was once called “The Dream Factory”—a part of the spectacle later exposed by Debord. Watching Hollywood movies, the masses could taste the fictional lives of others—much more pleasant and spectacular than their own. Short videos offer everyone a chance to peek into others’ semireal, semistaged—simulated—lives in highly consumable and tiny pieces, but nearly endlessly. Moreover, short videos offer everyone to become a dream maker and display snippets of their own lives, playfully staged for admiration.

All social media do this, but in “traditional” posting, you still need at least some residual literacy skills—texting—to elicit a response. Reels freed user self-expression not only from elite control but also from literacy altogether. The staged replay of life scenes is essentially a “human replay,” to use the metaphor of media ecologist Paul Levinson. The affordance of replaying ourselves in movie-like short stories and peeking into the lives of others is so seductive and potentially beneficial for social recognition that literacy becomes a small sacrifice—the fee spectators pay to become spectacular themselves and direct the new global spectacle.

Sometimes I think of a famous ad campaign from the 1960s: the Avis car rental agency’s “We Try Harder.” Implied in that slogan (and no need to imply, because the fact was well known) was that Avis was second place behind Hertz, then number one in the car rental game. The campaign is considered a brilliant flex because it took a weakness—being in second place—and turned it into a strength: We’re hungry. We’re still trying to earn your business. We’re not resting on our laurels like those number-one guys. This isn’t just clever advertising; it’s a snappy way to capture something true about human psychology and behavior.

I thought about this insight when my wife and I visited Croatia in 2022 and then Italy (Sicily) in 2023. In many ways they are similar places; we stuck mostly to the Croatian coastline, which is very Mediterranean. Both were once outposts of the Roman Empire. Both were controlled by many different peoples over the centuries. But as much as they resemble each other on paper, our experience of these places was very different.

Croatia, a popular but still basically second-tier European destination, felt clean, tidy, welcoming, well managed. Sicily felt faded, dirty, ramshackle. Sicily gave the impression of having seen all the tourists it would ever need to; Croatia was still positioning itself as a top-tier destination. Sicily didn’t need to do anything to be what it was anymore; Croatia was still hungry. We try harder. You know when you go to a restaurant and the experience is just seamless and perfectly executed? That was the vibe Croatia gave.

A pair of American cities that I visited back to back last year gave me this same sense of contrast. I visited Seattle for a weekend with my wife, who had a work event that week, and then I flew to Cincinnati for a pair of conferences on urbanism that I was attending. I imagined Seattle as one of America’s great cities. Surely it must be, with all that you hear about it? I knew very little about Cincinnati, and I suppose if you asked, I would have said maybe it used to be one of America’s great cities.

Yet Seattle felt underwhelming. Low energy. Like a place that didn’t have to try anymore, or that had given up. Plenty of other people, judging from comments I received when I wrote about my visit, felt the same way. The city’s downtown felt emptied out—which it kind of was, especially after the pandemic and its effects on the commercial real-estate sector—and the homelessness and public drug use were unnerving. But beyond that, the city felt just a bit uninspiring. It was expensive, but it didn’t deliver the value.

Cincinnati was obviously in worse physical shape. There were more vacant and run-down buildings, more of that eerie feeling when you suddenly find you’re the only person on a desolate block, yet you’re only a minute or two from a bustling block. (Surprisingly to me, the crime rate is quite similar between the two cities—I had assumed Cincinnati was more dangerous, but Neighborhood Scout, which may or may not have the best data, shows it as slightly safer than Seattle.)

However, despite that slight sense of ruin or faded glory, Cincinnati also felt energetic. Like it wanted us. Instead of Seattle’s cutesy Biscuit Bitch serving bougie Southern breakfasts next to a homeless encampment, there’s the local, humble Skyline Chili. Instead of Seattle’s potato-themed restaurant, there’s a greasy-spoon deli with a fine corned beef sandwich and a massive potato pancake for $13. We even found some excellent Korean fried chicken downtown. (What can I say, I pay a lot of attention to the food when I visit a new city.) I wouldn’t say you’d never know urban renewal, or the collapse of legacy industry, had happened. But Cincinnati felt like an ordinary place on the upswing.

