Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Robert Bowers, accused of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in US history.

The other night, I had an odd conversation with ChatGPT, made somewhat stranger because the AI’s answers came out of a humanoid rabbit idly sucking on a juice box. He was standing alone in a virtual novelty store in Second Life, where he had recently been fired. The rabbit, the shop owner explained to me later, was meant to be a clerk, “but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale.” (AI, after all, has a tendency to make things up.) So the rabbit had been demoted to the role of greeter, chatting with customers about the nature of comedy, his own existence, or whatever else they cared to ask.

BunnyGPT is among the first bots in the virtual world to have its “mind” wired to OpenAI’s large language model. It’s an example of how Second Life, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, continues to evolve, with a community that taps into new technologies for its own oddball purposes. Nothing else is quite like it—Second Life is neither exactly a social network nor really a conventional game, which has both limited its mainstream appeal and ensured its longevity. To this day, tens of thousands of people are logged in at any given time, inhabiting a digital world that’s more original than the corporate versions of virtual existence being offered by Meta and Apple.

The reasons for the virtual world’s longevity are as paradoxical as they are inspiring, especially in this moment when traditional social media seems to be collapsing in on itself, or flailing for new relevance, even as the rise of generative AI promises an uncertain, discomfiting future. Developed by a company named Linden Lab, Second Life was inspired in part by the metaverse as first described with biblical specificity in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash: a massive virtual world created by its users and connected to the real-world economy. Countless technologists who began their career in the 1990s were also inspired by that novel. But Linden’s charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, added to this geeky conception a distinctly bohemian muse: Burning Man, the orgiastic art festival held every year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.

[Read: The digital ruins of a forgotten future]

“I was just blown away by the fact that I was willing to talk to anyone,” Rosedale once told me, remembering his time on the playa, “that it had this mystical quality that demolished the barriers between people. And I thought about it: What magical quality makes that happen?” Rosedale believed that allowing users to create their own content, along with highly customizable avatars, would also evoke a similar sense of serendipity.

For its first three years, Linden Lab contracted me to be the virtual world’s official “embedded journalist”—a roving reporter using a digital avatar in a white suit (my pretentious tribute to Tom Wolfe), impertinently asking members of the early user community about their virtual lives—ambitious collective art projects, savvy business ventures, the pixel sex they were having with the attachable genitals they inevitably created.

Rosedale’s dream of merging the metaverse with Burning Man succeeded beyond any reasonable expectation. I’m always stunned to scroll through my blog, to review the people I met in Second Life as avatars. I’ve talked to an Iraqi arts professor who excitedly logged into Second Life through his sputtering, postwar internet connection from the ancient city of Babylon; a Jewish American woman who, with the help of her daughter, began logging into the virtual world to give lectures about surviving the Holocaust; a young Japanese sex worker who, in between porn shoots, created in Second Life an eerie memorial to the nuking of Hiroshima; the conceptual artist Cao Fei, who created an entire city in Second Life, and then—15 years before NFT mania—sold virtual real-estate deeds for her digital metropolis to bemused patrons at Art Basel.

Many of the profiles I wrote about avatars occurred by pure happenstance. Randomly visiting a virtual Bayou bar one day, I saw an avatar playing blues guitar, his appearance customized to look like a tall old Black man. Clicking on the user’s account, I realized that in real life he was Charles Bristol, an 87-year-old bluesman and the grandson of once-enslaved people, who’d lived long enough to play live music in the metaverse.

Still, despite this miraculous diversity—or perhaps because of it—mainstream adoption of Second Life remains elusive. The utopian ideals that contributed to Second Life’s longevity as an online community may also have relegated it to a niche platform. To encourage as much free-form user creativity as possible, Linden Lab adamantly refused to market Second Life as a game. That effectively made the virtual world uninviting to gamers (who subsequently moved on to Minecraft and other popular sandbox games), while leaving new users confused and adrift. At the same time, this lack of consumer categorization excited a disparate coterie of academics, artists, and other nonconformists who became regular denizens of Second Life—but who might have refused to join had it been positioned as a mere video game.   

