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Yesterday, the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a Senate judiciary subcommittee about the “significant harm” that ChatGPT and similar generative-AI tools could pose to the world. When I asked Damon Beres, The Atlantic’s technology editor, for his read on the hearing, he noted that Altman’s emphasis on the broader existential risks of AI might conveniently elide some of the more quotidian problems of this new technology. I called Damon today to talk about that, and to see what else has been on his mind as he follows this story.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

What makes the Durham report a sinister flop Has North Carolina found an abortion compromise? TV isn’t about to get worse. It already is. The billionaires who are threatening democracy

A Missed Opportunity

Isabel Fattal: Can you talk a bit more about Altman’s emphasis on the existential risks of AI, and what that focus might leave out?

Damon Beres: Discussing artificial intelligence in terms of vague existential risks actually allows Altman, and others discussing the future of artificial intelligence, to dodge some of the everyday impacts that we’re already seeing from the technology. For those who work in developing these tools, it’s a clever way of putting the ball in the court of lawmakers and essentially saying, This stuff is so big and abstract, and I’m fully on board with the idea that it should be regulated, and I want to be your partner in all this, but this is something that you have to wrestle with.

Isabel: What are some examples of these everyday impacts that get lost?

Damon: There was not really any talk at the hearing about the impacts of AI on labor. There were broad allusions to the idea of job loss. But there are so many specific ways that jobs are already threatened by automation today. Amazon is pushing for greater automation on its warehouse floors. The Writers Guild of America strike has brought the issue of AI-generated writing in entertainment to the forefront, but the strike didn’t come up in specific terms.

Additionally, we’ve seen AI deployed in a broad range of settings that deeply affect how people live their lives every day. Four years ago, there was a study on the algorithms that determined whether patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston should receive extra proactive medical care. And the way this artificial-intelligence system was set up ended up privileging relatively healthy white patients over sicker Black patients.That’s an example of artificial intelligence being deployed in a setting that is not necessarily getting meaningful governmental oversight but is fundamentally having a significant impact on human lives.

Of course, Sam Altman and OpenAI have their own corner of the world that they operate in. ChatGPT isn’t the same thing as a hospital program. But given the opportunity for lawmakers to think seriously about the impacts of artificial intelligence and what regulation could look like, it seems a little bit like a missed opportunity—we’ve known about these problems for a long time.

Isabel: Where do you think lawmakers should begin the conversation about AI regulation?

Damon: The EU is working on an AI act that would essentially regulate the development and deployment of new AI systems. And China has drafted policies that would enforce a certain set of rules over generative-AI products similar to ChatGPT, and also limit the kind of content these AI tools can create. So there are already a couple of precedents out there. There have also been a number of interesting proposals put forth here in the U.S. by AI experts who’ve been paying attention to this for quite a long time.

It’s encouraging that we’re having these conversations, but on the other hand, the horse has left the barn in a very real way. ChatGPT is already out there. We’re already facing the potential of job disruption. We’re already facing the potential for the internet to be flooded by spammy content and disinformation to a greater extent than maybe anyone would have thought possible even a couple of years ago.

And some of these large language models are already out of the hands of the technology companies themselves, let alone the government. For example, in March, an AI language model created by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, leaked. This was supposed to be a tool that would be available to AI researchers. It ended up pirated, essentially, and released on 4chan. Anyone who knows where to look can access and download this technology. It’s not ready-made like ChatGPT, but it can be developed and purposed in such a way. And once that’s out on the internet, there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle.

There’s also still a need for oversight of the existing AI applications used in health care, law enforcement, surveillance, real estate—those sorts of things.

Isabel: With those existing applications of AI that have been around for years, it seems like the horse is really far from the barn at this point.

Damon: I think that’s right. We are interacting with what would be defined as artificial intelligence countless times throughout the day. You might wake up and talk to your Alexa device. You might see algorithmically sorted content when you look at your phone and read Facebook or even Apple News over breakfast. There are instances where you might be in the hospital and, unbeknownst to you, the type of care that you’re getting could be influenced by how your data are processed by an algorithm. AI is a gigantic category of technology that has been in development for decades upon decades at this point. Some of the most consequential impacts are those outside of tools like ChatGPT.