At the end of my first conference, we made our way toward Over-the-Rhine, not too long ago one of Cincinnati’s most blighted neighborhoods, but also one of its most intact. We marveled at its almost Old World beauty, watching the sun set over the city nestled into the hills, from the rooftop of a local microbrewery. Whatever complaints about gentrification and affordability there may be, I imagine that the people who can remember a neighborhood left for dead are grateful, and excited, to see urban growth coming back. At least I got that impression.

Politically, Cincinnati has been ambitious: In regard to housing, which raises affordability issues even there, the council recently passed a city-wide zoning reform dubbed Connected Communities. Though it was controversial and took time, it showed that the city was willing to, you know, do something. Connected Communities basically allows moderate-density or “missing middle” housing in certain parts of every area of the city; this policy aims, in effect, to reverse-engineer old-fashioned urban growth and distribute it in a more organic manner than very large projects would do. (Seattle passed a similar reform—but at least in part because the state passed a law requiring localities to facilitate missing middle housing.) The scrappy, second-place Rust Belt city did the big thing first.

Heading home from our conference-closing happy hour in Over-the-Rhine, we hopped on a streetcar that took us back to our downtown hotels. This was an actually usable streetcar running a decent loop through the urban core, not just a little vanity project or gimmick. It was clean. It worked. It was full at 10 p.m. on a weeknight.

That was my broad impression: Seattle, despite being highly successful, felt dysfunctional. Cincinnati, despite struggling with decades of urban problems, felt like everything basically worked. Maybe because if it didn’t, the city’s recovery would be compromised.

Cincinnati felt like a city coming back, relishing its growth, appreciating every visitor and every dollar. In a way, being number one is a curse. You know how an airplane feels fastest when it’s taking off and feels like it’s going nowhere when it reaches speed? That’s kind of what’s happening here. And just as a lot of car renters in the 1960s went for the number two, I’ll take a city in its takeoff stage. I’m drawn to the places that appreciate that the best is yet to come—and that are still hungry for it.

By Sam Kazman

In the 1993 film “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays a cynical big-city TV weatherman stuck with an assignment he loathes—covering the annual groundhog ceremony in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Once he arrives in the small town, he finds himself stuck in a time loop, trapped in the same day and place over and again, despairing of ever breaking this cycle. At one point, he asks two locals in a bowling alley, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered?”

For those who have their doubts about the Trump presidency, that film and that question are pretty relevant these days. “Groundhog Day” isn’t simply a film that got lucky in the relevance sweepstakes; it had long been viewed as highly significant in many ways ranging from philosophy to religion to ethics, and it’s been featured in numerous academic writings. With Trump’s election in 2016, the film seemed tailor-made to take on political meaning as well. As one columnist wrote for The Week, “This is our life under President Trump. Every day, we awaken to the same mean tweets from the president, the same outraged memes on social media, and the same screeching reports about lies, fake news, impeachment, the 25th Amendment, the wall, idiots and morons, and even treason.”

That column appeared not last week or last month, but nearly seven years ago. If the “Groundhog Day” metaphor for Trump was apt then, it’s even more fitting now. This past February, for example, on the occasion of Groundhog Day 2025, USA Today editorialized that “with Trump, every day is ‘Groundhog Day.’ A nightmare over and over again.” Not surprisingly, many other publications have picked up the theme.

But there’s another far shorter work that is arguably even more compelling as a meme for life during the Trump presidency: the 1997 “Festivus” episode of “Seinfeld.” In the episode, the Festivus anti-holiday features an aluminum pole as its decorative centerpiece; the pole requires no ornamentation because, as the host (George Costanza’s father) explains, he finds tinsel too distracting. Festivus begins with an “airing of grievances,” as each family member around a table tells the others “all the ways they’ve disappointed you over the past year.” It then culminates with “feats of strength” in which celebrants try to pin the host to the floor.

Festivus ultimately caught on with lots of people in the real world, but it’s the airing of grievances that is most relevant to the Trump presidency. Whether Trump has expressly said so or not (and he often has), a sense of grievance underlies a huge number of his statements and actions: his attacks on mass media, his diatribes against political opponents, his denunciations of other countries, his rebukes of judges who’ve ruled against him (even when he’s the one who appointed those judges) and so on—almost literally ad infinitum. As one news headline put it regarding one of his first press conferences in 2017, “Trump airs grievances ... in unprecedented fashion for a president.” Eight years later, the headlines haven’t changed: “Trump Delivers Gloating, Grievance-Filled Speech Hours After Sending Economy Reeling.”