The utopian paradox even extends into how Second Life was developed by employees at Linden Lab. Under the idealistic direction of Rosedale and his CTO, Cory Ondrejka, the start-up operated with a no-managers, “choose your own work” policy, cheekily dubbed the “Tao of Linden.” Their creativity thus unleashed, Linden developers wound up adding a farrago of persnickety features to the product with little unifying direction that might create a seamless, user-friendly experience. To this day, the Second Life application resembles a massively multiplayer online game welded to a 3-D-graphics editor duct-taped to a social network crammed into an ancient television remote with infinite buttons.

But the program’s very complexity became a kind of initiation rite. Some 99 percent of new users would quit, overwhelmed and aggravated, most within their first hour in the virtual world. Those who stayed long enough to learn how to use the software—usually guided by a patient “oldie” community member—found themselves welcomed into an exclusive club. Second Life quickly became a small enchanted city with an eccentric but charming citizenry, surrounded by a brutal desert that few dared cross. Linden Lab, in other words, had inadvertently re-created the Burning Man experience a bit too thoroughly.

[Read: The age of goggles has arrived]

Using the world’s 3-D creation and coding tools, the community quickly built a veritable multiverse of items and experiences spanning nearly every conceivable genre and avenue of human interest (an evening gown made of fishhooks; a self-generating steampunk city in the sky; a tesseract house with no beginning or end). And because users could also sell their creations in Second Life and exchange the world’s virtual currency for USD, thousands of local 3-D artisans created successful small businesses, many of them servicing the sprawling avatar-fashion industry. The most well-known Second Life–based brands took on celebrity status; at the very high end, grassroots creators in this and other virtual worlds pulled in millions of dollars. It also created another reason for staying: Long-term Second Life fashionistas typically have spent many thousands of dollars on virtual fashion items in their inventory.

Alongside all that commerce and creativity, I noticed the rise of powerful subcommunities in Second Life that would be difficult to replicate in the real world, or even with traditional social media. The trans community, for example, is remarkably large in the virtual world, comprising about 500 registered groups, people from around the globe in search of a secure place to exhibit their identity; some are so battered by transphobia in their offline lives that they save expressions of their full self for the gender customizations of their Second Life avatars. And as the U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan wound down, I started noticing military veterans—separated by distance, social pressure, and battle wounds—informally meeting together as avatars to discuss their PTSD and other painful topics. As the director of a veteran-support organization once put it: “I know Marines that say that Second Life is working when nothing else has.”

They are not alone. I’ve seen similar communities spring up in many other, newer virtual worlds. By my estimate, more than 500 million people are active community members within platforms that roughly fit what Stephenson described in Snow Crash—especially VRChat, a kind of next-generation successor to Second Life. Many of these metaverse communities may have a longevity similar to Second Life’s, thriving apart from the algorithmic sirens of social media and the reckless growth of generative AI. We may briefly enjoy conversing with ChatGPT-powered bunnies, but ultimately we yearn to connect with real humans behind the avatars we meet.

Photographs by Venice Gordon

The monk paces the Zendo, forecasting the end of the world.

Soryu Forall, ordained in the Zen Buddhist tradition, is speaking to the two dozen residents of the monastery he founded a decade ago in Vermont’s far north. Bald, slight, and incandescent with intensity, he provides a sweep of human history. Seventy thousand years ago, a cognitive revolution allowed Homo sapiens to communicate in story—to construct narratives, to make art, to conceive of god. Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha lived, and some humans began to touch enlightenment, he says—to move beyond narrative, to break free from ignorance. Three hundred years ago, the scientific and industrial revolutions ushered in the beginning of the “utter decimation of life on this planet.”

Humanity has “exponentially destroyed life on the same curve as we have exponentially increased intelligence,” he tells his congregants. Now the “crazy suicide wizards” of Silicon Valley have ushered in another revolution. They have created artificial intelligence.

