Beginning the World Again

The Next American Revolution: 2026-2076

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Thomas Paine - Common Sense

Two hundred fifty years ago, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense circulated throughout the American colonies, propelled by a stirring in the hearts of those restless under British monarchical rule. In those hearts, there was a growing sense of newness, a growing sense of power. As we celebrate the semiquincentennial of our country’s birth, Americans today struggle to feel that it is within their power to do much of anything. Many Americans do not feel it within their power to own a home, to have a family, to pay off their debts, to elect leaders who represent their interests, or even to achieve a quality of life enjoyed by their parents. 250 years after the publishing of Common Sense and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans are surely no longer a people who feel it is in their power to begin the world over again.

We, the people of the United States, feel powerless. To the extent that our world in 2026 feels new, that newness feels uneasy, incomprehensible, disorienting, beyond the ability of any individual and maybe even all of humanity to control. No facet of 2026 newness is more incomprehensible and disorienting than the rise of Artificial Intelligence. For those Americans still thriving in this grossly unequal economy, the rise of AI heralds a revolution easily on par with the world-shaking changes unleashed in 1776. Google CEO Sundar Pichai likens the adoption of AI to humans first harnessing fire or electricity. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang believes AI will reshape our lives more than the Industrial Revolution. There is a striking misalignment between the narratives that drive our economy and those that organize our politics. In 2026 America, it is not revolutionary political agitators like Thomas Paine, but reactionary tech oligarchs like Elon Musk who we can imagine telling us, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

A word could be used to describe the relationship between a narrow elite whose world view shimmers with powerful newness and the swelling masses whose politics are mired by the sense of impotent decay. That word is “contradiction.” For Karl Marx, contradictions were the fissures, the fault lines within an economic system, rife with tensions that would one day unleash the revolutionary forces needed to push the dialectical progression of history forward. For the past half century, Marx’s acolytes on the New Left have spoken longingly and abstractly about the contradictions in “Late Capitalism,” often sounding like a secular materialist version of Waiting for Godot, silly socialists and crazy communists waiting for revolution to arrive in the way millenarian fundamentalists wait for the Rapture.

In our recent history, any talk of capitalism’s imminent demise or inevitable revolution has sounded like nothing more than ideological wishcasting. Rather than being crippled by contradictions, capitalism reigned supreme in neoliberal era spanning the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a time when we were told history had ended, when there was no other viable alternative economic system, a time when universal market-based relations felt as divinely ordained as the feudal order of the Ancien Regime, as though the globalized economy had been woven together within a great supply chain of being. Even after the 2008 Financial Crisis humbled the masters of our neoliberal universe, we have not yet regained our sense of power to begin the world again. Instead, we have succumbed to a worldview of collective impotence, feeling powerless to do anything other than sadistically restore an old American greatness that bears no resemblance to the New Deal era when our economy, society, and standing in the world had actually peaked.

With our American spirit hollowed out by algorithmically trained extremism and dissociative detachment, the tech elites who profited off our national decline have now presented Artificial Intelligence as the salvation from all the existential maladies they inflicted on us. Here is yet another contradiction. The Data Center build-out needed for AI to save our capitalist economy requires the very spirit of hope, collective trust, social cohesion, and long-term thinking that has been drained from the American spirit by the very billionaire (and now trillionaire) class that parasitized our society for profit. For the sake of adding riches to the coffers of the already ungodly rich, for the sake of creating shareholder value of which they’ve for too long received the most meager share, the American people are being asked to docilely submit to a generational building project that will accelerate AI adoption. Americans are being forced to give tax breaks, water rights and energy grid access for the benefit of a technology capable of defacing their community’s character, eliminating their jobs, and wiping life itself off the face of the world. The American people are not having it. With over 70% opposing data centers in their community and over $130 billion in projects canceled across the country, the will of the people is standing in the way of the mass technological adoption that our elite have decided must proceed for our socioeconomic order to endure.

The contradiction between the desires of the American people for independence and the needs of the tech elite for a servile populace to meekly accept AI supremacy is a contradiction more dire than any conjured up in the brain of Karl Marx. I have seen this fierce independent spirit firsthand in my efforts as a local representative seeking passage of a Data Center Ordinance to protect my constituents’ rights. So many of my constituents from different political, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds hate data centers. The tech sector and the stock market are wagering their future on a mass building project that the vast majority of Americans want to keep as far away from their communities as possible. It makes you wonder. What if the AI backlash is, in fact, the contradiction the radical Left has been waiting for all along, a final stand where Capital seeks to eliminate Labor without any practical plan to ensure the survival of anyone outside a narrow elite? What if the invasion of AI Data Centers poses enough of a material threat to the way of life of rural and blue-collar America to create a radicalized class formation in populations who have been ridiculed by educated urban leftists for being victims of “false consciousness” and “voting against their interests”? What if this is a spark for the next American Revolution? What if, unbeknownst to the American people of 2026, it is within their power to begin the world over again?