Yes, this sounds a bit like the time loop in “Groundhog Day,” but it’s really more like one incredibly long Festivus. While very little changed from day to day in the film, Trump’s grievances cover a dizzying array of situations. Here are just a few of them:

• Tariffs—I’ve got problems with a lot of you countries!

Trump’s tariff policy, unveiled in April, covered about 180 countries and territories. Trump claimed this would “end decades of the U.S. being ‘looted, pillaged, raped and plundered’ by trading partners.” He later declared that negotiating with other countries was hard because they’re “spoiled from having ripped us off for 30, 40 years.”

• Air Force One—All the other kings have shinier planes

Trump has long disliked his aging Air Force One plane, and so he was happy to accept Qatar’s offer of a new plane as a gift. In mid-May, while traveling in the Middle East, he stated: “When you land and you see Saudi Arabia, and you see UAE, and you see Qatar and they have these brand new Boeing 747s mostly. And you see ours next to it, this is like a totally different plane. It’s much smaller. It’s much less impressive. ... We’re the United States of America – I believe we should have the most impressive plane.”

• I continue to hate artists who didn’t endorse me

When Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris before the 2024 election, Trump tweeted “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” Then in mid-May, for no apparent reason, Trump tweeted “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” Dream on, Mr. President.

• I speak for Putin’s grievances too

In his notorious February Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump brought up the pain supposedly inflicted on Putin by the allegedly phony Russiagate investigation: Putin “had to suffer through the Russia hoax—Russia, Russia, Russia. It was a hoax. It was all Biden. It was nothing to do with him. He had to suffer through that.” In fact, Trump claimed that he and Putin both had to endure this suffering: “Putin went through a hell of a lot with me.” The airing of grievances, evidently, can generously encompass those who aren’t present at the Festivus table.

• These judges have it in for me

In late May, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade unanimously ruled that Trump’s threatened tariffs exceeded his authority under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump took this very personally; on TruthSocial, he wrote: “Where do these initial three Judges come from? ... Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?”

What other reason? Well, for starters, there are the reasons laid out in the court’s 49-page ruling: The law’s narrow provision for regulating imports didn’t encompass anything as broad as the unlimited tariffs that Trump sought to impose, and Trump’s plan to use his tariffs as a pressure tactic ran counter to the law’s design. Then there’s a nearly identical ruling from another court in a second tariff challenge. And as for where those judges came from, one had been appointed by Trump himself (the other two by Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama).

• And speaking of judges ...

In the best Festivus manner, Trump used that same TruthSocial post to vent about other things as well—specifically, the Federalist Society (“I am so disappointed ... because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!”) and its former head, Leonard Leo (“a real ‘sleazebag’ ... a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America”).

“Groundhog Day” ends on a note of moral redemption and the character’s discovery of love. Festivus does not. This is in keeping with a rule laid down early on for “Seinfeld” by its creator, Larry David—there was to be “no hugging, no learning.” Its characters were to undergo no emotional growth whatsoever.

Now, comparing memes is an iffy task, and when it comes to “Groundhog Day” and Festivus there’s a David-versus-Goliath aspect as well—“Groundhog Day” is 100 minutes long, while the Festivus scene in “Seinfeld” is five. But Trump’s lack of “learning” makes Festivus the more compelling meme for Trump’s presidency.

The future may not be that bleak. Trump’s recent characterization of Putin as talking “bullshit” suggests he may indeed be starting to learn. Still, all in all, when it comes to the White House right now we have not just Festivus, but Festivus in Chief.

Sam Kazman is former general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market public interest organization in Washington, D.C.

This article is second in a three-part series on the worker classification debate. The first article can be found here.

Recent news headlines suggest that the ongoing debate over how to classify independent contractors is not going away anytime soon. The current Department of Labor (DOL) announced in May that it will no longer seek to enforce the Biden administration’s rulemaking that favored classifying workers as employees rather than contractors. The Biden rule, in turn, had reversed a more pro-contractor rulemaking from the first Trump administration. Trump 2.0 appears poised once again to swing the pendulum back toward favoring independent contracting.

