Patriot
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It’s been a pretty all-consuming week for news readers. If you need a break, I wrote for The Atlantic about why Bluetooth speakers are ruining music (free link, but please subscribe!), and it came out on Wednesday. The specifics of the argument might surprise you.
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It’s hard for me to focus outside the news right now. (Thank goodness for the procession of storms in the Hudson Valley that have required at least a few hours outside, shoveling snow.) So, unusually, I’m going to write about it.
Some background: I led the News Desk at The New York Times in 2016, 2017, and 2018—the first Trump election and most of his initial two years in office. We shepherded breaking news stories through the other desks and broadcast the output of the newsroom to readers across an array of digital platforms. One of the things I loved most about that job was working with my colleagues to tell any given story in the tiny confines of the mobile push notification. (Writing shorter takes longer, as Mark Twain Blaise Pascal knew centuries ago, but every one of those news alerts needed to go out yesterday—with the approval of about 25 people, then an audience of tens of millions. It was the world’s most intense writing seminar.) Then I was a deputy editor at The Atlantic through the 2020 election, and had just gone on book leave to begin work on my novel when armed rioters stormed the Capitol. I watched that one on live TV, like everyone else.
I’m a patriot. I’m proud to be an American. I love the Constitution. I’m not a partisan or an ideologue; it’s not at all important to me that other people believe as I do, so in my writing I rarely touch on politics. I choose to live in a blue state, but I come from one of the reddest. So does my partner. I know and love people with a great variety of beliefs.
The political process often has results I don’t like. I might even find them abhorrent, as I do with the plain and pervasive history of structural racism in the United States, or the bullyish scapegoating of transgender people—or the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, or the naive bipartisan embrace of a soft or nonexistent regulatory regime for technologies that will end humanity.
But I do trust that over the course of time, a representative democracy is as equitable and just as an institutional government can be. I believe that it allows for the continuing possibility of progress. I know the consensus about what is right and fair and in the public interest can and does evolve, and that its evolution in America has largely produced a broader and more determined recognition of human dignity. I’m a gay man who was in the Times newsroom and helped write the news alert when Obergefell v. Hodges came down, one June morning in 2015, and marriage equality became the law of the land. Through the rightward tilt of the culture and many institutions in the last few years, I have remembered that politics is cyclical.
What Elon Musk is doing in Washington right now, as he takes private control of enormously sensitive and potent public information systems, is on some level a political act, sure. It’s wrapped in political mechanisms: He’s acting with the approval of the executive and the demurral of the legislature. (What, if anything, the courts will do in response is still an open question.)
But what he is doing is not really politics. It’s hacking. As many others have noted, this presidential administration has co-partisans in control of the other two branches. It has all the levers of government at its disposal. It can act through constitutional means to, say, disband the U.S. Agency for International Development. That would be a contentious and probably an unpopular move, if only because it’s so obvious that it will cede American soft power around the planet to China, the chief economic, technological, and military rival of the U.S. It’s a dumb thing to do, and it calls deeply into question the motives of the people doing it. But if President Trump wanted to do it legally, he could exert political pressure on a Congress that has shown him little opposition, and pass a law. There’s no intellectually honest argument that he had to resort to the illegal sabotage of the government. He didn’t even bother to try the other way.
Here’s an even more important point: In 2025, information technology is destiny. That’s not a future state. It’s now. If nongovernmental operators assume control of the core IT systems of the federal government, they control the government. Those people were not elected. When you hear people calling this a coup, that’s what they mean. They mean that control of the government has been taken from our elected representatives—including, actually, the president—and is in the hands of a private citizen and his associates. That private citizen expressly intends to hand some of that control to artificial intelligence, which is not provided for in the Constitution. However you define liberty, this arc will have consequences for yours, and they will not be good. You don’t have to be a partisan to oppose that fiat, that usurpation, with every tool at your disposal as a citizen. All you have to be is a patriot.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com.