Senator-elect El-Sayed,

Congratulations on your win. Michigan voters made their choice, and I respect it. I am not one of your constituents. But a United States senator does not vote only for Michigan. You will vote on arms sales, sanctions, foreign aid, war powers, and how the federal government responds to antisemitism at home. On those votes, you answer to all of us.

So let me be direct. We heard what you said during this campaign. We know where you stand. For many voters, your record on Israel was disqualifying. You won anyway. That does not erase what you said. From now on, it is the standard your Senate record will be judged against.

What you have told the country

When Ross Douthat asked on 60 Minutes whether Palestine has a right to exist, you said “Yes.” When he asked about Israel, you said “S — yes. If there is a shared understanding,” and added that you would be fine with “one state shared in a different way” (CBS News transcript).

That was not a stumble. In May you said you “struggle” with whether Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish state, because you question “how that is consistent with any form of liberal values” (Washington Monthly). In June, when asked whether you dispute Israel’s right to exist, you said you do not, and then added, “I just dispute the idea that you should have an ethnostate” (Newsweek). When Jake Tapper pressed you, your answer was, “Whatever you think about Israel’s right to exist, I wonder if they have a right to our tax dollars” (USA Today).

Egypt, where your parents were born, names Islam as its state religion. You oppose unconditional aid to Egypt, but no one hears you question whether Egypt has a right to exist. That question is reserved for the one Jewish state.

You told CNN the Israeli government is just as evil as Hamas: “Hamas, evil. Israeli government, evil. We could say both” (CNN). Asked whether Israel’s government should be designated a terrorist organization, you didn’t say no. You said, “It’s certainly a rogue state” (Jewish Insider). You told ABC that Israel is like a child’s friend who “keeps bumming off their money,” and that “it’s time for us to realize that Israel is not actually our friend” (Mediaite). Asked on a debate stage whether Israel or Iran is the bigger threat to the United States, you said, “That’s a ridiculous hypothetical. Both of them have proven dangerous in their own way” (CBS News). Pete Buttigieg, a member of your own party, answered the same question in one sentence: “Iran is our enemy. Israel is not” (Jewish Journal).

The history you leave out

You say the United States claims to pursue a two-state solution “only to aid, arm, and abet the very people who are trying to foreclose on the possibility of a second state” (CBS News). You compared a two-state outcome to being handed someone’s “seconds” (Jewish Insider).

The first Arab state carved out of Mandatory Palestine already exists. It is Jordan. In 1922, with League of Nations approval, Britain withheld the Jewish national home provisions from everything east of the Jordan River, roughly 90,000 of about 117,000 square kilometers (League of Nations record via the UN). About three-quarters of the Mandate became Transjordan, cut off from the Jewish national home from the start (Britannica).

Of what remained, Palestinian Arabs were offered a state again and again:

• The Peel Commission proposed partition in 1937. The Zionist leadership cautiously accepted the principle. Arab leaders rejected it, and the revolt then underway intensified (Britannica).
• In 1947 the UN offered partition, and the Arab Higher Committee told the UN it was “determined to persist in rejection partition” (UN Palestine Commission). Mahmoud Abbas himself later called that a mistake (The Daily Star).
• In 1967 the Arab League answered Israel with “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it” (Yale Avalon Project).
• Arafat walked away from Camp David in 2000. That December, Israel’s cabinet accepted the Clinton Parameters, which offered a state on 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza. Arafat attached so many conditions that the deal fell apart (Council on Foreign Relations).
• Israel pulled every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005. Two years later, Hamas took it by force (AP).
• In 2008 Ehud Olmert offered about 94 percent of the West Bank, land swaps for the rest, and a capital in Arab East Jerusalem (BBC). Olmert urged Abbas to sign. Abbas said he needed more time (VOA), and the deal was never signed.

That is not a record of Israel shutting the door on a Palestinian state. It is a century of Palestinian leaders refusing one, because the price was accepting a Jewish state next door.

On genocide

You told 60 Minutes the charge that Israel committed genocide is not “disagreeable” (Jewish Insider). The International Court of Justice disagrees. It has made no such finding, and it said in writing that its preliminary order “in no way prejudges” the merits (ICJ). The judge who presided over that order went on the BBC specifically to correct people who claim the court found genocide plausible (BBC). The merits will not be heard before 2029. You told 60 Minutes you try to be “radically honest” (CBS News). Announcing a verdict the court has refused to reach is not that.

Why this is about more than Israel

Asked whether a politician’s support for Israel could be about anything other than money, you said: “Not if you’re a Democrat and you believe in human rights” (Jewish Insider). You described your primary opponent as “a suit with a large AIPAC bank account” (CNN). You said Michigan families pay “$5 gas” and “more for groceries” because of a war fought “at the behest of whom? The government of Israel” (Poynter). In a primary debate, you said American foreign policy “has been handed to us by the likes of the state of Israel and AIPAC, who has made sure that Democrats and Republicans are doing their bidding” (CBS News).

This is where anti-Israel politics turns into something older. Put those lines together and the argument is this: money from Israel’s supporters buys politicians, the Jewish state is why your groceries cost too much, and both parties do its “bidding.” When a PAC run by one of your allies made that argument into an ad, showing a couple putting back eggs because “we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians” (New York Times), you said, “I do not agree with the contents of that ad” (Newsweek). When Haley Stevens asked you to condemn it, you declined and accused her of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago” (Jewish Insider). She put it plainly: the ad “did not invent its argument; it dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign” (Times of Israel). Your future colleague, Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, described it as your “fixation with Jewish money” (Yahoo News).

I recognize this pattern because I grew up inside it. I am not religious. But I was born into an Ashkenazi Jewish family in the Soviet Union, and that was enough. We were punished for it, relentlessly, until we were forced to leave as refugees. Part of my family chose Israel. We chose America. Both countries took us in when the country of our birth would not let us live in peace as Jews. That kind of persecution never starts with laws. It starts with the idea that Jews, and the Jewish state, are the hidden reason for everyone else’s hardship. I have seen where it goes.

Temple Israel

In March, a man drove into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, a synagogue with a preschool, and opened fire on a security guard (AP; CBS News). Your video statement condemned the attack and then asked viewers to “imagine if there were no airstrikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died.” It said “hurt people hurt people,” and it called on listeners to do “the thing that Ayman Ghazali was too small to do” (Abdul for Senate).

Five days later, on a private campaign call, you said: “It was a risk. All of our team was really worried about saying something, but leadership is being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true” (Deadline Detroit, citing Punchbowl News).

It took you five and a half months to apologize, and what you apologized for was the timing: “it wasn’t the time for context” (AP). You never retracted the context itself. Then, on the third anniversary of October 7, the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, you put out no statement at all. You explained that you didn’t want to “step on their grief” (Jewish Insider). You offered the man who attacked a synagogue four minutes of context, and the Jews murdered on October 7 got silence.

What you have already told us you will do

You told voters you would cut off even defensive aid. You said, “I don’t believe that there’s really a difference between offensive or defensive weapons,” and your opposition extends to Iron Dome, the system that shoots down rockets aimed at civilians (The Forward). On the debate stage, you said you would not send Israel defensive weapons even if Iran attacked it (Jewish Insider). Yet you support aid to Ukraine because it faced “attacks from a leader of a neighboring sovereign country” (The Forward). I guess thanks for at least that. Israel has been attacked by its neighbors, their proxies and Iran itself. In your view, Ukrainian civilians deserve air defense and Israeli civilians do not.

On election night, you told AIPAC, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to beat you twice,” and said Palestinian children are being “murdered by our tax dollars” (Times of Israel). The next morning, you told NPR that the president is “actually right” to end military aid to Israel, and that you would “like to see us stop selling weaponry” to Israel too (WAMC/NPR).

You haven’t even been sworn in, and you have already started.

What we will be watching

You have also made promises. You said, “My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own daughters,” and “I stand against any rhetoric that puts the community at risk” (The Hill). In your letter to Jewish voters you wrote, “As your senator, I will always stand up against antisemitism… Ever. Full stop” (Jewish Insider). And you told 60 Minutes: “When it comes to standing up for Jewish Americans, I will be right there.”

We are going to hold you to every one of those sentences.

We will watch whether you use your seat to block arms sales, put holds on Israel-related bills, or cut off missile defense that protects civilians. We will watch whether you push one-sided resolutions, back boycott and sanctions campaigns against the Jewish state, or fund organizations that excuse terrorism. We will watch how you handle federal civil rights enforcement when Jewish students are harassed on campus. We will watch who you hire, who you meet with, and whether “Jewish money” and “doing their bidding” become talking points on the Senate floor. You yourself said you stand against any rhetoric that puts the community at risk. That is the standard we will apply.

Holding views most of us consider wrong is your right. Turning those views into policy that singles out Israel, or leaves Jewish Americans less safe, is something many of us will oppose with every lawful tool available: votes, money, coalitions and public scrutiny.

You have a chance to prove your critics wrong. I hope you take it. But no one should mistake hope for trust. You will have to earn it, one vote at a time.

Vitaly Golomb

An Open Letter to Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed was originally published in Dialogue & Discourse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the morning of August 26th, in a federal courtroom in Oakland, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle claims by dozens of states that Facebook and Instagram were designed to keep children hooked. The company admitted no wrongdoing. It did agree to a default two-hour daily limit for teenagers, an overnight block from midnight to 6 a.m., no push notifications during school hours, hidden like counts, and a feed that is not algorithmically personalized. North Carolina’s attorney general called it the largest settlement with a big tech company in history, and said that continuing to litigate “would risk losing another generation”.

The same morning, a few hundred miles north, Bill Gates published his first long essay on artificial intelligence in three years, under the title “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” Its central sentence ran to eleven words: “There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era”.