Related:

Before AI takes over, make plans to give everyone money. A chatbot is secretly doing my job.

Today’s News

President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy stated their intention to reach a deal on the federal government’s debt ceiling, which could occur as early as Sunday. The Supreme Court rejected a request to block state and local bans on assault-style weapons in Illinois. A UN agency says that the world will likely experience record temperatures in the next five years, and that it is poised to breach the crucial threshold of a 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature increase above preindustrial levels by 2027.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Nowhere in the U.S. should expect a cool summer, Matteo Wong writes—but even a less punishing season than recent summers would be hotter than historical norms.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Shelby Tauber / Reuters

Latinos Can Be White Supremacists

By Adam Serwer

A gunman turned a Dallas mall into an abattoir earlier this month, and parts of the American right reacted in disbelief. Not at the sixth mass shooting in a public place this year—by now these events have become numbingly routine—but that the suspect identified might have been motivated by white-supremacist ideology.

Why? Because the suspect was identified as one Mauricio Garcia.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Universal

Read. “A Week Later,” a poem by Sharon Olds in which she bids farewell to her husband of 32 years.

“And it came to me, / for moments at a time, moment after moment, / to be glad for him that he is with the one / he feels was meant for him.”

Watch. Fast X (in theaters this week), to understand why staff writer David Sims will only watch Fast XI, or whatever numeral it gets assigned, out of “grim professional obligation.”

Play our daily crossword.

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

The moment the Hollywood writer’s strike became a possibility, some TV fans and reporters worried that shows were about to take a turn for the worse. Some predicted an era reminiscent of the 100-day strike in 2007–8: a parade of reruns, reliance on reality shows, and hastily lowered standards on-screen. But it’s way too late to be anticipating TV’s decline now. As streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and Peacock have gone from representing the entertainment industry’s Wild West to its inevitable future, television at large has embraced quantity over quality—a fact that striking Writers Guild of America members know better than anyone. The painful truth is that TV isn’t about to get worse. It’s already worse—and the quality might slip even further.

How many times have you watched a new show only to realize that an entire season has passed but barely anything has happened? How many times have you checked an episode’s duration and wondered why it’s doubled since the show started? How many times have you forgotten the details of a show hardly a week after you binged it? I have spent a decade watching as much television as possible for a living—including as chief TV critic at Variety from 2018 to 2022—and I’m here to say: It’s not just you. There is so much TV now, and the impact on storytelling has become unavoidable. The early years of streaming, which introduced shows such as Orange Is the New Black, The Handmaid’s Tale, and BoJack Horseman, felt like an exciting tasting menu. Today, we have an all-you-can-eat buffet that won’t let us stop eating long enough to breathe.

In my quest to be a TV completist, I’ve taken on every kind of show. I’ve followed sweeping dramas, wacky comedies, and reality shows whose greasy, addictive episodes I could devour like popcorn. I’ve found something to love about almost all genres. And yet, as streaming offerings have ballooned over the past five years, I have struggled to even register the dozens of shows premiering every month, let alone watch them. Moreover, for every great series I’ve reviewed in recent years, there were 10 more that barely made an impression. Streaming’s once-revolutionary lack of time constraints compared with broadcast networks’ became an excuse for shows to forgo tightly edited narrative arcs. Take the most recent season of Stranger Things, which averages nearly 80 minutes an episode, and whose finale clocks in at two and a half hours. When Netflix announced that the season was a triumph with “1.3 billion hours viewed,” the priority appeared clear. For streamers, the goal seems to be to keep you watching more TV, not better TV.

Another newer, troubling detriment to TV’s trajectory is the endless recycling of franchises. By the end of my Variety tenure in November, I was pleasantly surprised whenever I got to tackle a show that wasn’t a spin-off, a reboot, or a reimagining of a cinematic universe that a streaming network’s parent company owned. In fact, the last three shows I reviewed for Variety represented a microcosm of that problem: Netflix’s Wednesday (a spin-off of The Addams Family starring Jenna Ortega as the taciturn teen), Disney+’s The Santa Clauses (a continuation of the The Santa Clause movies starring Tim Allen as a Santa experiencing existential panic), and Peacock’s Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin (an offshoot of the Pitch Perfect trilogy about a female a cappella group, starring not a single woman from the original films).

