In the archive, winter behaves like a bureaucrat: it stamps everything with the same dull light.
The building itself wanted to be trusted. It had clean lines, earnest signage, and the kind of silence that implies a moral lesson. I was there for something harmless—some municipal history, a thread of paper that could be tugged without pulling down a wall. But harmlessness is not a stable property of archives. It's more like a temporary agreement between the reader and the dust.
A clerk in a cardigan slid a brown box across the desk. The box had the look of other boxes—modest, square, unloved—but it carried that faint odor of glue and old patience. Inside were letters tied with twine and a ledger whose cover had been handled so often the cardboard shone.
I opened the ledger and saw, immediately, what it was: not secrets, not exactly, but the record of how "public life" becomes private property. Dates. Amounts. Names. The kinds of names that appear on buildings. The kinds of names that are pronounced with a soft reverence at dinners where nobody discusses salaries.
On the inside cover was a sentence, written in a meticulous hand:
The country is a mirror, but the mirror charges admission.
The handwriting belonged to my uncle Tom—an uncle by accident, as uncles often are. We collect them the way a coastline collects driftwood: storms deliver them, and later the family pretends it was intentional.
Tom had worked in the orbit of politics for decades. He was neither an idealist nor a cynic. Idealists believe the system is good. Cynics believe the system is bad and also unstoppable. Tom believed the system was bad and changeable, which is a more exhausting creed. He still believed in shame. It's a useful emotion, shame: it implies a standard.
The last time I saw him was in a hospital room in New England. He was too tall for the bed, too thin for his own jokes, and too stubborn to let illness win the conversation. On his bedside table lay a book with graphs—lots of them—so many graphs you could mistake it for a weather report about the future. He tapped the book and said, almost tenderly, "This explains why people keep insisting the ladder is still there while the rungs have been sawed off."
Then he turned the page like it was guilty.
"You think democracy is rules," he said. "It's not. Democracy is a bargaining relationship."
I asked him what he meant, and he made the little shrug that meant: you know perfectly well what I mean, but you're hoping I'll say it politely.
"It's bargaining," he repeated, "and some people arrive with lawyers."
Tom's humor wasn't decorative; it was a tool for removing varnish. He didn't treat corruption as an exceptional scandal. He treated it as a plumbing problem: the hidden pipes that determine what comes out of your tap.
That ledger in the archive—his ledger—was the plumbing diagram.
I turned its pages slowly, as though speed might offend the dead. There were notes in the margins: "met at fundraiser," "introduced by X," "committee," "follow-up," "call." It wasn't cinematic. No dramatic envelopes sliding across tables. No villains twirling mustaches in dim rooms. It was worse than cinematic. It was normal.
Legal. Administrative. Boring.
The ledger's genius was its boredom. It made influence look like what it often is: paperwork with charm.
The sentence on the cover stayed with me as I read. The mirror charges admission. That's not just a line; it's a diagnosis. A country is supposed to be a place where you can recognize yourself among others—where the public sphere is a shared room, and the law is the same ceiling above every head. But what happens when the ability to see clearly—what's happening, who is deciding, why the outcomes keep repeating—requires payment?
Payment in money, yes. But also payment in time, attention, expertise, exhaustion. A kind of taxation of the soul.
The mirror charges admission, and most people arrive without cash.
I. The Town That Made Things
Tom was born in one of those American towns that used to make things. The town was not picturesque. It had no quaint cruelty to redeem it for tourists. It had the honest ugliness of industry: streets that were built to move workers, not to charm pedestrians; houses that were built to last long enough, not to be loved; a river that carried the metallic smell of effort.
His father worked at a factory until the factory closed. After the closure, his father became the kind of man who sits in a chair in the living room as if waiting for instructions from a government that no longer has his address. His mother cleaned houses for people who had "nice" kitchens—the kind of kitchens where the faucet looks like it has a passport.
Tom got a scholarship and escaped to a university that seemed designed by architects who feared spontaneity. He studied political science, which is what young Americans study when they want to be disappointed professionally.
He moved to Washington, D.C. and learned the city's two principal religions: networking and parking. In that city, introductions are a currency more stable than cash. "Meet so-and-so" is the local sacrament.