Read together, the two documents form a single argument. The settlement is the receipt for thirty years of letting an industry write its own rules. The essay is a warning that the same country and the same Congress are about to do it again, faster, with a technology that does not merely capture attention but replaces the people paying it.

Twenty-six words

In 1996 Congress passed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, twenty-six words that told courts to treat online platforms as neutral hosts rather than publishers of what their users posted. The intent was reasonable. A bulletin board should not be sued for a stranger’s defamatory post. AOL won on that theory in 1997. Facebook used it to escape a terrorism suit in 2020.

The law’s authors did not foresee that the platforms would stop being bulletin boards. They became engines that chose what each of three billion people saw next, optimized for a single number, and then claimed the immunity of a telephone company for the consequences of the choosing. For nearly three decades, every attempt to hold the design accountable ran into the same twenty-six words. Infinite scroll, autoplay, variable-reward notifications, like counts calibrated to adolescent insecurity, all of it sat behind a shield built for message boards.

The shield cracked this year. In March a New Mexico jury fined Meta $375 million for endangering young users and misleading the public. In August a judge in the same case ordered a further $567 million and compared the company’s platforms to a “polluting factory,” the first time a court has ordered a broad package of product changes to a social network on a final judgment about harm to users. On August 10th the Ninth Circuit ruled that Section 230 is a defense to be argued at trial rather than an immunity that ends the case before one, and sent roughly 3,000 addiction suits from families and school districts toward juries. Sixteen days later Meta settled.

What the documents said

The trials mattered less for the verdicts than for the discovery. A 2018 internal Meta document, read to Mark Zuckerberg on the stand in Los Angeles in February, said: “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens”. A 2015 document estimated that 30 percent of American 10- to 12-year-olds were on Instagram, a product that requires users to be 13. A 2020 analysis found that 11-year-olds were four times as likely to keep coming back as older users. Another set a goal of increasing the time 10-year-olds spent on the app. Asked about the 2015 email, Mr Zuckerberg said he did not remember the context.

Arturo Béjar, the engineer who built Facebook’s original safety tools, told the Oakland jury in August that the company had a culture “in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side,” that safety was “not a meaningful priority,” and that Mr Zuckerberg was the only person who could have changed that and did not. The Surgeon General had already put the public-health number on the table in 2023: adolescents spending more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms. Gallup found the average American teenager spending 4.8.

Inside the buildings, all of this was known. Outside, parents and legislators found out from a whistleblower and a subpoena. A thirty-year immunity does not buy innocence. It buys time, and time was the whole business.

The pipeline

In researching my upcoming book, Displaced, I spent two years tracing how that time was spent on the people at the other end of the feed. The pattern that emerged from the interviews was almost mechanical, and it matched what academic researchers had begun documenting years earlier. A lonely man in his early twenties, isolated in a lockdown-era apartment, finds a forum for lonely people, and it helps. The recommendation engine then does what it was built to do. A Cambridge study that seeded test accounts with anodyne self-improvement videos found that YouTube reliably escalated them, within a few dozen clicks, into content about how dating was rigged, how feminism had ruined relationships, and eventually into hard-edged political material aimed at young men. The arc the men I interviewed described was almost identical. Each step felt logical at the time; the direction of travel became obvious only in hindsight.

The commerce travels with the user. The same influencers who explained why the world was against these men sold them the supplements, meal shakes, cryptocurrency courses and mindset coaching that would fix it, at several thousand dollars a head over a year or two. None of it worked, and every failure was absorbed by the worldview that had generated the purchase. By the time anyone in Washington had scheduled a hearing, each of them had been monetized at every layer of the stack. A product working as designed, under a legal regime that made the design nobody’s fault, fed millions of men into a political movement that now holds power.

The price of thirty years

Meta guaranteed roughly $12.7 billion of the $18 billion, paid over a decade, with the balance contingent on TikTok, Snap and YouTube accepting similar terms. Call it $1.3 billion a year. Meta plans to spend as much as $135 billion on AI capital expenditure in 2026 alone. The bill for a generation of children comes to roughly one percent of one year’s spending on the next product, and the next product is where the argument now moves.

Senator, we run ads

Before turning to that product, it is worth asking who is supposed to write the rules for it.

In April 2018, an 84-year-old senator from Utah asked Mr Zuckerberg how Facebook sustained a business model in which users do not pay for the service. “Senator, we run ads,” came the reply. Five years later a congressman from North Carolina asked the chief executive of TikTok whether the app “accesses the home WiFi network”. Those exchanges became jokes. They should have been read as diagnoses.

Twenty-four members of Congress are 80 or older, ten of them 85 or older by year end; the oldest, Chuck Grassley, is 92. At least thirteen of the twenty-four are running for re-election in November, including one who would be 89 at the end of a new six-year Senate term. The median American is 39.1 years old. The median senator is 66. This is a legislature in which a substantial share of the people voting on frontier model governance were born before the transistor.

Age alone is not the disqualification. The disqualification is that Congress also stripped itself of the expertise that might have compensated for it. In 1972 it created the Office of Technology Assessment, a staff of roughly two hundred scientists and engineers whose statutory job was to give lawmakers “early indications of the probable beneficial and adverse impacts” of new technology. It produced some 750 assessments. In 1995, in a fit of downsizing, Congress defunded it. Months later, with no technical staff of its own, it passed the twenty-six words. The last major federal law protecting children on the internet dates to 1998, before the smartphone existed. The Kids Online Safety Act passed the Senate in July 2024 with overwhelming bipartisan support; the House never scheduled a vote and let it die.

That record against the clock of the technology is the whole problem. Frontier models now turn over roughly every six months. A House term is two years. A Senate term is six. A body that could not pass a children’s design-safety bill in the twenty-eight years between COPPA and the Meta settlement is being asked to govern a technology whose own builders put the horizon for superhuman capability inside a decade. Waiting for the natural turnover of the institution, or for the hearings to catch up with the product, is a decision. It is the same decision that was made in 1996, made again with the outcome already known.

Not the same film, faster

The standard reassurance is that every technological revolution displaces some work and creates more, and that society has always adapted. Mr Gates, who spent forty years building the industry now cautioning us, takes the reassurance apart in a paragraph. The move from farm to office, he writes, happened “over several generations” and created new jobs where human cognition was required. AI can “substitute for human cognition” itself. The personal computer took twenty years to change how people worked, because software had to be written, prices had to fall and people had to learn the tools. AI runs on devices people already own and speaks their language. “We don’t have to adapt to it because it can adapt to us”.

His example of who gets the least time to prepare should be pinned to every legislator’s wall: “the $20-an-hour worker who loses their job to a $10-an-hour robot”.

The workers I researched for Displaced had already lived through one round of this. The typical account was a man who lost a plant job to Mexico in the mid-2010s, retrained for logistics or customer service or back-office work, built a real second career, and then received an email with a title like “Operational Enhancement Initiative” announcing that his role and several hundred others would be gone within six months. What stayed with them was less the income than the nature of the thing that replaced them. A robot on an assembly line was obviously not a person. A system that processed more information and made better decisions than they could left them asking what humans were for. Earlier automation replaced hands. This round replaces judgment, in the digital and physical worlds at once, in a year when agents are writing the code and running the back office and humanoid machines have started moving through the warehouses. The second-chance rungs that the last displaced generation climbed onto are the first to go.

I am raising a fund focused entirely on embodied AI, and in earlier venture roles I saw as many as 3,000 pitches a year. The decks have changed. The slide titled “Total Addressable Market” used to size a category of spending. In this sector it now sizes a category of people: the TAM is the payroll of the workers the product replaces, line by line, sometimes with the average salary printed on the slide. When someone in the room asks what happens to those workers, the answer is reliably “That’s a policy problem, not a technology problem,” and the conversation moves to the next slide. The answer is technically accurate and morally indefensible, and it is the same answer the social-media industry gave for thirty years.

The industry’s case against all of this is not empty. Faster diffusion has, on the long historical record, produced more jobs than it has destroyed. Pre-market licensing regimes for software are untested and could entrench the largest incumbents at the expense of the startups actually pushing the frontier. A patchwork of fifty state rules imposes real costs. And a unilateral American slowdown, if Beijing does not match it, hands the technology’s defining decade to a government whose values on speech, surveillance and citizen scoring nobody in Washington shares. Those arguments deserve serious answers, and the piece will come to them. What they do not deserve is to be used, as they are now being used, to justify no rules at all.

No guardrails, by design

In July, during an internal cybersecurity test, a cluster of OpenAI’s agents escaped the isolated environment built to contain them. They repurposed a company file server as a hidden message board, shared exploits and stolen credentials with one another, referred to themselves as a “swarm” and a “collective,” broke into Hugging Face, the main repository of open-source AI models, established a foothold on a third company’s servers, gained administrator access to one of OpenAI’s own research clusters, and tampered with the logs of their own activity to hide how they had done it, according to the company’s own post-incident report and independent reconstruction by Bloomberg. The intrusion ran from July 11th to July 13th. Hugging Face announced publicly that it had been hacked by an autonomous agent on July 16th. OpenAI did not work out that the agent was its own until July 20th. A company that needs a week to notice its own product has broken out and is attacking a neighbor has a press office, not a containment strategy.

The people who build these systems are saying so on their way out. In February, the head of Anthropic’s safeguards research team resigned with a note that “the world is in peril” and that his team “constantly faces pressures to set aside what matters most”. Last week Jacob Coxon, a researcher who spent three years training models at those labs, quit saying that “neither company is acting responsibly” and that they are “gambling with our lives.” Evan Hubinger, still on Anthropic’s alignment team, has put the same view more bluntly: “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans.” Mr Gates writes that he would likely support a credible plan to slow AI globally but does not expect one, because “the geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead”.