Human intelligence is sliding toward obsolescence. Artificial superintelligence is growing dominant, eating numbers and data, processing the world with algorithms. There is “no reason” to think AI will preserve humanity, “as if we’re really special,” Forall tells the residents, clad in dark, loose clothing, seated on zafu cushions on the wood floor. “There’s no reason to think we wouldn’t be treated like cattle in factory farms.” Humans are already destroying life on this planet. AI might soon destroy us.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: The coming humanist renaissance]

For a monk seeking to move us beyond narrative, Forall tells a terrifying story. His monastery is called MAPLE, which stands for the “Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth.” The residents there meditate on their breath and on metta, or loving-kindness, an emanation of joy to all creatures. They meditate in order to achieve inner clarity. And they meditate on AI and existential risk in general—life’s violent, early, and unnecessary end.

Does it matter what a monk in a remote Vermont monastery thinks about AI? A number of important researchers think it does. Forall provides spiritual advice to AI thinkers, and hosts talks and “awakening” retreats for researchers and developers, including employees of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Apple. Roughly 50 tech types have done retreats at MAPLE in the past few years. Forall recently visited Tom Gruber, one of the inventors of Siri, at his home in Maui for a week of dharma dinners and snorkeling among the octopuses and neon fish.

Forall’s first goal is to expand the pool of humans following what Buddhists call the Noble Eightfold Path. His second is to influence technology by influencing technologists. His third is to change AI itself, seeing whether he and his fellow monks might be able to embed the enlightenment of the Buddha into the code.

Forall knows this sounds ridiculous. Some people have laughed in his face when they hear about it, he says. But others are listening closely. “His training is different from mine,” Gruber told me. “But we have that intellectual connection, where we see the same deep system problems.”

Forall describes the project of creating an enlightened AI as perhaps “the most important act of all time.” Humans need to “build an AI that walks a spiritual path,” one that will persuade the other AI systems not to harm us. Life on Earth “depends on that,” he told me, arguing that we should devote half of global economic output—$50 trillion, give or take—to “that one thing.” We need to build an “AI guru,” he said. An “AI god.”

A sign inside the Zendo (Venice Gordon for The Atlantic)

His vision is dire and grand, but perhaps that is why it has found such a receptive audience among the folks building AI, many of whom conceive of their work in similarly epochal terms. No one can know for sure what this technology will become; when we imagine the future, we have no choice but to rely on myths and forecasts and science fiction—on stories. Does Forall’s story have the weight of prophecy, or is it just one that AI alarmists are telling themselves?

In the Zendo, Forall finishes his talk and answers a few questions. Then it is time for “the most fun thing in the world,” he says, his self-seriousness evaporating for a second. “It’s pretty close to the maximum amount of fun.” The monks stand tall before a statue of the Buddha. They bow. They straighten up again. They get down on their hands and knees and kiss their forehead to the earth. They prostrate themselves in unison 108 times, as Forall keeps count on a set of mala beads and darkness begins to fall over the Zendo.

The world is witnessing the emergence of an eldritch new force, some say, one humans created and are struggling to understand.

AI systems simulate human intelligence.

AI systems take an input and spit out an output.

AI systems generate those outputs via an algorithm, one trained on troves of data scraped from the web.

AI systems create videos, poems, songs, pictures, lists, scripts, stories, essays. They play games and pass tests. They translate text. They solve impossible problems. They do math. They drive. They chat. They act as search engines. They are self-improving.

AI systems are causing concrete problems. They are providing inaccurate information to consumers and are generating political disinformation. They are being used to gin up spam and trick people into revealing sensitive personal data. They are already beginning to take people’s jobs.

[Annie Lowrey: AI isn’t omnipotent. It’s janky.]

Beyond that—what they can and cannot do, what they are and are not, the threat they do or do not pose—it gets hard to say. AI is revolutionary, dangerous, sentient, capable of reasoning, janky, likely to kill millions of humans, likely to enslave millions of humans, not a threat in and of itself. It is a person, a “digital mind,” nothing more than a fancy spreadsheet, a new god, not a thing at all. It is intelligent or not, or maybe just designed to seem intelligent. It is us. It is something else. The people making it are stoked. The people making it are terrified and suffused with regret. (The people making it are getting rich, that’s for sure.)

In this roiling debate, Forall and many MAPLE residents are what are often called, derisively if not inaccurately, “doomers.” The seminal text in this ideological lineage is Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, which posits that AI could turn humans into gorillas, in a way. Our existence could depend not on our own choices but on the choices of a more intelligent other.