As TV writers tell it, getting shows green-lit is especially difficult if they don’t have some connection to a recognizable intellectual property, particularly one like Star Wars or Marvel. Some writers have found new and genuinely innovative ways into old worlds, such as Bisha K. Ali’s Ms. Marvel, Tony Gilroy’s Andor, and Rolin Jones’s Interview With the Vampire update. But the list of more half-baked takes on preexisting IP—The Time Traveler’s Wife, Jupiter’s Legacy, The Book of Boba Fett—just gets longer. A truly original, breakout hit like Showtime’s Yellowjackets or FX/Hulu’s The Bear is an exception. Meanwhile, the success of Paramount’s Yellowstone soon became grounds for several spin-offs and Western-flavored copycats, all hoping to grasp the magic of a series that became popular because of its singularity.

As the industry prioritizes sheer volume of output, it’s no surprise that TV writers are reporting untenable working conditions. The newer phenomenon of “mini rooms,” which enlists a small group of writers to outline entire seasons before ultimately putting the burden of editing on a single showrunner, has led to cut corners and creative exhaustion. The unprecedented pace of demand for new series forces writers to churn out screenplays without the time to thoughtfully refine them. Further, not bringing writers on set for the filming of their episodes robs them of the knowledge of how their words become three-dimensional worlds—which is invaluable experience for honing scripts. Under these circumstances, the disappointing number of shows with loose plot ends feels practically inevitable.

[Read: Why you should pay attention to the Hollywood writers’ strike]

If these trends continue, new shows with great potential will keep getting ignored because people simply can’t keep up with them. (Peacock’s surreal treat The Resort deserves better than the blank stares its mention typically gets.) They will continue getting prematurely shut down for tax benefits. (RIP, AMC+’s excellent animated series Pantheon.) They will suffer for lack of writers on set who can address inconsistencies and sharpen lines on the fly, in stark contrast to those that do. (Succession and Hacks employ extraordinary actors, but that biting dialogue ultimately belongs to their writers.) And they may even get left in dark corners of the streaming ecosystem. (Stream High School on Amazon Freevee, if you can find it—or even know what Freevee is.)

At its best, television can be a thrilling, elastic medium that goes into profound depth on characters, unfolds stories over years, and uses a writers’ room to draw from a range of human experiences. But TV’s evolution into a conveyor belt of “content” has incentivized predictability, and threatened creativity. The effects, both for striking screenwriters losing their livelihoods and viewing audiences at home, are obvious—and have been for a long time.

A gunman turned a Dallas mall into an abattoir earlier this month, and parts of the American right reacted in disbelief. Not at the sixth mass shooting in a public place this year—by now these events have become numbingly routine—but that the suspect identified might have been motivated by white-supremacist ideology.

Why? Because the suspect was identified as one Mauricio Garcia.

As soon as the suspect’s name was reported, some conservative media figures declared that his name indicated that he could not have been a white supremacist. Twitter’s right-wing billionaire owner, Elon Musk, amplified suggestions on the social network that the reporting about Garcia’s ideological predilections was a “psyop,” a claim that proved particularly popular among those users desperate enough to pay him $8 a month to have their terrible opinions boosted by the network’s algorithm. Business Insider later reported that Twitter had apparently limited the visibility of the account of the website Bellingcat, which had first followed Garcia’s ideological paper trail to the far right. Musk has continued to insist that documentation of Garcia’s ideological background is a “psyop,” despite Texas authorities affirming Bellingcat’s assessment.

This disbelief is naive at best. Racial identity is a social reality, not a biological one, and Hispanic people can be of any racial background. “Latinos are a pan-ethnic group that have very many racial identifications within that grouping. So, you know, we can be Latino by ethnicity, but Latinos are also white, Black, Indigenous, Asian,” Tanya Katerí Hernández, a professor at Fordham Law and the author of Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality, told me. “We have white Hispanics, and there are some white Hispanics who hold very white-supremacist views.”