One evening in his late twenties, he attended a fundraiser. He wore a suit that fit him the way a borrowed identity fits: tight at the shoulders, hopeful at the buttons. The wine was free, and he drank too much of it, because free wine in America is always a little ideological. It suggests that generosity exists, but only temporarily and indoors.
He stood near a donor—an older man with a confident smile, the kind of smile that implies you are both welcome and irrelevant—and listened to a description of a ski house delivered as though it were a constitutional right. The donor asked Tom where he was from.
Tom said the name of his town.
The donor nodded. "Ah," he said, "one of those places."
Tom, who could be reckless, asked: "One of what places?"
"One of those places that used to make things," the donor said. He said it with mild nostalgia, as though the loss were aesthetic, like the closing of a charming old theater.
Tom later told me that in that moment he understood how a single country can contain two emotional geographies. There are people who feel economic change as personal injury. And there are people who feel it as scenery.
The same policies. The same global shifts. The same redistribution of risk and reward.
One side bleeds. The other side takes photographs.
That night, Tom began taking notes. Not because he wanted revenge, but because he wanted clarity. He believed that you cannot argue with the fog. You have to measure it.
Eventually he began to keep a ledger.
II. The Ledger's Calm
The ledger is not a scandalous object. It is an almost sacred object in its calm. It is the kind of thing that makes you feel foolish for ever believing in a clear separation between public interest and private advantage.
As I read, I started noticing patterns, the way you notice patterns in family arguments. Certain names recurring. Certain dates clustering around key votes. Certain relationships—formal and informal—appearing like faint pencil lines connecting the obvious ink.
The ledger did not say: Here is corruption.
It said: Here is how the world works when the price of access is not universal.
A thought came to me, unwelcome and stubborn: perhaps the most efficient form of corruption is the kind that is legal. Illegal corruption admits that it is wrong. Legal corruption calls itself "participation," "stakeholder engagement," "support."
There is a peculiar moral comfort in legality. It allows people to do harmful things with clean hands. They can say, sincerely, "It's allowed," and mistake that for "It's right."
The ledger made me think about a phrase that is constantly used to describe modern democracies: "the marketplace of ideas." People say it like it's flattering. They say it like it's freedom.
But marketplaces have owners. Marketplaces have gatekeepers. Marketplaces price out the poor.
In a true marketplace, the richest participant does not merely speak louder. He buys the microphones, hires the ushers, and changes the architecture so that every conversation takes place near his booth.
Once you think of politics as a marketplace, it becomes difficult not to see how inequality affects the very shape of speech.
Tom had once put it like this, in a letter to me: "When wealth becomes permanent, it becomes policy."
I didn't fully understand what he meant until I saw his ledger.
III. The Machinery of Consent
People love to say technology is neutral. They say it like a lullaby. It helps them sleep while the world changes.
But technology is a system of choices made durable. And choices have politics. Even a default setting has a politics. Especially a default setting.
The modern citizen lives inside an ecosystem of devices and services that extract personal information like a miner extracts ore. It is done continuously, quietly, with the efficiency of habit. We are told it is for convenience. We are told it is for personalization. We are told it is free.
Nothing is free. If you aren't paying, you are being measured.
Personal data is not just information about you. It is the raw material for predicting you, nudging you, shaping you. It allows the construction of profiles that are more governable than people. A person has a conscience and a memory and a capacity for surprise. A profile is obedient.
A profile can be sold.
The old public sphere was messy but legible. There were newspapers with addresses. Broadcasters who could be shamed. Parties that could be voted out. The gatekeepers were flawed, but they were tangible.
The new gatekeepers are systems—ad markets, recommendation engines, data brokers, private rules written in public language. They do not have addresses. They have terms of service. They do not blush. They issue updates.
This changes the nature of political persuasion.
Persuasion used to be public argument: speeches, debates, pamphlets, rallies. It could be manipulative and ugly, yes, but it was at least visible.
Now persuasion can be private and individualized. It can be delivered as a whisper to a particular kind of person at the perfect vulnerable moment. It can be tested and refined the way a company refines a product. It can be designed not to convince you of an idea, but to trigger you into a mood.