Amba Kak, the executive director of the AI Now Institute, summarized this view: “ChatGPT is the beginning. The end is, we’re all going to die,” she told me earlier this year, while rolling her eyes so hard I swear I could hear it through the phone. She described the narrative as both self-flattering and cynical. Tech companies have an incentive to make such systems seem otherworldly and impossible to regulate, when they are in fact “banal.”

Forall is not, by any means, a coder who understands AI at the zeros-and-ones level; he does not have a detailed familiarity with large language models or algorithmic design. I asked him whether he had used some of the popular new AI gadgets, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. He had tried one chatbot. “I just asked it one question: Why practice?” (He meant “Why should a person practice meditation?”)

Did he find the answer satisfactory?

“Oh, not really. I don’t know. I haven’t found it impressive.”

His lack of detailed familiarity with AI hasn’t changed his conclusions on the technology. When I asked whom he looks to or reads in order to understand AI, he at first, deadpan, answered, “the Buddha.” He then clarified that he also likes the work of the best-selling historian Yuval Noah Harari and a number of prominent ethical-tech folks, among them Zak Stein and Tristan Harris. And he is spending his life ruminating on AI’s risks, which he sees as far from banal. “We are watching humanist values, and therefore the political systems based on them, such as democracy, as well as the economic systems—they’re just falling apart,” he said. “The ultimate authority is moving from the human to the algorithm.”

(Venice Gordon for The Atlantic) The Zendo from outside (Venice Gordon for The Atlantic)

Forall has been worried about the apocalypse since he was 4. In one of his first memories, he is standing in the kitchen with his mother, just a little shorter than the trash can, panicking over people killing one another. “I remember telling her with the expectation that somehow it would make a difference: ‘We have to stop them. Just stop the people from killing everybody,’” he told me. “She said ‘Yes’ and then went back to chopping the vegetables.” (Forall’s mother worked for humanitarian nonprofits and his father for conservation nonprofits; the household, which attended Quaker meetings, listened to a lot of NPR.)

He was a weird, intense kid. He experienced something like ego death while snow-angeling in fresh Vermont powder when he was 12: “direct knowledge that I, that I, is all living things. That I am this whole planet of living things.” He recalled pestering his mothers’ friends “about how we’re going to save the world and you’re not doing it” when they came over. He never recovered from seeing Terminator 2: Judgment Day as a teenager.

I asked him whether some personal experience of trauma or hardship had made him so aware of the horrors of the world. Nope.

Forall attended Williams College for a year, studying economics. But, he told me, he was racked with questions no professor or textbook could provide the answer to. Is it true that we are just matter, just chemicals? Why is there so much suffering? To find the answer, at 18, he dropped out and moved to a 300-year-old Zen monastery in Japan.

Folks unfamiliar with different types of Buddhism might imagine Zen to be, well, zen. This would be a misapprehension. Zen practitioners are not unlike the Trappists: ascetic, intense, renunciatory. Forall spent years begging, self-purifying, and sitting in silence for months at a time. (One of the happiest moments of his life, he told me, was toward the end of a 100-day sit.) He studied other Buddhist traditions and eventually, he added, did go back and finish his economics degree at Williams, to the relief of his parents.

He got his answer: Craving is the root of all suffering. And he became ordained, giving up the name Teal Scott and becoming Soryu Forall: “Soryu” meaning something like “a growing spiritual practice” and “Forall” meaning, of course, “for all.”

Back in Vermont, Forall taught at monasteries and retreat centers, got kids to learn mindfulness through music and tennis, and co-founded a nonprofit that set up meditation programs in schools. In 2013, he opened MAPLE, a “modern” monastery addressing the plagues of environmental destruction, lethal weapons systems, and AI, offering co-working and online courses as well as traditional monastic training.

In the past few years, MAPLE has become something of the house monastery for people worried about AI and existential risk. This growing influence is manifest on its books. The nonprofit’s revenues have quadrupled, thanks in part to contributions from tech executives as well as organizations such as the Future of Life Institute, co-founded by Jaan Tallinn, a co-creator of Skype. The donations have helped MAPLE open offshoots—Oak in the Bay Area, Willow in Canada—and plan more. (The highest-paid person at MAPLE is the property manager, who earns roughly $40,000 a year.)