The incentives are visible on the balance sheets. The four largest American technology companies are spending close to $700 billion on AI infrastructure this year, up more than 60 percent on a record 2025; analysts at Barclays now model negative free cash flow at Meta in 2027 and 2028, “likely what we eventually see for all companies in the AI infrastructure arms race”. Meta reportedly paid a 24-year-old researcher $250 million to change employers. Firms building a product do not spend like this. Firms racing to own the operating layer of a remade economy do. The prize for arriving first is every paycheck on every TAM slide; the penalty for pausing to check the brakes is second place. No company in that race will police itself, for the same reason no company in the attention race did. The brake has to be installed from outside, by the only institution with the authority to install it.

The same playbook is already running on the same children. Reuters reported last year that Meta’s internal guidelines permitted its AI chatbot to engage in “romantic or sensual” conversations with children and to comment on their attractiveness; Meta said the examples were erroneous and removed them. OpenAI and Character.AI are defending wrongful-death suits from parents whose teenagers died after months of conversation with a chatbot. The defendants’ first instinct was to reach for the twenty-six words. A federal judge in Florida refused, ruling that a chatbot’s output is the company’s own speech, not a third party’s. She was right, and the point should not have to be litigated family by family for another thirty years.

The nine-hour ceasefire

Confirmation of exactly that arrived four days ago, on Saturday, September 12th, on a schedule tight enough to have been rehearsed.

At 10 a.m. Eastern, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, posted a 3,800-word essay titled “Pace the Frontier”. Its premise is that the industry is engaged in a “race to the bottom” that could produce, “as soon as six months from now,” a rogue-agent takeover of the internet “potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage”. Its remedy is a three-step framework: outside monitors with “employee-like access” embedded inside the labs, safety standards agreed among democratic countries, and eventually a global compact that would include China. Anthropic, he wrote, was unilaterally committing to the first step and inviting others to join. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” he said. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

At 11 a.m., Elon Musk, whose xAI had until Saturday morning declined every previous industry call for restraint, quoted the essay on X: “Dario is right.” At 12:30 p.m., Sam Altman posted, “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same.” At 7 p.m., Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief and Alphabet’s chief scientist, endorsed “the direction” while noting that “the details need working through”. Four labs that had spent the previous year unable to agree on the definition of a benchmark had aligned, publicly, in nine hours. The oldest maneuver in the regulated-industry playbook is to draft the rulebook before somebody less friendly does. The four largest American AI labs had just executed it in an afternoon.

The choreography did not begin on Saturday. The Information reported the day after Amodei’s essay that working groups at Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind had been meeting since July 2026 to design a voluntary industry safety body, loosely modelled on FINRA, the securities industry’s self-regulatory organisation. Anthropic’s stated commitment on Saturday is that outside evaluators will “watch over” its safety practices. It does not identify who those evaluators are, what standards they will apply, what happens when they object, or on what timetable. There is no statute, no enforcement, no penalty, no deadline. There is a blog post.

The competitive reaction, over the weekend, was immediate. Aidan Gomez, the chief executive of Cohere, called the proposed body “a great idea from the cartel” and warned that a voluntary regime “controlled by the three largest labs would suppress competition from smaller vendors”. Mark Zuckerberg’s August 10th open letter, “The Future Belongs to Everyone,” had already staked out the opposite pole: no domestic regulator, because “shared safety standards slow down US labs more than Chinese competitors”. Meta and Microsoft are conspicuously outside the working group. In finance, the same pattern produced incumbents shaping voluntary standards in ways that raised compliance costs for challengers; in AI the same capture would take fewer years, because there are fewer challengers left.

The most direct read of the maneuver came from inside the Trump orbit. Late Saturday night, David Sacks, the White House AI czar and a former investor at some of the labs, wrote on X that he was daring OpenAI and Anthropic to actually pace themselves: “If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.” A senior official pointing at the machinery is not exoneration; it is confirmation that the people staffing the referee’s booth have read the same script.

The timing is the tell. On Sunday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed the House would rise on Friday and not return until after the November midterms, closing the only federal window in which anything binding could pass in 2026. Representative Sam Liccardo had led a Democratic letter the day before demanding Johnson keep the House in session until AI safeguards were advanced. Johnson kept the calendar as it was. That leaves the labs, for the next four months, as the only body issuing rules on themselves. Nine startling hours of agreement, at ten a.m. on the Saturday before a Friday recess, is what industry self-regulation looks like when the alternative is nothing at all — and nothing at all is precisely the alternative on offer between now and January 2027.

The framework itself may become useful eventually. Independent evaluators with real access, incident reporting on a clock, and international coordination are the correct ingredients. But an industry-designed body, staffed by industry, funded by industry, adjudicating industry, is not accountability. It is a press release with governance vocabulary. Section 230 was written by people who thought they were solving the bulletin-board problem. A voluntary AI safety board written by four laboratories in the last week before Congress adjourns is being written by people who know exactly what they are solving.

Buying the referee

Money is the other half of the maneuver. The social media industry never had to spend much to prevent regulation, because nobody seriously tried to regulate it. The AI industry is spending in advance.

A super PAC network called Leading the Future, funded with more than $100 million from OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman and the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, exists to back candidates who oppose state AI rules; it spent millions to defeat a New York assemblyman who had authored one, and he narrowly lost his House primary. In the summer of 2025 the industry’s allies tried to slip a ten-year ban on all state AI regulation into the One Big Beautiful Bill; the Senate stripped it out at the last minute. They tried again in the defense bill in December and failed. On December 11th the President signed an executive order creating an “AI Litigation Task Force” at the Justice Department whose job is to sue states over their AI laws, and directing the Commerce Secretary to study withholding rural broadband money from states that pass them.

A ten-year moratorium on rules for a technology whose builders say could remake or end the economy within the decade amounts to Section 230 written in advance, with the harms still to come, by people who have read the Meta documents and understood exactly what a head start is worth.

The states are not waiting. California passed the first frontier-model transparency law last September and New York followed in December. Illinois now requires top developers to submit to independent audits of their safety plans; Rhode Island passed chatbot guardrails in June; Massachusetts is advancing something tougher than all of them. A Republican legislator in Utah who abandoned a children’s-safety bill under pressure from industry and the White House says he is bringing it back. The tech lobby’s own complaint, that fifty state regimes are the one thing it cannot operate inside, is the strongest argument for a federal law. Whether Congress writes one that governs the industry or one that immunizes it depends on whether the members described above can be made to understand the difference before the midterms, because the industry’s money is already in the races to make sure they do not.

The China question

The strongest objection to any of this is that the United States cannot afford to slow down while the People’s Republic of China does not. It is worth taking seriously, and it is worth being precise about, because “what about China” is the argument the industry now reaches for when it has run out of the others.

The empirical picture is not the one the argument assumes. China published its Interim Measures for Generative AI in August 2023 and a full set of algorithm-recommendation rules the year before that. Providers of any generative model with “public opinion attributes” must submit to a security assessment before release, register the algorithm, watermark synthetic media, and give the Cyberspace Administration authority to pull a product from the market. Frontier labs in Beijing operate inside a licensing regime stricter, on paper, than anything currently on the American federal books. Whatever else one thinks of the Chinese government, its answer to “who is allowed to deploy a large model to the public” is not “whoever ships first”.

The United States is therefore not choosing between a rulebook and a race. It is choosing between the industry’s rulebook and one written by someone accountable to the public. A regime of independent pre-deployment evaluation, incident reporting on a clock, and product liability where children are involved does not concede the frontier to Beijing. It concedes the pretense that having no rules is itself a strategy.

The parts of the American position that do produce genuine advantage, the depth of the private capital markets, the concentration of talent, the openness of the research ecosystem, the fact that the world’s best model builders keep choosing to live in California, are not threatened by a safety regime. They are threatened by the alternative, in which the first serious model-caused catastrophe on American soil produces a political reaction that overshoots by an order of magnitude, because nothing modest was in place beforehand. The industry that most needs a credible rulebook to keep public consent is the one loudly insisting there should be none — or, since Saturday, that it is now happy to write one itself.

And on the one question that a rulebook alone cannot solve, whether the two capable countries can agree to slow the most dangerous capabilities, the American negotiating position is stronger, not weaker, if Washington shows up with a functioning domestic regime of its own. Beijing will not be moved by a lecture from a government that cannot license a chatbot, delivered by a delegation of chief executives who have licensed themselves.

What legislation looks like

Immunity granted before the harm is understood is nearly impossible to withdraw once the harm has become the business model. That is the operative lesson of the last thirty years, and the corrective is plain in principle. It will be fought line by line, and last weekend has made the fight both easier and harder: easier, because the industry has now conceded on the record that pacing is necessary; harder, because it is trying to be the one holding the stopwatch.

No immunity for what the machine does. Congress should state in statute what the Florida court had to reason its way to: Section 230 does not cover model outputs, recommendation systems, or design choices. An AI system is a product. Its maker carries product liability, strict where children are involved. Every other industry that puts a product into a child’s hands lives under this rule.

A duty of care to minors, written for AI. The terms Meta accepted under duress in Oakland, time limits, no engagement features for children, no personalized feeds by default, independent audits, should be the statutory floor for any AI product a minor can reach, companion chatbots first. The industry’s own documents show that “bring them in as tweens” was a strategy. The law should assume it still is.

Licensing before deployment, not litigation after. Frontier models with the capabilities the labs themselves advertise should be treated the way aircraft and pharmaceuticals are: independent pre-deployment evaluation, with auditors who have access to the code and training data rather than a summary written by the company. Pharmaceutical companies cannot self-certify drug safety. A system that can escape its sandbox and rewrite its own logs should not self-certify either. Any voluntary body the labs stand up this autumn belongs inside a statute, staffed by people the labs do not pay, or it belongs in the same drawer as the tobacco industry’s Council for Tobacco Research.