[Xochitl Gonzalez: Enough with latino anti-blackness]

Reporters have uncovered a lengthy social-media trail testifying to Garcia’s racist and misogynist beliefs, and Texas authorities have described him as expressing “neo-Nazi ideation.” The initial reports in the aftermath of a mass shooting are often confusing and contradictory, and there’s nothing wrong with treating them with a little healthy skepticism. But the idea of a Hispanic person adhering to white-nationalist ideology is hardly ridiculous. The rest of the world does not conform to domestic American understandings of race, because race is an ideological concept, not a scientific one. Just because people classify you as one thing in America doesn’t mean they see you the same way everywhere else.

“Racial identity is not fixed. It’s not natural. It’s not biological. It’s not monolithic,” Ian Haney López, a law professor at UC Berkeley and the author of White by Law, told me. “Racial identity is culturally and politically produced. How people respond to it varies enormously. And that means that some people of whatever color respond to racism by saying, This is immoral and ugly. And other people respond to racism by saying, Yeah, I’m one of the superior races.” Indeed, two of the most prominent Hitler admirers in America are Kanye West and a guy with the surname Fuentes. America is nothing if not a land of opportunity.

Latin American countries have their own issues with racism. Although some countries present their “mixedness” as a cultural ideal, in practice, race and class tend to be closely intertwined.

“In the United States, there’s this binary that denies all the complexity of various other races and various mixtures, and also a cultural sense that race is strictly biological,” Haney López said. “And in Latin America it’s more of a continuum, with more room for social, economic, and cultural factors to be factored into one’s racial standards.”

A few examples drawn from the long history of race and racism in Latin America help illustrate the point.

Latin American countries, like the U.S., have a colonial history built on the displacement of native communities, and exploitation of African labor through the transatlantic slave trade. Less than 10 percent of enslaved Africans in the Middle Passage landed in North America; most of the rest landed in nations where the main languages spoken are French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Although the social dynamics in these countries are not identical, as in the United States, their societies remain scarred by the legacy of that history. Evo Morales, the first Bolivian president of Indigenous descent, was mocked by his political opposition as a “poor Indian.” In 2021, the then–Argentine president remarked that “Mexicans came from the Indians, the Brazilians came out of the jungle, but we Argentines came from boats from Europe.” This was a reference to Argentina’s 19th-century immigration policy, which, much like that of the United States, attempted to socially engineer its population to be whiter—and it was not the only South American country to pursue such a policy. “After the abolition of slavery, a number of countries across Latin America—some successfully, some unsuccessfully—wanted to bring in European immigrants in order to undercut the number of now-free people of African descent,” Hernández said.

[From the April 2019 issue: White nationalism’s deep American roots]

The Hispanic population of the United States is incredibly diverse, and its members subscribe to a wide array of views. Among the largely Hispanic communities along the Rio Grande Valley, many people are employed by the border-protection industry, and their views on immigration tend to be quite conservative. Fearmongering about illegal immigration, in terms that would be familiar to Tucker Carlson viewers, is prominent in Spanish-language right-wing media, which both illustrates the point that people of Hispanic descent can be as anti-immigrant as anyone else and raises the question of whether those contending otherwise are ignorant or dishonest. Several conservative commentators even blamed lax immigration policies for the Dallas shooting. Although Garcia, who was born in Dallas, might have been trying to martyr himself for the white-nationalist cause, to some conservative commentators, he was just another “illegal” because of his ethnic background.  

And the question of how Hispanics fit within America’s constructed categories of race has long been contested. Mexican was included as a category on the 1930 census, but Hispanic was not included until 1980. From the 1930s into the ’60s, Haney López told me, many Hispanic advocacy groups pursued the same political strategy as Southern and Eastern European immigrants, seeking to distinguish themselves from African Americans and ultimately be accepted as white.

“With the civil-rights movement,” Haney López said, “you get this rapid, significant shift where a lot of folks in the leadership class and the more politically engaged elements of the community say, No, we’re not white. We’re actually brown, and we always have been brown. And we’ve been brainwashed, brainwashed ourselves into thinking we’re white, but actually, we’re brown, and we’re brown in a way that makes us similar to African Americans.”

That shift, though, was hardly universal, Haney López said, pointing to a survey he worked on in 2020. Only about a quarter of Latinos saw the group as being “people of color,” he found, and those respondents tended to be more liberal.