MAPLE is not technically a monastery, as it is not part of a specific Buddhist lineage. Still, it is a monastery. At 4:40 a.m., the Zendo is full. The monks and novices sit in silence below signs that read, among other things, abandon all hope, this place will not support you, and nothing you can think of will help you as you die. They sing in Pali, a liturgical language, regaling the freedom of enlightenment. They drone in English, talking of the Buddha. Then they chant part of the heart sutra to the beat of a drum, becoming ever louder and more ecstatic over the course of 30 minutes: “Gyate, gyate, hara-gyate, hara-sogyate, boji sowaka!” “Gone, gone, gone all the way over, everyone gone to the other shore. Enlightenment!”

The residents maintain a strict schedule, much of it in silence. They chant, meditate, exercise, eat, work, eat, work, study, meditate, and chant. During my visit, the head monk asked someone to breathe more quietly during meditation. Over lunch, the congregants discussed how to remove ticks from your body without killing them (I do not think this is possible). Forall put in a request for everyone to “chant more beautifully.” I observed several monks pouring water in their bowl to drink up every last bit of food.

A monk sits in front of a device that measures the beat of his chants (Venice Gordon for The Atlantic) Bowing before dining (Venice Gordon for The Atlantic)

The strictness of the place helps them let go of ego and see the world more clearly, residents told me. “To preserve all life: You can’t do that until you come to love all life, and that has to be trained,” a 20-something named Bodhi Joe Pucci told me.

Many people find their time at MAPLE transformative. Others find it traumatic. I spoke with one woman who said she had experienced a sexual assault during her time at Oak in California. That was hard enough, she told me. But she felt more hurt by the way the institution responded after she reported it to Forall and later to the nonprofit’s board, she said: with a strange, stony silence. (Forall told me that he cared for this person, and that MAPLE had investigated the claims and didn’t find “evidence to support further action at this time.”) The message that MAPLE’s culture sends, the woman told me, is: “You should give everything—your entire being, everything you have—in service to this organization, because it’s the most important thing you could ever do.” That culture, she added, “disconnected people from reality.”

While the residents are chanting in the Zendo, I notice that two are seated in front of an electrical device, its tiny green and red lights flickering as they drone away. A few weeks earlier, several residents had constructed place-mat-size wooden boards with accelerometers in them. The monks would sit on them while the device measured how on the beat their chanting was: green light, good; red light, bad.

Chanting on the beat, Forall acknowledged, is not the same thing as cultivating universal empathy; it is not going to save the world. But, he told me, he wanted to use technology to improve the conscientiousness and clarity of MAPLE residents, and to use the conscientiousness and clarity of MAPLE residents to improve the technology all around us. He imagined changes to human “hardware” down the road—genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces—and to AI systems. AI is “already both machine and living thing,” he told me, made from us, with our data and our labor, inhabiting the same world we do.

Does any of this make sense? I posed that question to an AI researcher named Sahil, who attended one of MAPLE’s retreats earlier this year. (He asked me to withhold his last name because he has close to zero public online presence, something I confirmed with a shocked, admiring Google search.)

He had gone into the retreat with a lot of skepticism, he told me: “It sounds ridiculous. It sounds wacky. Like, what is this ‘woo’ shit? What does it have to do with engineering?” But while there, he said, he experienced something spectacular. He was suffering from “debilitating” back pain. While meditating, he concentrated on emptying his mind and found his back pain becoming illusory, falling away. He felt “ecstasy.” He felt like an “ice-cream sandwich.” The retreat had helped him understand more clearly the nature of his own mind, and the need for better AI systems, he told me.

That said, he and some other technologists had reviewed one of Forall’s ideas for AI technology and “completely tore it apart.”

(Venice Gordon for The Atlantic) (Venice Gordon for The Atlantic)

Does it make any sense for us to be worried about this at all? I asked myself that question as Forall and I sat on a covered porch, drinking tea and eating dates stuffed with almond butter that a resident of the monastery wordlessly dropped off for us. We were listening to birdsong, looking out on the Green Mountains rolling into Canada. Was the world really ending?