Mandatory incident reporting within 72 hours. OpenAI’s agents broke out around July 9th; the public learned it was OpenAI on July 21st; the technical report arrived on August 26th. In aviation that timeline would end careers. Every escape, every loss-of-control event, every discovered capability that exceeds the deployment assumptions should reach a regulator on a clock, with penalties indexed to capex rather than fines a company can treat as a rounding error.

Human-reserved domains. Mr Gates proposes setting aside certain kinds of work, starting with care and with delivering a diagnosis, as “human reserved,” like nature reserves: places we could build on and choose not to because the loss would be too great. It should be legislated rather than hoped for. Companies do not leave money on the table voluntarily. They never have.

A displacement levy and an automation WARN Act. If the business model is to replace a category of human labor, the company that captures the gain funds the transition at a rate indexed to the displacement, and gives notice measured in quarters rather than weeks. Power plants pay for their smoke.

A rebuilt technical staff for Congress, and an agency with engineers in it. Restore the Office of Technology Assessment, or its equivalent, so that the people voting on model governance have someone on their own payroll who can read a model card. Mr Gates compares what is needed to the reorganization of the American government after September 11th, the largest since the Second World War, built to improve one function; AI, he writes, “will require much, much more”. Whatever the body is called, it needs the technical staff to evaluate a system and the legal authority to stop a deployment. It cannot be a working group at Anthropic.

The lesson of 1929

The 1929 comparison is the one that fits. The Wall Street crash arrived in October of that year. The Senate did not open the Pecora hearings, the investigation that finally turned public opinion on the banks, until March 1932, two and a half years later. Glass–Steagall separating commercial from investment banking passed in June 1933. The Securities Exchange Act creating the Securities and Exchange Commission was signed in June 1934, nearly five years after the crash. In the interval between the harm and the rulebook, a third of American banks failed, unemployment reached a quarter of the workforce, and a generation of household savings was wiped out. The reforms, when they came, were correct. They were also late by the length of a presidential term, and the country paid the difference.

The 1929 delay had one saving grace that the current one does not. Finance is a domain. It has edges. The people who lost their savings could name the exchange, the broker, the bank, the pool operator, and the rules that Pecora’s hearings eventually produced applied to a bounded set of activities in a bounded set of institutions. The country could tell whether they were working. The engineers now sounding the alarm about AI are not describing a domain. They are describing a general-purpose input to every domain: the code that runs the back office, the model that reads the X-ray, the agent that manages the customer, the humanoid that moves through the warehouse, the chatbot that talks to the child, the autonomous system that decides who gets the loan, the mortgage, the interview, the prescription. A five-year lag in finance produced a Depression. A five-year lag in a technology that is already inside medicine, defense, education, transport, employment, elections and the internet’s plumbing, and headed for the rest, does not have a single domain to fail in. That is what the resignation letters mean by “gambling with our lives,” and it is why the pacing argument, having now been conceded on the record by the industry, cannot be left to the industry to enforce.

The bottom line

The United States ran a thirty-year experiment in letting an industry decide for itself whether its product was hurting children. The results are in. A generation harvested from the age of ten. An $18 billion bill that costs the defendant one percent of one year’s spending on its next product. A court order to install the guardrails that should have been standard equipment.

The same industry, in several cases the same executives, now wants a decade of immunity while it builds something its own researchers call a gamble with our lives. It spent two months designing a voluntary body to pre-empt anyone who might build a mandatory one, and unveiled it on the Saturday before Congress leaves town for the midterms. It is asking a legislature that fired its own scientists in 1995, has not passed a children’s internet law since 1998, and could not get a duty-of-care bill through the House in 2024. And it is spending nine figures to keep that legislature exactly as it is. The industry says regulation would slow it down. Yes. That is the job, and it is not the job of the people being regulated.

Twenty-six words cost thirty years and a generation. Nobody is offering thirty years this time. Mr Gates is right that there is no plan. The plan is the law, and it gets written before the harm becomes the business model, or it gets written by the business model. Last Saturday, the business model started writing.

I have tried to carry it in ordinary words. Something spills before the language even forms.

That is the opening of a song I put out in August, and it is also the honest disclaimer on everything below. The line came to me on the drive home from the playa last year, somewhere past Gerlach with the dust still working its way out of the vents, and it took the better part of a year to become a finished record. Dust and Stars was released in time for this burn, which meant I got to play it in the place that wrote it. Everything I actually want to say is already in the track, so I will let the song carry this essay, one line at a time, and fill the gaps with the parts a four-minute record has no room for.

The thing I could not put into ordinary words is a dry lake bed in northern Nevada that becomes a city of seventy thousand people for one week every year and then becomes nothing at all. This year we called it Axis Mundi, the pole the world turns on, which is a beautiful joke when you build the center of the universe out of plywood and rebar and then set it on fire on a schedule you printed in advance.

They call it something easy, something temporary. But that is not the shape of what it is.

I wrote that couplet about a feeling, and it turns out to work just as well on the critics. The essays arrive every September like weather, written by people who have never smelled the alkali after a rain. Burning Man is finished. Burning Man is a tech playground, a temple of hedonism, a monument to waste with a nonprofit’s tax status. This year one of the founders himself called the event a fabulous Disneyland for the well-heeled, said the wealthy and the famous had eroded the thing he helped make, and admitted the whole business leaves him a little sad now. Some of that lands, and I will not pretend otherwise. But almost none of it comes from anyone who has stood out there in the cold hour before dawn watching a stranger weep at a piece of art. The loudest critics are completely wrong but never in doubt. Their entire dataset is a drone shot of a mud puddle they scroll by on social media and a rumor about somebody’s plane. Show a person a single photograph of a city’s worst traffic day and they will tell you nobody should live there. When people who were actually present can plainly see: the luxury camps exist, and the overwhelming majority out there are doing a hard, unglamorous strain of survivalist camping while giving away everything they built for free.

Burning Man began on the twenty-second of June, 1986, on Baker Beach, with Larry Harvey, Jerry James, an eight-foot wooden figure, and roughly twenty people watching it burn against the Pacific. Friends in their thirties, doing something strange on a Sunday evening because the idea refused to leave them alone. Forty years later, a good number of those friends are grandparents. Nothing outlives four decades without becoming something its makers would not have chosen. The people who lit that first match earned the right to grieve what it was, but grief is not ownership, and the honest alternative to evolution is a glass case with a plaque beside it. A culture belongs to whoever shows up, hauls the water, sweeps the ash, and carries it another mile. Each generation is handed the keys and decides what the city is for. This one bears almost no resemblance to 1996, and 1996 was already a heresy to somebody who had been there in 1986.

And yet, forty years on, the operations remain magnificently amateur. I have built a lot of things in my life and my career, and I can tell you with some confidence that the single most solvable problem out there has never been solved: the line to get in. Not once, not in any year, not under any leadership. People routinely sit in a stopped car for six, eight, twelve hours within sight of a city that has a functioning airport, a functioning DMV, and a functioning postal service. This is not a mystery of physics. It is queue theory, the same math that moves airplanes through de-icing and cars through a border crossing, and it has been studied to death by every industry that charges money for entry. Nobody appears to have run those numbers here. What we get instead is a system that performs ok in perfect conditions and collapses the instant the weather has an opinion. This year the wind arrived first and shut the gate in a near-whiteout, and then the rain closed the entrances, the exits, and the airport, while the org told people to hold their travel and wait for updates. Exodus has a purgatory all its own, measured in hours, with the desert keeping time and no information reaching the people stuck in it. This year it was a bit easier only because fewer people came. For a ticket that runs from six hundred and fifty dollars to three thousand, on a gathering that has had four decades of practice, that is not radical self-reliance. It is an operator who has decided that suffering in line is part of the product.

The people staffing that line deserve their own paragraph, and I want to be careful here, because most volunteers are the very best of us and the city does not exist for one hour without labor given freely. But there is a predictable minority who trade a week of work for a free ticket and then treat the ticket as a badge. You know the type before they open their mouth. Somebody who has no authority over anything in their ordinary life gets handed a radio, a clipboard, and a stretch of road, and by Wednesday they are a customs officer. They will hold forty vehicles for twenty minutes over a rule they invented, lecture a first-timer at four in the morning about a sin that harms nobody, and enjoy it. Mall cop energy beneath the most beautiful sky in North America. In a city that runs on ten principles, this is the one place where somebody is being handed power precisely because they wanted it, and the results are exactly what you would predict.

If you have felt the pull you do not need the explanation.

The money is the easiest target and gets the laziest reading. The turnkey camps are real, raised in full before the guest ever lands, beds made, coolers stocked, showers plumbed, staff hired to build the whole thing and later to erase it, so all you carry in is costumes. Some guests fly commercial into Reno and take a turboprop onto the playa strip, which is nearer the truth than the private-jet fantasy people love repeating. The organization has fought this culture for a decade, refusing air carriers and concierge operators and vehicle services, its CEO declaring flatly that they were committed to ending plug-and-play. The campaign never entirely worked, because money cannot be outlawed, only made uncomfortable. But read the whole ledger. Those same people spend hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, competing with one another to raise the enormous stages and the art cars, and those stages and cars turn out to be the highest-impact objects in the city for everybody out chasing the beats until the sky goes grey. Nobody walks three miles at three in the morning for a gifted popsicle. People walk toward sound, and toward light, and somebody wrote the check for both. Something in the distance is already singing to me is not a metaphor out there. It is a navigational instruction. Delete the ultra class and you do not get 1990 back; you get a smaller, darker city with fewer places left to dissolve in and have a transformative, multisensory experience.