This debate continues to broil at all levels of government—from localities to states to the halls of Congress and DOL. But much of the political shouting over the past decade of this debate has focused specifically on the gig economy and the use of independent contracting status by gig platforms. This overlooks the fact that broad swaths of the traditional American workforce also operate via 1099 contracting arrangements and largely find themselves ignored in the debate.

The general preoccupation with gig economy work in the independent contracting debate is understandable. California’s notorious A.B. 5 law—which served as the prototype for the national push to reclassify contractors as full-scale employees—was a thinly veiled attempt to target the gig economy. In turn, a ballot proposition sponsored by gig companies ended up overturning the law’s application to app-based transportation and delivery platforms.

To the extent California lawmakers did focus on other industries during the fallout from A.B. 5, they mostly did so through a controversial and political process of handing out exemptions to the law for favored industries. As a result, not only did A.B. 5 have a deleterious impact on California’s broader economy—as documented by researchers at the Mercatus Center and elsewhere—but it also had a disproportionate impact on industries that lost out in this political game of picking winners and losers.

While certain professions—like freelance writers, artists and photographers—were exempted under California’s law, other professions—such as nursing—did not receive a direct exemption. In the end, relying solely on the whims of a legislative body to secure an exemption from this type of statutory requirement is akin to Winston Churchill’s oft-repeated warning that “[a]n appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”

To wit, A.B. 5 included a strict “ABC test” that classified workers as employees unless three specific requirements were met: namely, the worker must be free from control and direction by a company, perform work outside the normal course of the company's business and be customarily engaged in an independently established trade or business. When this test was imported into the federal PRO Act bill (introduced in the last Congress) that sought to similarly narrow the definition of who could qualify for contracting status, the Golden State’s list of exemptions didn’t make it into the bill. Likewise, the Biden DOL’s rulemaking, while not a full-on ABC-style test, nonetheless discouraged contracting arrangements and did not contain the breadth of carve-outs that California’s bill did.

In a world where an ABC-style test is enacted federally, a whole host of professions with long-standing traditions of operating under independent contracting arrangements could find themselves in the regulatory crosshairs.

One prime example is the financial advisory industry, which uses both W-2 (employee) and 1099 (contractor) models for advisers. Financial advisers were explicitly exempted from California’s A.B. 5, but not from the federal PRO Act or Biden DOL rulemaking. Estimates vary as to exactly how many financial advisers operate as contractors, but figures range anywhere from 1 out of 7 to over 50%. There are potential advantages and disadvantages to any employment model, but those advisers who operate under 1099 status prefer the flexibility offered by that arrangement.

An independent contracting model allows advisers to switch between firms while taking their client base with them—the type of worker empowerment one would expect to be championed on the political left. Contracting status likewise allows advisers to set their own hours and hire their own staff, as well as maintain their own office space. While advertising and social media use are heavily regulated by numerous federal agencies in the financial advisory space, W-2 advisers tend to face even more restrictions in what they can say publicly because of additional policies enacted by their firms.

Independent advisers are also more likely to work with lower-net-worth individuals. According to a report compiled by the Financial Services Institute, 78% of independent advisers believe that becoming a W-2 adviser would cause their account minimums to increase and restrict their ability to work with smaller accounts, while 77% believe their commissions and management fees would increase from such a switch. Overall, the advisers surveyed in the report estimated that over 30% of existing clients would be lost on account of these increased account minimums and fees.

The real estate industry is another sector that has long organized itself via 1099 contracting arrangements. According to the National Association of Realtors, 87% of its 1.5 million members are classified as independent contractors. Since the early 1980s, real estate agents have been classified as non-employees for tax purposes under federal law, which further underscores the contracting traditions of the industry.

While real estate agents were able to secure an exemption under A.B. 5, once again the PRO Act and Biden DOL rulemaking contained no such exemption, leading some to speculate that an assault on the sector’s independent contracting model could lead to an industry contraction of 50% or more.

Perhaps the scariest example of a traditional industry that could be affected by a crackdown on independent contracting is health care. The industry has often used so-called PRN nurses or agency nurses—many of whom are 1099 workers—to fill staff shortages on an as-needed basis, and in recent years the use of independent nurses and home health aides has only increased in the health care sector. As covered by The Wall Street Journal, over 100,000 nurses dropped out of the workforce or retired during the pandemic, making the health care supply shortage particularly acute.