The idea that a Hispanic American could be a white supremacist may seem confounding to those wedded to the idea that racial identity is both a biological fact and fixed throughout time. But neither is true. And it’s not at all surprising, given the history of racism in the United States, that someone would see such an ideology as a way to raise his status relative to others.

“You don’t have to look any particular way to want to be part of the club,” Hernández said.

America’s obsession with renovating homes is finally coming to an end.

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By 2017, the billionaire financier Ray Dalio had grown his company, Bridgewater Associates, into the world’s biggest hedge fund. And like many wealthy executives, he had also begun to reinvent himself as a “thought leader,” weighing in frequently on topics such as geopolitics, public education, and workplace culture.

In the fall of that year, Dalio was interviewed by Michael Milken, a fellow billionaire who had previously been imprisoned for fraud. Onstage in Santa Monica, California, Dalio hailed Lee Kuan Yew, considered the founder of modern-day Singapore, as “probably the greatest leader of the last 50 or 100 years.” Lee’s three-decade rule transformed the country from what Dalio called “a mosquito-infested backwater” into a vibrant economy with a GDP per capita bigger than that of the United States. “The man was a very strong man,” Dalio said. Under Lee’s rule, “there was a firmness … there was a strictness in terms of the definition of what a good citizen was.”

To Lee’s critics, however, that’s not far off from authoritarianism. Today, Singapore is rated as only “partly free” by the human-rights organization Freedom House. Although the city-state has regular elections, the outcomes are largely predetermined: The ruling People’s Action Party has held power since Lee took office in 1959. (Lee’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, has been prime minister since 2004.) Political protest is rarely tolerated. “We decide what is right,” the elder Lee once said. “Never mind what the people think.”

At the same time, thanks in part to its deep integration with global financial markets, its huge flows of international capital, and the productivity of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers with limited rights who are housed cheaply in dorms, Singapore is an economic powerhouse. For a small but powerful collection of executives, along with certain investors and libertarian ideologues, Singapore’s “benevolent dictatorship” offers a model for how well a market-driven system can work when concerns about democracy don’t get in the way. In his new book, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, Quinn Slobodian focuses on these figures—an informal grouping he calls “market radicals”—whose influence on the political right seems to be growing.

[Read: Cryptocurrency might be a path to authoritarianism]

Slobodian, a historian of ideas at Wellesley College, seeks to understand how these market radicals undermine democracy. His analysis zeroes in on a particular worldview that he claims is shared by an eclectic cast of characters, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Silicon Valley billionaires Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. How this radicalism is expressed varies greatly: There are executives and investors who scour the globe for places to shelter and multiply their wealth, and who may not actively oppose democracy but do see civil and political freedom as secondary to economic permissiveness and societal stability. Some echo that most laissez-faire of economists, Milton Friedman, who once lamented that “political democracy has elements which tend to destroy economic freedom.” On the most extreme end, they include libertarian ideologues like Friedman’s grandson Patri, who advocates for “seasteading”—the creation of secessionist (and tax-free) communities that are built on floating platforms in international waters and, in turn, not beholden to meddlesome laws and regulations that don’t suit their founders.

As Crack-Up Capitalism shows, what unites market radicals is the conviction that societies should be designed to prioritize capital, not people. The book illustrates the profound fatalism about democracy—and sometimes outright contempt for it—that sits at the core of many market radicals’ beliefs. As Slobodian writes, they believe that democracy—self-government characterized by citizen participation, civil and political freedoms and protections, and representatives responsive and even beholden to the people’s demands—does not provide an adequate environment for maximal profit-making.

This opposition to democracy, however, doesn’t imply an opposition to government. As reflected in the desperate demands of venture capitalists and other wealthy investors for a bailout of Silicon Valley Bank, market radicals are enthusiastic about state power and resources—as long as that power prioritizes their ability to do business. “Their goal,” Slobodian writes, is “not to take a wrecking ball to the state but to hijack, disassemble, and rebuild it under their own private ownership.” Crack-Up Capitalism argues that market radicals aspire, above all, to use the authority of government to serve their interests: to eliminate taxes, unions, workers’ and citizens’ rights, political uncertainty, and barriers to capital flows, and to put the resources of the state—whether labor, land, or the legal system—at their disposal. They believe that this approach will, in turn, result in a more prosperous society with benefits eventually accruing to all.