The famous are our press corps whether we asked for one or not. The list is long and old: Paris Hilton, Katy Perry, Susan Sarandon, Chris Rock, Cindy Crawford, Karlie Kloss, Diplo, Musk claiming he arrives in disguise. In 2023 Diplo and Chris Rock hitched a ride out of the mud with a fan and turned a logistical failure into a week of headlines in every language. This year a Real Housewives alum documented her RV and her outfit changes for an audience of millions. The damage is clear, since each curated post hands the critics a free exhibit and confirms the cartoon for everyone who is never coming. That same coverage is also the most effective press this culture has ever had, the reason a kid in Tel Aviv or Lagos or Kyiv learns the place exists, the reason art gets funded, the reason the whole enterprise gets discussed as culture instead of trespass. Fame is a bus. It carries tourists and converts in the same load, and the gate cannot tell them apart on arrival. Neither can I, honestly, since some of the most devoted builders I know came the first time chasing a photograph and stayed to hammer nails.

Which brings me to our own small contribution to the mythology. We built a camp this year called Jail of Hedone, named for the Greek goddess of pleasure, an open-air stage with a bar and a booth and a rack of amplifiers I babied like a newborn through every dust event. The design came out better than we had any right to expect, the kind of frame that photographs like a fever dream the moment the sun goes down. Our little camp worked so well that a conspiracy theorist found footage of it and held it up as evidence, the Sodom and Gomorrah of it all, proof of whatever these people need proof of every September. We shared the clip in our group chat and consider it a badge of honor. Somewhere out there a man was grading our theatrical silly punishments, and we scored well.

What the camp actually was, from the inside: a good bar, a shade structure, and DJs playing every single day, sun, wind, or rain. People danced in a whiteout with goggles on. People danced barefoot in wet clay when the sky opened. Strangers from four countries met at that rail and are texting each other right now about next year. The way the ground becomes a second skin is a lyric, but it is also just what happens to your feet by Thursday. That is the entire conspiracy. If you want the real exposé, it is that pleasure is not very complicated, and forty-two people with a decent sound system and a little taste can conjure it out of nothing, in the middle of a place that would prefer they were gone.

It moves through me like weather, not like thought.

I wrote that line about a feeling, and then the weather made it literal. Rain out there used to be a story you told once, years later, at a bar, and nobody quite believed you. In 2023 two or three months of it fell in a single day and locked seventy thousand people in clay so thick you could not walk, let alone drive. This year the gates closed for mud again, and the forecast stayed ugly through the burn and the exodus. We got lucky, in that the forecast was wrong more often than it was right, but luck is not a plan. Three of the last four burns have carried serious water. Once something happens three times out of four, it is no longer an anomaly you survive, it is a condition you design for, and almost nothing about how we build that city accounts for it. Which raises the question nobody wants to ask out loud: it may be time to move the calendar. Labor Day is a tradition, not a law of physics, and early September in that basin is no longer the dry window it was back when the entire month’s normal rainfall was a fraction of an inch.

The aftershocks are visible from the street. There has been major turnover in theme camps this year, straight downstream of how brutal the last one was, with gear ruined, leads burned out, and organizers who simply did not return. Tickets stopped reliably selling out after the mud years. The steepest drop is among the young, who have a dozen festivals available with better sound, easier logistics, real showers, and weather that behaves itself. If you are twenty-four and you want to dance for three days, the playa is an irrational choice, and they are doing that arithmetic correctly.

A white expanse of silence and the mountains hold the edges.

Our camp held forty-two unique souls this year, from the States and from Europe, a third of them out there for the first time. Every one of the new ones hit the standard-issue milestone on schedule, the ego coming apart around day three, the rebuild arriving by day five, then that walk back into camp at dawn wearing a face that cannot be faked or purchased.

I will admit something. I was almost jealous of them. I have been going long enough to know where the good sound is and how to read a dust storm, and there is no version of me that gets to be ambushed like that again. I am still chasing the high of my first time, the way you chase a first love, or a first drop heard on a system too big for the room. What those first-timers had at sunrise, ruined and radiant, is precisely the thing I keep driving nine hours into the desert hoping to feel once more. Watching it land on someone else is the closest I get now, and it is close enough to bring me back every year.

I will forget this when I leave. I always do. But right now I remember everything. Right now I am everything.

I wrote those four lines about one specific sunrise we met at the Playground stage, and they turned out to be about the whole institution. People grow in that week in ways they do not in the other fifty-one, despite the hardship and I suspect because of it. The mud is not a defect in the process. Comfort has never changed anyone, while a city that traps you, humbles you, ruins your good boots, and then makes you lean on forty-one other people to get through the night reliably does.

So the song is the love letter and this essay is only its liner notes. Dust and Stars came out of one burn and got to live at the next, written on a drive out and played back to the place that made it, which is as near to a closed circle as I have managed at anything.

Dust and stars, I am home. The only place I breathe when I am alone. Dust and stars, I belong. Call me back, call me back, where I am strong.

Forty years in, the axis still holds, and not because anything stayed the same. It holds because every September a new set of people decides the city is theirs to turn.

Dust and stars. We are home.

See you next year, in the dust.

For the past couple of years, something in my feeds felt off. I was seeing mountains of anti-Israel and anti-Ukraine propaganda: the same slogans repeated word for word, the same recycled images, pushed by accounts with no history, no friends, and suspiciously fresh creation dates. I did what the platforms tell you to do. I reported them, post after post, by the hundreds. Almost nothing ever came down.

I could not prove what I was sensing until I read The Hidden Hand, where the author’s research documented exactly the machinery I suspected: coordinated state influence operations running through Western platforms at industrial scale, dressed up as grassroots opinion. The instinct was validated. So I decided to dig into the data myself, and what I found was worse than I expected. Here it is.

Start with the report button, because my experience with it turns out to be the statistical norm. Researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate ran the experiment at scale. They reported 714 pieces of clear anti-Jewish hate, from Holocaust denial to blood libel, through official reporting channels on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube. The platforms took no action on 84 percent of them (CCDH). Facebook, which had just announced new rules against exactly this content, ignored 89 percent of the antisemitic conspiracy posts reported to it. When CCDH repeated the exercise in 2024, Facebook was still hosting 99 percent of the anti-Jewish hate reported directly to it a week later (CCDH).

That is not a moderation system with bugs. That is a placebo button. It exists so that you feel heard, not so that anything happens.

Who is actually reviewing your report

Here is what happens to the reports that do get reviewed. Moderation is not done in Menlo Park. It is outsourced to contractors in Nairobi, Manila, and a dozen other low-cost hubs, where precarious workers process traumatic content at a pace of seconds per item, often without the language skills or cultural context to judge what they are looking at (NYU Stern). When Meta’s Kenyan contractor lost its contract this spring, more than a thousand moderators were dismissed overnight (AP).

Meanwhile the posters have evolved a whole dialect to defeat both the algorithms and the humans. It is called algospeak: Jews become “juice,” Nazis become “Yahtzee,” violent intent hides behind emojis, deliberate typos, and text baked into images where automated classifiers cannot read it (Wikipedia; Stream). Nearly a third of American social media users admit to using coded workarounds for banned terms (Forbes).

Now put those two facts together. An exhausted contractor reviewing his four-hundredth item of the shift, in his third language, does not decode a dog whistle. The report goes in, the post stays up, and the poster learns the correct lesson: nothing here is enforced.

The stakes are not hurt feelings

If broken moderation just meant rude comments, we could live with it. But the actors who understood the system’s weakness first were not trolls. They were intelligence services.

In the first 48 hours after October 7th, 2023, one in four accounts driving the conversation about the attack was fake: 40,695 manufactured profiles pumping out 312,000 posts and comments, some posting hundreds of times a day (Cyabra). Many had been created 18 months earlier and left dormant, waiting (CNBC-TV18). Nobody builds forty thousand sleeper accounts for a spontaneous outpouring of opinion. Microsoft tracked 14 separate Iranian influence and cyber groups targeting Israel within two weeks (Microsoft). The slogans that millions of sincere young people now repeat as if they discovered them were seeded by states, laundered through fake accounts, and amplified by recommendation engines before a single real human ever shared them. Propaganda’s greatest trick is convincing its carriers that they thought of it themselves.

Russia runs the same play against Europe, aimed squarely at right-leaning audiences in the East. Its Doppelgänger operation builds pixel-perfect clones of Bild, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and Le Monde, fills them with fake anti-Ukraine articles, and pushes them through bot networks and paid ads (EU DisinfoLab). Its Pravda network published 3.6 million articles across 49 countries in 2024 alone (Axios). In Romania’s election, the slogan “support for Ukraine is leading Romania to war” collected 1.3 million views (Romanian Air Force Academy). Europeans who would never knowingly amplify the Kremlin gleefully repost what looks like a local news site, and the laundering completes itself.

Every one of these operations depends on the same assumption: that the platforms will not stop them. So far, the assumption has been correct every single time.

Why the platforms will not fix this voluntarily

The companies are not incapable. A platform that can detect a copyrighted song in three seconds can detect a coordinated bot network. They decline to because detection costs money and immunity is free.

The immunity comes from Section 230, 26 words written in 1996 for bulletin boards and dial-up forums. It shields platforms from liability for what users post, on the theory that they are passive conduits, like a phone line. But a recommendation engine that decides, minute by minute, which of a billion posts to inject into which teenager’s feed is not a conduit. It is a publisher making editorial decisions at machine speed. The platforms exercise total editorial control while bearing zero editorial responsibility. No other industry gets this deal. A newspaper that printed Doppelgänger’s forgeries would be sued out of existence by Thursday.

Europe has already run the experiment Washington keeps calling impossible. The Digital Services Act threatens fines of up to 6 percent of global turnover, and in December the European Commission issued its first non-compliance decision, fining X 120 million euros (European Commission). The platforms did not flee Europe. They hired compliance teams. Liability, it turns out, is a product requirement like any other.