On cue, apps such as ShiftKey and CareRev have gained in popularity as platforms for hospitals to contract with on-demand nurses during difficult-to-staff hours and weekends. Nurses were not directly exempted from A.B. 5, and a sudden move to restrict independent contracting status in federal legislation or rulemaking could cause acute care shortages in hospitals across the country.

When one thinks of the American middle class, it’s not a stretch to think of moments like selling a home to upsize with a baby on the way, working with a local financial adviser to save for retirement, or having your child’s broken arm mended at the neighborhood hospital. All these moments and industries could find themselves in the crosshairs of forced worker reclassification efforts in the years ahead.

So far, Uber and Lyft drivers have gotten most of the attention. But any drastic and sudden restructuring of the American workforce will affect far more than the gig economy.

C. Jarrett Dieterle is a nonresident senior fellow at the R Street Institute and a legal policy fellow for the Manhattan Institute.

By Stacy Phillips

A few years ago, I found myself in the middle of two very different storms. One was political—a country growing more divided, conversations turning combative, friendships being tested. The other was deeply personal—my ex-husband’s struggle with addiction, and my role as a mother trying to raise strong, emotionally intelligent boys in the middle of the wreckage. Both situations taught me the same essential truth: Healthy boundaries are not about shutting people out—they’re about staying grounded so you can keep showing up with compassion.

This truth didn’t come easily to me. In fact, I come from a long, proud line of people who have no idea what boundaries are. Growing up the youngest of 10 siblings, boundaries weren’t something we talked about—they were something you accidentally ran into, usually by stepping on someone else’s last nerve. Personal space? Emotional limits? Saying no? Unheard of. Our family motto might as well have been: “We love hard, we talk loud, and we’re all up in each other’s business.”

But as I got older, I started to recognize what I had missed: the sense of safety that boundaries provide—not just physical space, but emotional protection. Learning that later in life wasn’t easy. There were years I confused boundaries with rejection. I thought saying “no” meant I was being cold or selfish. But as a mom, I realized I didn’t want my kids growing up believing they had to sacrifice their peace to maintain relationships. I wanted them to know that love can have limits—and still be love.

My best friend and I have known each other for 27 years. We don’t vote the same. We don’t watch the same news. But we laugh until we cry, show up when it matters and choose to focus on what we’ve always valued about each other—kindness, loyalty, humor. Her beliefs haven’t really changed over time, but mine have evolved. There were moments when I worried that shift would create distance. What saved our friendship wasn’t compromise—it was clarity. We learned to say: “I love you, even if I don’t agree with you.” That simple sentence is a boundary in action—respect without surrender.

Boundaries in Action

So what are healthy boundaries, really?

According to research published in the British Journal of Nursing, healthy boundaries are the psychological space between individuals that “allows a sense of individuality and separateness,” which is essential for maintaining personal identity and emotional well-being. They protect our emotional space, clarify our responsibilities and reduce conflict by creating expectations. Boundaries help us distinguish what’s ours to carry—and what isn’t.

When my ex-husband was deep in his addiction, I had to draw painful but necessary boundaries for the sake of my children and myself. I remember telling my boys, “Love doesn’t mean you say yes to everything. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is step back.” That was a turning point—not just for them, but for me. We had to learn how to separate the disease from the person, to love without enabling, to show compassion without becoming casualties.

And that’s what healthy boundaries do: They keep you safe enough to stay loving.

Too often, we think boundaries are confrontational. But they’re really just communication. They sound like:

• “I’m not comfortable discussing this topic today.”

• “I need time to cool off before continuing this conversation.”

• “I respect your view, but I see it differently.”

• “This behavior isn’t okay with me, and I need some space.”

These aren’t ultimatums—they’re expressions of self-respect.

One of the best professors I ever had once said, “There’s no way to truly understand your own viewpoint unless you can understand the opposing one.” That stayed with me. Listening—really listening—is not about changing someone’s mind. It’s about showing that their humanity matters, even if their opinion challenges your own. That’s empathy. And empathy is a boundary’s best friend.

Empathy allows you to say, “I want to understand where you’re coming from,” without losing your own footing. It allows you to stay curious, not combative. And it keeps relationships intact when everything else feels like it’s falling apart.