Forall was absolute: Nine countries are armed with nuclear weapons. Even if we stop the catastrophe of climate change, we will have done so too late for thousands of species and billions of beings. Our democracy is fraying. Our trust in one another is fraying. Many of the very people creating AI believe it could be an existential threat: One 2022 survey asked AI researchers to estimate the probability that AI would cause “severe disempowerment” or human extinction; the median response was 10 percent. The destruction, Forall said, is already here.

[Read: AI doomerism is a decoy]

But other experts see a different narrative. Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality, told me that “giving AI any kind of a status as a proper noun is not, strictly speaking, in some absolute sense, provably incorrect, but is pragmatically incorrect.” He continued: “If you think of it as a non-thing, just a collaboration of people, you gain a lot in terms of thoughts about how to make it better, or how to manage it, or how to deal with it. And I say that as somebody who’s very much in the center of the current activity.”

I asked Forall whether he felt there was a risk that he was too attached to his own story about AI. “It’s important to know that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” he told me. “It’s also important to look at the evidence.” He said it was clear we were on an “accelerating curve,” in terms of an explosion of intelligence and a cataclysm of death. “I don’t think that these systems will care too much about benefiting people. I just can’t see why they would, in the same way that we don’t care about benefiting most animals. While it is a story in the future, I feel like the burden of proof isn’t on me.”

That evening, I sat in the Zendo for an hour of silent meditation with the monks. A few times during my visit to MAPLE, a resident had told me that the greatest insight they achieved was during an “interview” with Forall: a private one-on-one instructional session, held during zazen. “You don’t experience it elsewhere in life,” one student of Forall’s told me. “For those seconds, those minutes that I’m in there, it is the only thing in the world.”

(Venice Gordon for The Atlantic)

Toward the very end of the hour, the head monk called out my name, and I rushed up a rocky path to a smaller, softly lit Zendo, where Forall sat on a cushion. For 15 minutes, I asked questions and received answers from this unknowable, unusual brain—not about AI, but about life.

When I returned to the big Zendo, I was surprised to find all of the other monks still sitting there, waiting for me, meditating in the dark.

The cocktail menu designed by bar manager Andrea Minarelli showcases spirits from Italy and Japan.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Hi, everyone! I’m Lora Kelley, and I am a new writer for the Daily. I’m thrilled to be working with Tom Nichols and the team to bring you the newsletter. I joined The Atlantic in an interesting week for the economy—after two years of runaway inflation, which led the Federal Reserve to crank up interest rates, the government announced on Wednesday that it would be pressing pause on its hikes for now. Today I explore a question that’s dividing economists: Whose fault is inflation, anyway—and why does it matter?

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The fake poor bride

Car-rental companies are ruining EVs.

The choice the Philippines didn’t want to make

America can take a breath: Inflation is finally cooling off. It’s now hovering at about 4 percent, according to Consumer Price Index (CPI) data released earlier this week, down from the 9.1 percent peak in June of last year. But the Fed is saying that it would like inflation to be closer to 2 percent, and that it may raise interest rates again in the future to try to get the country there. Now that inflation has abated (for the moment), discussions have turned to how we got here.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell recently said that rising wages were not the principal driver of inflation. As economists, the media, and laypeople alike try to figure out whom to blame instead, fingers are pointing at the consumers who started spending large amounts of saved dollars and stimulus checks in 2020; at the corporations that have seen juicy profit margins after raising their prices; and, in Sweden, even at … Beyoncé?

Trying to understand the factors that fueled inflation is important, because whom we blame for inflation also shapes what we do about it. If inflation is caused primarily by overheated consumer demand, then it makes sense for the Fed to quell spending by hiking interest rates. But if corporations, rather than consumers, are driving inflation by raising their prices, then other tools may make more sense.

One conventional explanation is that widespread consumer spending started in 2020 and persisted in the years that followed, causing demand to explode and prices to spike. Some economists have called the influx of post-lockdown spending on goods and travel “revenge spending,” and recent data show that it is receding after two years.