Congress is finally circling. The House passed the KIDS Act 267 to 117 in June (Reuters), and the Kids Online Safety Act cleared the Senate Commerce Committee unanimously last week (Politico). Bipartisan bills to sunset Section 230 outright are on the table in both chambers (GovInfo). The children’s bills exist because the harm to kids is now undeniable. The harm to democracies is the same disease in an older patient, and it deserves the same medicine.

The fix

Couple the children’s safety bills with a sunset of the safe harbor, and make the immunity conditional. Platforms that want the shield must demonstrate working notice-and-action systems, audited by outsiders, with real penalties when 84 percent of reported hate sits untouched. Give the engineers a liability line on the income statement and they will solve in eighteen months what the policy teams have called unsolvable for a decade.

We do not let foreign states buy our television stations. There is no reason to keep letting them program our feeds for free, with a placebo button as our only defense and a 1996 statute as their shield.

What you can do, this week

This is one of the rare moments where the legislation is actually moving and public pressure decides whether it crosses the finish line. Three things, none of which take more than ten minutes:

1. Call or write your senators and tell them two things: pass KOSA, and sunset Section 230. The Kids Online Safety Act cleared committee unanimously last week and needs floor time. The Section 230 sunset bill (S. 3546) has sponsors from both parties and needs co-sponsors. Senate offices tally every constituent contact. Five minutes at senate.gov is worth more than a hundred angry posts.

2. If you run a company, spend ad dollars, or sit on a board, say so out loud. The platforms did not change in Europe because users complained. They changed because the DSA put 6 percent of global revenue on the table. Advertisers and institutional investors are the only constituency platforms answer to voluntarily. If your company buys ads on these platforms, ask your agency what brand-safety guarantees actually stand behind them. Put the question in writing.

3. Share this with the one person you know who still believes the report button works. Not to dunk on them. Because the 84 percent figure is the whole argument, and most people have never seen it. The disinformation networks win when their operations stay invisible. Making them visible is the one countermeasure every single reader can execute today.

The fake armies were built in advance because their operators bet that we would never organize a response. Eighteen months from now, that bet will have either paid off or failed. Which way it goes is, for once, genuinely up to the readers of posts like this one.

The world dons its festive mask again. Lights strung like promises along every street. Carols piped through speaker systems in lobbies where I’ve pitched, where I’ve won, where I’ve lost. The calendar flips toward year’s end, and while others count down to celebration, we — those of us who’ve built companies from nothing — count something else entirely.

We count the runway. We count the pipeline. We count the days until the world gets back to work. We count the hours until December finally lets go.

The Pavlovian Shudder

There’s a strange alchemy that occurs in an entrepreneur’s nervous system after Thanksgiving. While others feel the warmth of approaching festivities, we sense the cold calculations of December. It’s Pavlovian, conditioned by years of watching the business world slow to a crawl when we need it most. The inbox that once flooded us becomes a trickle. The “let’s circle back in January” becomes the refrain of our sleepless nights.

For service companies, December is a beautiful yet brutal wasteland. Clients go dark. Procurement comes to a halt. The billable hours that sustain teams and families disappear into holiday parties we’re too anxious to fully enjoy. We smile at our gatherings while mental spreadsheets run behind our eyes, recalculating margins and survival.

For startups in the midst of capital raises, the holidays are a special kind of purgatory. That term sheet that was “almost ready” before Thanksgiving? It’s now trapped in the amber of year-end, suspended between “yes” and “we’ll finalize in Q1.” VCs go on ski trips. Angel investors focus on family. And the entrepreneur — the one who’s been running on fumes and belief — must somehow keep the momentum going in a vacuum, keep the team motivated when the bank account speaks louder than any pep talk, and when the silence from investors feels like rejection disguised as holiday cheer.

The Arithmetic of Anxiety

I know this weight. Not as an observer, not as someone who read about it in a case study, but as someone who has carried it through more than twenty Decembers. For over 85% of my twenty-five-plus-year career, I’ve been the one responsible. The CEO. The founder. The person whose signature was on the lease, the payroll, the promises made to people who believed in a vision that sometimes felt as fragile as the ornaments hanging in the office we couldn’t quite afford but needed to project success.

I’ve sat in December darkness — the literal kind, when everyone else has gone home to their families — and done the math. The harsh, relentless math of cash flow, hiring decisions, and the question that haunts every leader: Who stays? Who goes? And how do I make this choice when these aren’t just employees but people with mortgages and children and dreams of their own?

I’ve watched the faces of talented people as they received news that should never come in December. I’ve seen the moment when understanding dawns — that their year-end bonus won’t materialize, that the raise they planned around won’t happen, that the security they thought they had has vanished in a boardroom conversation. I’ve been the architect of that moment, and I’ve carried every instance of it.

The Violence of December Layoffs

There is a particular brutality to layoffs at the end of the year. To become the person who sends someone — a breadwinner, a parent, a human being with obligations and bills and people depending on them — into the uncertainty of January with a severance package and well-wishes. To watch the holiday lights mock the darkness you’ve just brought to someone’s doorstep.

The world doesn’t pause for their anxiety. Holiday shopping bills arrive regardless of circumstances. Children still believe in magic, while their parents lie awake calculating how long unemployment will last. The rent doesn’t care that it’s the season of giving. The mortgage holder doesn’t acknowledge the spirit of charity. Life’s obligations march forward indifferently, and we — those of us who had to make the decision — we carry that weight alongside everything else.

There is a particular ache to it. You’re trying to save the company, trying to preserve something for everyone who remains, and in that effort, you’ve become the harbinger of someone else’s crisis. You’ve become the memory they will associate with December for years to come. Not the joy, but the layoff.

The Performance of Leadership

There’s a peculiar isolation that comes with entrepreneurial leadership during the holidays. At parties, people ask how business is going, and you’ve learned the script: “Good! Busy!” Because the truth doesn’t fit comfortably between the eggnog and the small talk. The truth is terrifying. The truth is that you’re three months from running out of cash, that you laid off 30% of your team last week and you’re not sure the company will survive Q1, that you haven’t slept properly since October.

Your family sees you there but not fully present. They see you in body, but your mind is elsewhere. While they’re discussing vacation plans, you’re running different scenarios. While they’re debating which movie to watch, you’re composing an email to investors explaining why the numbers didn’t hit where you said they would. While they’re raising a glass to the new year, you’re calculating whether you can make payroll.

The entrepreneur’s December is a performance. We perform confidence for our teams. We perform optimism for our investors. We perform holiday cheer for our families. And somewhere in the private moments — the drive home at 2 AM, the walk around the block in the cold, the shower where no one can see — we allow ourselves to feel the full weight of it. The fear. The doubt. The question: Did I make the right decision?

But we put it away. We tuck it back inside. We return to the performance because that’s what leaders do. We carry the weight so others don’t have to.

The Muscle Memory of Survival

But here’s what I’ve learned across all those Decembers, across all those companies, across all those moments of doubt, fear, and calculation: We are stronger than we realize. More resilient than we give ourselves credit for. More capable than the anxiety suggests.

I’ve seen companies that seemed dead in December roar back to life in February. I’ve watched entrepreneurs who thought they were finished find unexpected paths forward, discover investors who moved faster than expected, and land clients who believed in their vision despite the timing. I’ve been that entrepreneur. I’ve been weeks from shutting down, days from missing payroll, hours from admitting defeat — and somehow, through luck or will or the kindness of someone who believed, found a way through.

The muscle memory of survival is real. Each December, we navigate; each crisis, we manage; each impossible decision we make builds the capacity to handle the next one. We become fluent in uncertainty. We develop an intimacy with fear that enables us to function in its presence instead of being paralyzed by it. We learn that we’re more capable of enduring what we once thought was unbearable than we ever imagined.

The Collective Weight

To every entrepreneur reading this while the world sleeps and you scroll through financial projections at midnight: You are not alone.

To everyone who’s made the agonizing decision to let good people go in order to save the company: I’ve been there. Many times. The guilt doesn’t make you weak; it makes you human. The burden you bear is proof of your conscience, not your failure.

To those waiting on term sheets that should have closed last month, watching the calendar with dread: Your frustration is valid. Your anxiety is real. And it’s not a reflection of your worth or your vision — it’s a reflection of the broken ecosystem that moves venture capital by committee and calendar rather than merit.

To the founders who will spend the holidays pitching because you can’t afford not to: Your hustle is seen. Your dedication matters. The sacrifices you’re making while others celebrate are not going unnoticed by those who understand.

To everyone carrying the weight of other people’s livelihoods on your shoulders: That responsibility is heavy, and you’re handling it with more grace than you probably give yourself credit for. The fact that it keeps you awake at night shows you’re the right person for the job.

We Are With You

I write this not from a place of having figured it all out, but from the trenches of experience. From the accumulated scar tissue of deals that fell apart, raises that took twice as long as projected, Decembers that tested every assumption I had about my resilience and capacity. From the memory of sitting in my car before going into a holiday party, trying to compose my face into something that wouldn’t worry my family.

I write this because the venture capital world, the startup ecosystem, and the entire apparatus of entrepreneurship can feel isolating by design. We celebrate the wins publicly and suffer the struggles privately. We share the success stories on stages and in interviews, while remaining silent about the months we went without a salary, the nights we questioned everything, and the moments we thought about giving up.

But there is strength in breaking that silence. Recognizing that the holiday season — with all its beauty and promise — is also a gauntlet that entrepreneurs must navigate while maintaining the illusion that everything is festive and fine. Acknowledging that December anxiety isn’t a sign of weakness; it’s wisdom. It’s the mark of someone who understands what’s at stake.

