How We Traded Democratic Rules for Corporate Permissions Regulation is the landscape, not the weather. Whether you’re building an app, writing a newsletter, selling crafts online, or just trying to share your work with the world, you will encounter rules that shape what’s possible. If democratic institutions don’t write them, the market’s largest players will. The question isn’t whether we’ll have rules—it’s who writes them, and whether they serve the many or the few. ...

In Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the supercomputer Deep Thought spent 7.5 million years calculating the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. The answer? 42. The problem? Nobody knew what the actual question was. This comedic masterpiece offers a profound lesson for our current AI revolution: answers without context are meaningless, and context without specialization is overwhelming. The Deep Thought Problem in Modern AI Today’s Large Language Models (LLMs) are remarkably similar to Deep Thought. They can provide answers to almost any question, but like “42,” these answers often lack the crucial context needed to be truly useful. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about quantum mechanics, cooking recipes, and tax law in the same conversation, and you’ll get responses—but are they the right responses for your specific situation? ...

Every major technological shift creates two types of people: those who cling to the old ways and get swept aside, and those who recognize the change early and position themselves to ride the wave. We’re at one of those inflection points now. We’ve built an entire economic system around the illusion of complexity. Universities churn out specialists, corporations create elaborate hierarchies of expertise, and we’ve convinced ourselves that professional work requires years of training and irreplaceable human insight. But what if most of what we call “skilled labor” is just systematized thinking that can be reduced to well-crafted prompts? ...

In a world increasingly defined by division, we find ourselves trapped in a paradoxical cycle: the categories we create to understand our society reinforce the divisions we claim to oppose. Left or right, Democrat or Republican, worker or elite, pro-choice or pro-life—these labels don’t just describe reality; they actively shape it. The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Classification Consider what happens when a union leader rallies workers against the “elite class.” In that moment of naming and opposing the elite, the leader affirms their existence and strengthens the binary. Labeling creates a conceptual boundary that might not otherwise exist with such rigidity. We end up trapped in a self-perpetuating system where our attempts to challenge power structures inadvertently validate their conceptual foundations. ...

Introduction In a recent podcast interview, Elon Musk suggested that “too much empathy” poses a problem for Western societies. This perspective, while provocative, misdiagnoses the actual issue at hand. The real problem isn’t an excess of empathy but rather its absence where it matters most. What we witness today is not too much compassion but a selective, inconsistent application of empathetic values—one that prioritizes economic self-interest and geopolitical convenience over genuine human concern. ...