In the lead-up to the United Kingdom’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union, many Brexit advocates believed that, once freed from EU regulations, Britain would become some sort of “Singapore-on-Thames.” But as Slobodian makes clear, this fantasy had it backwards. Singapore’s economic prosperity doesn’t stem from the absence of the state. Instead, the country’s growth depended in part on the government’s rigid social and political control of its people.

Singapore is just one of the world’s many legal jurisdictions where the government has used its authority to throw out traditional rules and laws—particularly those involving taxation. These pockets exist internationally but differ in size and scope and specifics. Some, including Singapore and Liechtenstein, are independent nations. Others are heavily promoted development projects, such as London’s Canary Wharf and New York City’s Hudson Yards. Still others are hardly visible to the unaware eye and might be as small as a few blocks. The 2017 Trump tax cuts, for instance, established “opportunity zones” that are intended to, according to the IRS, “spur economic growth and job creation in low-income communities while providing tax benefits to investors.” In these areas, the U.S. government subsidizes private investors by allowing them to avoid paying capital-gains taxes if they maintain their investments for at least a decade. (There are now more than 8,700 opportunity zones across the United States; Washington, D.C., alone has 25.)

Some of the zones most admired by market radicals can be found in Dubai. Like Singapore, the Persian Gulf emirate is remarkably welcoming of foreign money and responsive to the desires of corporations and investors. It is also willing to maintain different legal jurisdictions, allowing investors and companies to cherry-pick the configurations that best suit them—including those that weaken labor laws, protect investment assets from outside scrutiny, or even maintain a separate court system designed to cater to business interests.

Perhaps most important, however, Dubai is hyper-controlled—as an authoritarian monarchy, it is generally safe from any threat of political uncertainty or dissent. Its Jebel Ali Free Zone, an enormous port housing industries including retail, petrochemicals, and oil and gas that bills itself as “the world’s largest free trade zone,” attracts international investors in part by levying no personal-income or corporate taxes. But its appeal also stems from cheap labor and almost nonexistent workers’ rights, which means that migrant workers can simply be deported if they demand greater protections, raise concerns about their working conditions, or threaten to strike.

This combination of features has made Dubai and its neighboring emirates into hubs of investor capital and corporate interests. (Last month, for instance, Bloomberg reported that Ray Dalio would open an office in the Abu Dhabi Global Market, another low-tax zone in the UAE, to manage his family’s wealth.) But Dubai has also attracted another cohort of market radicals: libertarian ideologues who see its authoritarian model as an inspiration. Among Dubai’s vocal fans is the influential software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin, sometimes known by his pen name Mencius Moldbug, who has cited Dubai as evidence that “politics is not necessary to a free, stable, and productive modern society.”

[Read: The red states experimenting with authoritarianism]

While Yarvin may not be a household name for most Americans, he has grabbed the attention of some of the most powerful figures on the right, including Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and Peter Thiel, one of the biggest Republican campaign donors in recent election cycles. In 2022, Thiel, who is friends with Yarvin and has written that he doesn’t “believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” invested tens of millions of dollars in the Senate campaigns of J. D. Vance and Blake Masters, both of whom, as Vox reported, have also praised and cited Yarvin’s work. Yarvin has even advocated on his blog for bringing some of the characteristics he admires about Dubai—namely, an authoritarian form of leadership—to the United States, which would ideally be run by a CEO “without any interference from the Congress or courts.” This worldview doesn’t exist on just the fringes of the internet. Slobodian suggests that it is beginning to infiltrate one of America’s main political parties.

Many of the market radicals Slobodian writes about say they are fighting to liberate humanity and unleash markets from the tyranny of government and bureaucracy. Thinkers and investors emanating from Silicon Valley, in particular, claim to be hacking the state to make it more efficient and effective. But Slobodian argues that many of these self-proclaimed advocates for disruption actually just want to disrupt the norms—such as civil and political freedom—that might threaten their interests. Democracy is already facing numerous threats from factions on the right who question the legitimacy of election results that don’t go their way. Crack-Up Capitalism is a reminder that this political challenge is only one of a number of fronts in the sustained attack on American democracy.