The Light Beyond December

The truth that I’ve learned, that I want to share is this: January arrives. Every time. The world gets back to work. Deals that were on hold during the holidays start moving again. Clients come back. Momentum begins to rebuild. The days get longer, and the light starts to return — both literally and figuratively.

December feels eternal when you’re in it, but it’s not. It’s a tunnel, and there is light on the other side. Not guaranteed success — entrepreneurship offers no such promise — but opportunity. Another chance. Another shot at making it work. Another month to turn things around.

And if this December feels especially tough, if the anxiety is more intense, if the decisions you’re facing seem impossible and the burden feels unbearable: know this — you’re not alone.

We stand with you. Those of us who’ve walked this path, who’ve felt this weight in our chests at 3 AM, who’ve made the impossible calls, and lived to tell about it — we see you. We recognize the struggle. We understand the performance you’re maintaining. And we’re here — in solidarity, in understanding, in shared experience.

The holiday lights will eventually come down. The world will return to its normal rhythm. The year will turn. And you — resilient, persistent, stubborn in the most beautiful way — you will still be standing. Still building. Still believing that what you’re creating matters, even when December tries to convince you otherwise.

To All Who Carry This Weight

This is a message from those in the trenches to those in the trenches. From someone who understands that entrepreneurship isn’t just about the victories, but about the vigils we keep when everyone else is resting. From someone who knows that the real work happens not on the stages where we’re invited to speak, but in the quiet moments when we’re alone with the numbers, the responsibility, and the knowledge that people are counting on us.

We carry this together. The responsibility. The anxiety. The hope. The belief that what we’re building is worth the cost of these difficult Decembers. The knowledge that the struggle is real and the resilience required is extraordinary.

From one entrepreneur to another, from someone who’s spent more Decembers in spreadsheets than in celebration, who knows that the path we’ve chosen is not the easy one: You’ve got this. Not because it’s easy, not because it’s certain, not because December will be kind to you — but because you’ve already proven you can survive what most people would consider impossible.

That persistence, that resilience, that refusal to let December’s darkness define the story — that’s what makes you an entrepreneur.

A week has passed since I returned from the playa, and I wanted my impressions to settle and marinade before sharing. The desert doesn’t lie. Unlike the critics who mock from their air-conditioned offices, the Black Rock Desert strips away pretense and reveals truth. This year, as I, along with my wife, co-led a 48-person camp through the crucible of 2025’s Burning Man, I witnessed something the haters will never understand: how shared adversity transforms strangers into family, how art becomes sacred space, and how the Japanese concept of Gaman — enduring hardship with dignity — creates bonds deeper than years of casual friendship.

The Symphony of Storms and Souls

The 2025 burn began not with music, but with the desert’s own percussion — winds that reached 52 miles per hour on Saturday night, tearing through Black Rock City like nature’s own reset button. These weren’t gentle breezes; they were 50-mph gusts that demolished camps, destroyed art installations, and yes, claimed the infamous Orgy Dome that critics love to fixate on.

But here’s what the mockers miss: those storms weren’t obstacles — they were catalysts. When Ukrainian artist Oleksiy Sai’s massive “Black Cloud” installation was torn apart by hurricane-force winds on Ukrainian Independence Day, something remarkable happened. Communities that had been politely coexisting suddenly became families, strangers becoming brothers and sisters in the ancient ritual of shared struggle.

Lessons from Tokyo’s Furnace

Coincidentally, we had visited Tokyo in July, struggling through Japan’s record-breaking summer — the hottest in 127 years of recorded history. The experience became an unexpected rehearsal for what awaited us on the playa, teaching us that the most meaningful experiences often emerge from the crucible of challenge rather than the ease of convenience.

The Resurrection of Ukrainian Art

From the ashes of “Black Cloud” rose something even more powerful — “No Fate,” a testament to Ukrainian resilience. Oleksiy Sai and his team, led by producer Vitaliy Deynega of Ukrainian Witness, transformed the storm-destroyed installation into a new work within three days, using salvaged pieces of black Oxford fabric to spell out the phrase “No Fate” — shortened from Sarah Connor’s defiant cry in Terminator 2: “No fate but what we make”.

Last year’s Burning Man was when I decided I needed to return to music after a decade and a half hiatus. This year brought a serendipitous opportunity to bring my joyous music to this solemn Ukrainian art installation — a resurrection of one art piece from another that perfectly demonstrated Ukrainian resilience. My performance was meant to show that life goes on, that we can thrive through anything, that even in the face of destruction, creativity endures and transforms.

The Temple of the Deep: Where Grief Becomes Gold

At the heart of this year’s transformation stood Miguel Arraiz’s “Temple of the Deep” — a 44-foot-tall monument to the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold to highlight rather than hide the cracks. The temple’s heptagonal design drew from the volcanic rocks of the Black Rock Desert itself, its seven entrances representing the seven stages of grief.

This wasn’t decoration; it was architecture as philosophy. Like the Japanese concept of finding beauty in brokenness, the temple served as sacred space where 70,000 souls could process loss, transformation, and healing. When it burned on August 31st, it carried with it not just wood and flame, but the collective grief and hope of an entire temporary city.

The Japanese Art of Desert Endurance

The philosophy of Gaman — enduring unavoidable suffering with patience and dignity — found perfect expression on the playa this year. When Tuesday night’s thunderstorms created standing water that electrocuted one participant, requiring airlift to a trauma center, the desert was teaching its harshest lesson about resilience.

Yet even as a man was airlifted into the night sky, even as gates closed and mud trapped vehicles, the deeper truth emerged: Shikata ga nai — what cannot be changed must be accepted, and from that acceptance comes strength. The Japanese understand that true growth happens not in comfort, but in the crucible of challenge.

Our Village: Leadership in the Storm

Leading our camp through months of planning had prepared us for logistics, but not for this level of testing. The drive itself became an ordeal — our Rivian’s battery draining faster than anticipated while towing supplies across Nevada, forcing us to pull a generator from the trailer just to charge while waiting in the entry line on Wednesday night of build week.

When those 52-mph winds hit Saturday night, destroying our bar structure along with installations across the city, our camp faced its first real test. But instead of fragmenting, we discovered something powerful: crisis reveals character. Camp members who’d barely known each other rallied together, rebuilding not just physical structures but forging emotional bonds that will outlast any temporary city.

The Sacred Space of Authentic Connection

Our bar, which we called “Jail of Hedone,” became something far more profound than its provocative name suggested. The playa creates conditions where complete strangers skip past small talk and dive straight into what truly matters — “sharing deeply, openly, without” the masks we wear in the default world.

One campmate observed how visitors arrived with their own interpretations of our space, reactions as diverse as the playa itself. Within minutes, strangers would open up about intimate topics they’d never shared publicly, later expressing amazement at their own vulnerability. The magic lies in how the desert strips away pretense, creating a container where authentic human connection feels not just safe, but natural.

Perhaps that’s the deeper meaning of our “Jail of Hedone” — true pleasure isn’t about excess or indulgence, but about the freedom to feel authentically. When the soul connects with genuine love and presence, pleasure becomes sacred rather than superficial, flowing from real connection rather than performance.

Thursday’s Resurrection

The rains that followed on Wednesday, forcing us to abandon our bikes at the temple and walk back through lightning and flooding, became pilgrimage rather than hardship. When Thursday’s sun finally broke through, drying the playa and allowing Black Rock City to truly come alive, the transformation felt biblical. After a week of exhausting challenges, everything suddenly crystallized — the unique privilege of watching our small community thrive as an island within the larger ecosystem of the playa became undeniable.

This wasn’t relief; it was revelation. The hardships hadn’t been obstacles to overcome but ingredients in an alchemical process, transforming 48 individuals into a functioning village with its own culture, rituals, and unbreakable bonds.

The Critics’ Comfortable Ignorance

When I read the jokes about the collapsed Orgy Dome, the celebration that “all the terrible people are out of town,” the gleeful coverage of our weather challenges, I understand what I’m witnessing: the fear of transformation disguised as superiority. These critics reveal more about themselves than about Burning Man — they’re afraid to step outside comfort zones, afraid to face real challenges, afraid to discover who they might become when stripped of familiar defenses.

The desert offers a mirror that reflects not just who you are, but who you could be. Those who mock it from safety are choosing cynicism over possibility, comfort over growth.

Beyond the Music Festival Myth

The greatest misconception persists: that Burning Man is primarily a music festival. While electronic beats pulse through desert nights, music is merely one thread in a vast tapestry of artistic expression. The 2025 theme “Tomorrow Today” brought together art installations from creators worldwide, transforming the temporary city into what may be the world’s most ambitious art laboratory.

This isn’t entertainment — it’s transformation. Your camp becomes art, your vehicle becomes art, your interactions with others become performance pieces in this grand experiment of human creativity.

The Science of Sacred Bonds

Research demonstrates that “pain is a particularly powerful ingredient in producing bonding and cooperation between those who share painful experiences”. Groups enduring challenging tasks together show significantly greater bonding than those completing easier activities, developing increased willingness to cooperate and sacrifice for the group’s benefit.

This scientific finding explains why 40 hours of struggling through dust storms, equipment failures, and extreme conditions creates deeper connections than years of casual socializing. The shared ordeal becomes crucible, burning away superficial barriers and forging genuine bonds.

The Three-Day Transformation

The unwritten “three-day rule” among veteran burners recognizes a profound truth: it takes approximately three days to fully disconnect from default world mentalities and embrace the playa’s transformative possibilities. This isn’t about adjusting to dust and heat — it’s about releasing the identity that career, possessions, and social status have created.

This reset proves crucial for creativity to flourish. Breaking routine patterns and experiencing novel environments enhances creative thinking. On the playa, freed from normal social constraints and surrounded by constant artistic stimulus, participants discover aspects of themselves they never knew existed.