But boundaries also mean protecting your energy. When conflict is constant—whether in the news, your social feed or your family group chat—you have every right to disengage. You don’t need to attend every argument you’re invited to. You don’t need to explain your values to people determined not to hear them. You don’t owe access to your peace.

What you do owe yourself, though, is joy. Part of setting boundaries is actively choosing joy. You have to make space for what fills you up. For me, that’s making fried rice on the Blackstone with my boys. It’s time with my girlfriends at wineries. It’s reading. It’s exploring new places. It’s choosing laughter over outrage. We can’t fight for the world we want if we’re running on empty.

And yes, it’s okay to walk away—from conversations, from dynamics, even from people—if your mental health depends on it. But sometimes, what saves a relationship isn’t distance. It’s redirection. Can we talk about something we both care about? Can we come back to the foundation we built this relationship on—trust, respect, shared history?

Making Positive Steps

You don’t need to persuade people to agree with you. There doesn’t always have to be an action step. Sometimes, the most radical thing you can do is just keep showing up in love—with your boundary intact.

If you’re struggling to navigate difficult relationships right now—political or personal—try this:

1. Name your boundary. Be clear with yourself and others about what you need to feel safe and heard. Before you can express what you need, you have to know what it is. Clarity starts from within. What makes you feel uncomfortable, resentful, unsafe or unheard? Those feelings are clues.

   You may realize, for example, that political arguments with a family member leave you feeling anxious and disrespected. Your boundary might be: “I don’t want to engage in political discussions at family gatherings.” Naming it helps you stay centered—and helps others understand your limits.

2. Communicate with kindness. You can say hard things with soft edges. You don’t have to be sharp or cold. The tone doesn’t have to match the tension. Kindness is not weakness—it’s strategic and mature.

   So when you’re in a heated discussion, instead of saying, “You’re being rude and I am done talking to you,” try: “I care about our relationship, which is why I need to step away from this conversation for now. Let’s talk when we are both calmer.” A kind tone creates more space for understanding—even when the message is firm.

3. Listen to understand, not to win. The goal isn’t persuasion—it’s connection. If your goal is to be right, you’ll probably miss the chance to be real. Listening to understand means being curious, even when it’s hard. This doesn’t mean you have to agree; it means you are creating space for someone’s experience—even if you’ll never share it.

   When a friend shares a viewpoint you disagree with, instead of debating, say: “Help me understand how you came to feel that way.” This doesn’t mean you agree—it means you respect their experience, which builds trust even in disagreement.

4. Focus on common ground. Our values often overlap more than our opinions. Start from there. What unites you is almost always deeper than what divides you.

   Say a co-worker is frustrated by your approach to a project. You could respond: “We both care about doing excellent work—I think we just have different styles. Let’s focus on the shared goal.” Or when your aunt insists on bringing up her strong political views at dinner, you could say: “I think we both want a safer, kinder world for future generations. That’s something we can agree on.” Finding common ground doesn’t ignore hard truths—it means staying rooted in what matters most.

5. Prioritize self-care. Refill your cup with what brings you joy. Boundaries are easier to maintain when your tank isn’t empty. If your emotional reserves are running on fumes, you’ll feel guilty, reactive or too exhaustive to follow through.

   So it’s okay if you decline an invitation to an event where you know you’ll feel overstimulated or drained. Instead, you choose rest and communicate that: “Thank you for thinking of me, but I’m going to sit this one out and recharge. Let’s catch up another time.” Refilling your emotional cup is not indulgence—it’s essential. You can’t offer peace to others if you’re at war with yourself.

6. Know when to disengage. Silence can be sacred when noise is toxic. Not every conversation is worth having. Not every person is ready to receive your truth. And not every boundary can be negotiated. Silence isn’t defeat; it’s discernment.

   For instance, when a social media comment spirals into personal attacks, you could quietly block, mute or log off rather than continuing the debate. Peace is more important than proving a point.

We live in a world that profits from outrage. Boundaries are your resistance. They are how you stay soft in a hard world, how you keep showing up with empathy when it’s easier to shut down and how you preserve what matters most—your relationships, your peace and your ability to love without losing yourself.

So, the next time you feel the tension rise—online, at the dinner table or in your own heart—remember this: You can hold your line and still hold someone’s hand. That’s what healthy boundaries do. They don’t push people away. They give you the strength to stay connected, without losing who you are.