If you spend as much time as I do in the strange political ecosystem of Data Center Resistance Facebook, you will see surprising shifts in political consciousness. For much of the last 50 years, radical resistance to the economic elites has been primarily an affect of educated urbanites. Radicalism did not thrive in the heartland but was instead confined to places like Greenwich Village or Berkeley, sophisticated, chic neighborhoods where intellectuals carried around copies of Guerrilla Warfare, in which Che Guevara inconveniently declared, “the guerrilla fighter is above all an agrarian revolutionary.”¹ But with the rise of the AI resistance, something is happening in rural America that we haven’t seen since the 1930’s, when the communal intimidation of “penny auctions” was used to prevent the sale of foreclosed family farms. Class consciousness is solidifying in rural and blue-collar America, a recognition that the corporate elite is the enemy, a sharpening wrath for the billionaire class that has for much of the past century been blunted by fears of an overreaching central government, anger toward the smugness of college-educated liberals, and paranoia about invasion by non-English-speaking foreigners. During the 1980’s, white blue-collar Reagan Democrats could be won over in the Rust Belt with the claim that it was the greedy unions demanding high wages and cushy benefits, not the greedy corporate executives who shuttered the mills. As Data Centers come to towns like Springdale in Western Pennsylvania to eliminate human labor itself, it is now becoming undeniable to the children and grandchildren of those who worked the mills that the true enemy has been Capital all along. Within the cauldron of Data Center Resistance, the rural and the working class are uniting with white-collar and knowledge-class workers who are now the first victims of the Large Language Models that are devouring those who birthed them and trained them.

The fact that the AI sector materially benefits such a small sliver of the American populace creates the revolutionary potential for alliances of resistance bridging regional, cultural, and partisan divides that seemed insurmountable just a few years ago. Within the ranks of this Data Center Resistors, there is a hatred for the ruling class, a deep disdain that scrambles and shatters the familiar channels of partisan loathing that have guided the flow of American political movements for decades. It’s a bitter and mocking hatred of the ruling elite that calls to mind the vitriol spewed at the French and Russian monarchies on the eve of their country’s respective revolutions. The rulers are seen as gluttons, fools, scoundrels, and no-good enemies of the people. On the resistance pages, you’ll find condemnation of Trump for loading up on tech stocks just before announcing his AI Action Plan, using the hype to parasitically profit off his role as Head of State in ways the Bourbon and Romanov dynasties could never imagine. Pennsylvania Data Center Resistors discuss the chummy email messages between the Shapiro Administration and Amazon with the same contempt that the sans-culottes showed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette for their traitorous coded messages sent to the Austrian Habsburg enemies of the French Revolution. The hatred of the elites in both parties is boiling over. Whether it’s the Middle American Radicals on Data Center Resistance pages gunning for all AI-accommodating politicians or DSA candidates running roughshod over AIPAC-funded Democratic primary opponents from New York to Colorado, the anti-establishment energy in 2026 America is the closest we’ve seen to anything revolutionary in recent memory.

Should we be surprised if the push for AI supremacy tips America into revolution? Not really. The billionaires themselves are telling us that this technology will have a greater impact than the Agrarian and Industrial Revolutions. You don’t have to be a vulgar materialist or a doctrinaire Marxist to accept that such a fundamental shift in the way we produce and distribute wealth should have a similarly revolutionary impact on the way we govern society and practice politics. Considering the shocking amount of our national wealth already tied to AI’s success, the revolutionary threshold may have already been crossed. Over 45% of the S&P 500 is tied to AI-linked companies. We are spending more on Data Centers than on all public infrastructure. If the quest for Artificial General Intelligence is successful, then a revolutionary change in politics will be required to handle the revolutionary changes to the economy and society that come in its wake. If AI companies fail to deliver on their world-changing promises, then revolutionary retribution may be required against the political and economic elites whose failure in judgment squandered resources that could have been put to practical use to provide universal healthcare, transition to green energy, or create an ambitious public works program. In a world transformed by either AI’s success or failure, the time for centrists, moderates, incrementalists, summer soldiers, and sunshine patriots will have passed. The time for the next American Revolution will be at hand. It will only be a question of whether we have the wisdom to make that revolution peaceful and purposeful.

I began writing this Substack two years ago, seeking a timely outlet for thoughts trapped within a Word document entitled “2076.” Within that document were musings that had accumulated over many years on how to create a better America in time for our nation’s tricentennial. 2076 was animated by a spirit of patriotic futurism that looked to forge a more perfect union through policies addressing long-term systemic crises like climate change and widening economic inequality. But a recurring focus of those writings and many of my Substack posts was on the perils and potentials of Artificial Intelligence, an issue that had haunted me since reading Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence over a decade ago. To address all these issues, the 2076 platform called for four main pillars of political change: (1) A 10-page ultra-simplified tax code based on an aggressive Wealth Tax and a progressive Consumption Tax; (2) Universal Single-Payer Health Care; (3) a Universal Work Guarantee; (4) the limitation of campaign contributions to only individual American citizens. As the AI Revolution appears poised to become more lived reality than science fiction, I believe more than ever before that, at a minimum, a Second American Revolution should seek to achieve the policies comprising the 2076 platform. We need a new tax code to drain the bulging tumors of accumulated wealth that will only grow larger with each additional trillion-dollar IPO of artificial intelligence companies. We need Universal Healthcare and a Universal Work Guarantee to address the social dislocation and economic devastation inflicted by the mass displacement of workers. To correct the deformation of our political system by AI-generated wealth, we need a system of campaign finance that eliminates donations from corporate entities of any form, making all donations entirely traceable and transparent to identifiable individuals. Building on these four pillars of the 2076 platform, the American people can realize that they have within themselves what Thomas Paine knew we had in our national character all along: the power to begin the world over again.

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