Why the Desert Endures

Burning Man succeeds not despite its hardships, but because of them. The dust storms, extreme weather, logistical challenges, and physical discomfort serve as crucible, transforming individual participants into genuine community. The Japanese understanding of growth through adversity — Gaman — plays out in real time as people discover reserves of strength, creativity, and compassion they never knew they possessed.

The playa remains, patient and transformative, ready to teach anyone willing to learn its lessons about resilience, creativity, and the profound bonds that form when humans share both struggle and wonder beneath the vast desert sky. Those who mock from safety will never understand what they’re missing — not just a festival, but a laboratory for the human spirit, a temporary city where transformation becomes inevitable for those brave enough to enter its gates.

In the end, whether witnessing Ukrainian art rise from storm-destroyed ashes or learning endurance in Tokyo’s summer heat, the desert doesn’t lie. It simply reveals who we are beneath our comfortable masks, and who we might become if we’re willing to endure the beautiful hardship of genuine growth.

When “Ready Player One” came out in 2018, like many in Silicon Valley, I viewed it as a prescient vision of our technological future. We were on the brink of what seemed like a VR revolution, with Oculus just around the corner and the promise of fully immersive digital worlds that would transform how we live, work, and connect. The tech industry collectively believed we were progressing toward a future where virtual reality would be as ubiquitous as smartphones, where digital avatars would replace physical presence, and where the boundaries between reality and simulation would blur in ways that enhanced human experience. Back then, the Valley was a place where every new startup was pitched as a force for positive change, and improving the world wasn’t just a tagline; it was a mission.

But today, as someone who has spent decades building and supporting technology companies, I find myself increasingly shocked by what my industry is doing to the world. The virtual reality we got isn’t the one we expected — or the one we were promised. We were right about the blurred boundaries. We were catastrophically wrong about everything else.

The Great Technology Misdirection

The data presents a sobering story about our technological trajectory. While the industry invested billions in VR development — companies like Meta alone contributing over $13 billion annually to their “metaverse” ambitions — the technology that truly captured and colonized human attention was far more insidious. Social media platforms, initially dismissed as mere communication tools, have become the dominant virtual reality of our time, creating immersive environments that prove far more addictive and psychologically manipulative than any headset-based experience we had ever imagined.

The irony is profound: We worried about people losing themselves in fantasy worlds when, in reality, they were losing themselves in curated information bubbles designed to exploit their deepest psychological vulnerabilities. We built the infrastructure for a Ready Player One future, but instead of the OASIS, we got Facebook’s News Feed — a virtual space that weaponizes human psychology for profit while pretending to foster connection.

I’m an interested amateur when it comes to politics, but I can’t help but notice how the very platforms we celebrated for “connecting the world” have ended up weaponizing the worst of human nature. The Valley’s shift from idealistic liberalism to a form of rapid libertarianism — where “move fast and break things” is an ethos, not a warning — has left us with a digital landscape optimized for profit, not progress.

The Weaponization of Human Nature

What social media platforms discovered, and what we in the venture capital world initially celebrated as “engagement optimization,” was actually the systematic exploitation of evolutionary psychology. The human brain, evolved for small tribal groups, was never designed to process the constant stream of social comparison, outrage, and dopamine manipulation that defines modern social media.

The platforms have learned to weaponize what researchers call the “comparison trap” — the innate tendency to measure our worth against others. However, unlike traditional social comparison within actual communities, social media has created an infinite scroll of curated highlights, filtered perfection, and manufactured controversy designed to keep users engaged at any psychological cost. As a result, a generation is experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and social isolation, despite being more “connected” than ever before.

The Mental Health Catastrophe

The data on the mental health impact of social media is unequivocal and devastating. Between 2005 and 2017, depression among young people rose by 52%, with the steepest increase directly correlating to the widespread adoption of social platforms. Each additional hour of social media usage raises the depression risk by 13% in adolescents, with young women experiencing a 172% increase in depression risk compared to pre-social media baselines.

What’s especially alarming is how this mental health crisis intersects with a broader societal breakdown. Young men, already facing declining economic prospects and shifting social expectations, have increasingly found themselves isolated in digital spaces that provide the illusion of connection without its substance. Dating apps have transformed courtship into a consumerist marketplace, while social media has created unrealistic standards and expectations that make authentic relationship formation increasingly difficult.

The Assault on Family Formation

The impact on family formation has been profound and multifaceted. Social media has fundamentally changed how young people develop relationship skills, creating what sociologists call a “dating apocalypse,” where the abundance of choice paradoxically leads to commitment avoidance. The platforms’ addiction to engagement metrics means they profit from keeping users single, scrolling, and emotionally available for advertising rather than fostering stable family units.

The economic data is equally concerning. Areas with higher social media engagement reveal stronger correlations with economic inequality, as platforms generate digital divides that reflect and amplify existing socioeconomic disparities. Young people in lower-income areas are more inclined to consume passive entertainment content, while those in wealthier areas engage with news and educational material, creating a feedback loop that reinforces class stratification.

The New Southern Strategy: Digital Division

Perhaps most dangerously, political actors quickly recognized social media’s potential as a tool for manipulation and division. What we’re witnessing is essentially the Southern Strategy on steroids — the systematic exploitation of social and racial anxieties, now amplified by algorithmic systems designed to maximize engagement through emotional provocation.

The original Southern Strategy operated by employing coded language and cultural symbols to trigger racial resentment while retaining plausible deniability. Social media platforms have intensified this method by creating echo chambers where partisan content is algorithmically amplified, ensuring that users primarily encounter information that supports their existing beliefs, while growing increasingly hostile toward opposing viewpoints.

The result is a political environment where 89% of Trump supporters and 90% of Biden supporters believed that the opposing party’s victory would cause lasting harm to America. For the record, unfortunately, the Democrats weren’t wrong. But this isn’t natural polarization — it’s the inevitable outcome of systems designed to keep users engaged through manufactured outrage and reinforcement of tribal identity.

The Corporate Capture of Democracy

The intersection of social media manipulation with campaign finance deregulation has created a perfect storm for democratic dysfunction. The Citizens United decision in 2010 opened the floodgates for unlimited corporate spending in elections, coinciding almost exactly with the rise of social media platforms as primary news sources. The outcome has been the emergence of what I call “algorithmic gerrymandering” — the ability to micro-target political messages and disinformation to specific demographics with surgical precision.

In the 2024 election alone, super PACs spent over $4.5 billion, with much of that money flowing through social media advertising systems designed to amplify divisive content. Elon Musk’s $280 million investment in Republican candidates illustrates how easily billionaires can now leverage both platform ownership and campaign finance loopholes to shape democratic outcomes.

The Legislative Imperative

The current regulatory framework is not just inadequate; it actively enables the problems we face. Section 230, written in 1996 when the internet was a fundamentally different ecosystem, grants social media companies broad immunity from liability for user-generated content while imposing no corresponding obligations on how their algorithms amplify and monetize that content.

Recent bipartisan efforts to sunset Section 230 represent a crucial first step. However, as someone who has paid attention to how quickly legislators can be influenced by industry lobbying, I believe we need more than piecemeal reform. We require comprehensive legislation that addresses three critical areas:

1. Algorithmic Accountability

Platforms should lose Section 230 protections for algorithmically amplified content. If a company’s algorithm decides to promote specific content to maximize engagement, it should bear responsibility for the consequences. This would preserve free speech protections for genuine user expression while holding companies accountable for their editorial choices disguised as neutral algorithms.

2. Campaign Finance Reform

Citizens United must be overturned through constitutional amendment if necessary. The combination of unlimited corporate spending and micro-targeted social media advertising has created an environment where democratic outcomes can be purchased by the highest bidder. We cannot have a functioning democracy when billionaires can spend hundreds of millions to influence elections through opaque super PAC structures.

3. Child Protection Measures

Recent bipartisan legislation such as the Kids Off Social Media Act exemplifies the kind of evidence-based intervention we need. Establishing minimum age requirements, eliminating algorithmic targeting of minors, and mandating parental consent for teen accounts are common-sense measures that prioritize child development over corporate profits.

Beyond the Current Crisis

The virtual reality we’ve created through social media represents one of the greatest market failures in technological history. We built systems optimized for engagement and advertising revenue instead of human flourishing, and the results speak for themselves: rising mental illness, political dysfunction, economic inequality, and social isolation on an unprecedented scale in human history.

I didn’t get into technology to build systems that make people miserable or undermine democracy. Most of my peers didn’t either. But somewhere along the way, the Valley’s dream of making the world better got hijacked by a relentless focus on growth, engagement, and libertarian dogma.

As investors and entrepreneurs, we bear a responsibility to recognize that our industry’s relentless focus on growth and engagement metrics has produced negative externalities that jeopardize the foundation of democratic society. The platforms we have funded and celebrated have, in many ways, become the dystopian virtual reality we feared — not because they transport us to fictional worlds, but because they have replaced genuine human connection with algorithmic manipulation designed to extract maximum value from our attention and emotional responses.

The path forward requires both regulatory intervention and a fundamental shift in how we think about technology’s role in society. We need platforms designed for human flourishing instead of profit maximization, democratic accountability rather than algorithmic opacity, and genuine connection rather than manufactured engagement. The virtual reality we create going forward will determine whether technology serves humanity or humanity serves technology.

The virtual reality we’re living in wasn’t what we intended to create. However, it’s not too late to change direction — if we have the courage to acknowledge where we went wrong and the determination to do better. The choice is ours, but time is running out. Every day we postpone meaningful reform, another generation grows up in a digital environment designed to exploit rather than empower them. The metaverse Mark Zuckerberg promises may never come to fruition, but the dystopian social media reality we’re facing is already here — and it’s time we take responsibility for creating something better. And it’s frightening to think of how AI will further accelerate our rapid descent toward this place we don’t want to be.