Power, Topology, the Dawn of AI and the End of Shared Governance, 2025–2028 There is a scene that recurs in the political science literature on regime change, drawn from Alexis de Tocqueville , from Crane Brinton , from Juan Linz : the moment when the erosion of norms, which has proceeded for years beneath the surface of institutional life, breaks through. It does not announce itself. The courts still meet. The legislature still convenes. The flag still flies. But the animating logic that gave those institutions their authority — the shared agreement that the rules apply to everyone, that outcomes must be legitimate even when they are unfavorable, that power is held in trust — has quietly departed. What remains is the scaffolding of a republic inhabited by the logic of something else. We are in that scene now. And the question for those who study how power actually operates — not as civics-class abstraction but as a lived social force — is not whether something fundamental has ...
When the Machine Empowers the Sovereignty . . . Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a significant force, coinciding with a decline in human confidence in self-governance. Human virtues like honesty, trust, and reliance on the rule of law have been questioned and openly challenged, leading to dire consequences. In this uncertain world, people are learning to distrust others but must find something to believe in to survive. AI presents an alternative. Its potential to either save the world or destroy it hangs in the balance. As democratic institutions lose the public's trust, artificial intelligence steps into a dangerous vacuum George Orwell did not write a prequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four , but the last decade of American political life has drafted one without his help. The erosion of shared language, the normalization of contradiction, and the systematic substitution of spectacle for substance have done something Orwell's Party could only have d...