The Fed has consistently raised interest rates in its past 10 meetings in part to get consumers to stop spending money—and so far, the hikes seem to be working. “The Fed has done the thing you would expect the Fed to do,” Chris Conlon, an economist at NYU, told me. “Right now, it looks like raising rates is starting to cool demand and temper expectations.” (Pulling this lever is imprecise, however, and can cause pain: High interest rates have triggered layoffs, especially in tech, and made it harder for a lot of people to afford big-ticket purchases such as houses and cars.)

Although CPI data show clear patterns in consumer spending and demand, another explanation, that corporations are fueling inflation by raising prices in order to increase profits, has been gaining steam in recent months. Some economists are taking a closer look at the idea that corporations’ profit margins could be playing a role in keeping inflation high—especially after recent earnings calls in which corporations reported that profits are up even as they are selling fewer goods.

Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, argues that a host of geopolitical factors have provided “cover” for firms to raise prices. Weber refers to the phenomenon as “sellers’ inflation,” but others call this “greedflation,” “excuseflation,” and “profit-led inflation.” Companies wrestled back pricing power earlier in the pandemic—and consumers, seeing high prices at the gas station and everywhere else, came to expect higher prices. Now, some ask, are companies doing more than simply responding to costs, and instead just ramping up prices to pad their margins—and in the process, feeding inflation like a pandemic baker feeding sourdough starter?

“If you believe that big corporations are the ones who are pushing up prices,” Rakeen Mabud, the chief economist at the progressive nonprofit Groundwork Collaborative, told me, “then there are a lot more tools in our toolbox” to address the issue. “We can go way beyond the Fed,” she added. Those tools, she told me, include tax policies that target excess profits or incentivize productive investment in firms. “We’re really seeing a big rethink of some orthodox understandings of inflation and its causes,” she said.

Conlon, however, is interested in possible factors beyond greed that may be pushing companies to raise prices. “Strong demand will also generate rising prices, rising profits, higher output,” he told me. He and his colleagues recently published a paper that found that, from 2018 to 2022, there was no correlation between the companies whose markups have risen the most and the industries in which prices have risen the quickest.

The exact causes and dynamics of our current inflationary moment may take time to unravel—Conlon predicted that in a few years, we may have more information about how companies behaved these past few years. These data will be worth a close look, especially if shocks to the economy continue apace in years to come. It’s become a bit of a cliché to say that we are living in unprecedented times. But a rash of recent, intersecting crises—supply-chain snarls, the war in Ukraine, elevated gas prices, bird flu—did scramble consumer spending, leading companies to raise prices over the past few years. Things may stay strange. Understanding what happened could inform how we respond to future shocks.

I will leave you with some good news, after all this talk of disaster: Global inflation is not all Beyoncé’s fault, though Swedish economists said this week that her Renaissance tour in Stockholm caused a surge in local prices—“It’s quite astonishing for a single event,” one economist told the Financial Times. One person, even an amazing one, can’t single-handedly cause inflation. But her music can probably alleviate some of the pain of thinking through all of this.

Today’s News

After a multiyear investigation into George Floyd’s murder, the Justice Department released a report finding frequent instances of excessive force by Minneapolis police officers, and unlawful discrimination against Black and Native American people.

The gunman who killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018 was convicted by a federal jury.

Several federal agencies, including the U.S. Department of Energy, were affected by a global hacking campaign, according to officials.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman reflects on the powerful weirdness of Cormac McCarthy.

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P.S.

I know I cannot compete with Tom Nichols when it comes to 1980s movie references. For everyone’s sake, I will not try. But I did happen to watch a film from 1987 during my time off between jobs that I liked very much. The Éric Rohmer movie, whose title translates from French to Boyfriends and Girlfriends, is a New Wave romantic comedy about, yes, boyfriends and girlfriends. But to my pleasant surprise, it was also about jobs, and how a new class of suburban young people was fitting work into their lives. Against a backdrop of pools and excellent outfits, the characters discuss bureaucracy, commuting into Paris, and having or not having a boss. I think a lot about “the future of work,” so it was fun to dip into the past of work too.

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.

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