[Initial draft] The popular debate underpinning our entire social contract is being creeping drugged — like if GHB/GBL was "added information". Generative AI oligopolies and authoritarian state regimes are slipping cognitive algorithms into our information ecosystem, disabling our collective capacity to think, deliberate, and govern ourselves.
Confronted with this crisis of institutional decay, the tech elite have offered two dominant, deeply flawed responses. But there is a Third Way.
The Two Technocratic Illusions
To understand how to fix the public square, we must first look at the escapist blueprints currently capturing the Silicon Valley imagination:
1. The "Exit" Strategy (Balaji Srinivasan’s Network State)
This school of thou…
