Election Entertainment

   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...

   How a decade of political doublespeak has been rehearsing a future the novelist warned us about. D onald Trump almost certainly never read Nineteen Eighty-Four. It seems safe to say, as many observers have, that the novel's more nuanced warnings never found their way to his desk. And yet the decades he spent on the political stage suggest that the lessons George Orwell encoded in that dystopian masterwork were absorbed not from the page but from experience—from watching how language, power, and public memory evolve in the hands of those who understand their value. The comparison is not simply about mendacity. Politicians have always lied. What Orwell diagnosed—and what makes his novel feel less like prophecy than mirror—was something more structural: the deliberate erosion of language as a medium of shared reality. That is a different thing, and a far more dangerous one. Consider the arc from President Kennedy to President George W. Bush, and then from ...