Outrage is not a side effect of this system. Outrage is often the fuel.
The algorithms that curate our attention are not moral agents. They do not ask what is true. They ask what keeps you looking. Engagement becomes the metric of value. The most arousing content wins.
This is why extremism thrives online. Extremism is emotionally efficient. It simplifies the world. It offers certainty. It offers enemies. It offers belonging. It turns politics into a story with villains.
And when politics becomes a story, people begin to behave like fans rather than citizens. They defend their side the way they defend a sports team. Facts become optional. Loyalty becomes the virtue. Doubt becomes betrayal.
A democracy can survive disagreement. It can even survive anger. But it struggles to survive when the public sphere becomes a machine for manufacturing tribal arousal.
IV. The Consent Economy: A Systems Anatomy
The machinery of consent has been privatized. And once a society privatizes persuasion, it is only a matter of time before persuasion becomes a revenue stream.
This is where the ledger and the data economy begin to feel like two volumes of the same book.
In one volume, money buys access to lawmakers and regulators. In the other volume, money buys access to minds. The end result is the same: the architecture of choice is shaped by those who can afford to shape it.
The following table maps the major actors in what we might call the Consent Economy—the ecosystem of companies whose business models depend on capturing, monetizing, or influencing attention, data, and political access.
| Company | Primary Domain | Consent Mechanism | Democratic Friction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alphabet (Google) | Search, advertising, cloud | Behavioral prediction from search, location, browsing | Ad-funded information hierarchy; lobbying on antitrust, AI regulation |
| Meta (Facebook) | Social networking, advertising | Engagement optimization; micro-targeted political ads | Amplification of outrage; election interference vectors |
| Amazon | E-commerce, cloud, logistics | Purchase prediction; Alexa ambient surveillance | Market power over sellers; labor surveillance; AWS as government contractor |
| Apple | Devices, services, App Store | Platform gatekeeping; privacy as product differentiation | App Store taxation; selective enforcement; China compliance |
| Microsoft | Enterprise software, cloud, AI | Workplace surveillance tools; LinkedIn professional data | Government contracts; AI governance lobbying; bundling practices |
| X Corp (Twitter) | Social media, information | Real-time discourse shaping; algorithmic amplification | Content moderation as political lever; verification as class system |
| ByteDance (TikTok) | Short-form video, advertising | Algorithmic attention capture; youth engagement optimization | Foreign data access concerns; attention economy extremes |
| Palantir | Government analytics, surveillance | Data integration across law enforcement, immigration | Opacity of algorithmic policing; ICE contracts; predictive systems |
| Oracle | Enterprise data, cloud, advertising | Consumer data aggregation (BlueKai, Datalogix acquisitions) | Health data access; government database contracts |
| Salesforce | CRM, enterprise cloud | Customer behavior tracking across industries | Lobbying data commodification; "ethical AI" positioning |
| Acxiom (Liveramp) | Data brokerage | Consumer profiles from offline/online fusion | Invisible data aggregation; political targeting enablement |
| Experian | Credit scoring, data brokerage | Financial behavior surveillance; marketing data | Credit as social control; data breach exposure |
| Equifax | Credit scoring, identity | Financial identity infrastructure | Breach accountability gap; mandatory participation |
| TransUnion | Credit scoring, marketing data | Employment screening; tenant screening | Housing access gatekeeping; algorithmic discrimination |
| Clearview AI | Facial recognition | Biometric surveillance for law enforcement | Consent-free image scraping; authoritarian export potential |
| Coinbase | Cryptocurrency, analytics | Financial transaction surveillance (Tracer contracts) | Government surveillance tool sales; regulatory arbitrage |
| OpenAI | Generative AI | Training on human-created content; API access hierarchy | Labor displacement; synthetic misinformation; safety-washing |
| Anthropic | AI safety, enterprise AI | Constitutional AI; enterprise deployment | Concentration of AI capability; influence over AI governance discourse |
| Nvidia | AI compute infrastructure | Hardware gatekeeping for AI development | Compute as geopolitical lever; supply chain concentration |
| Northrop Grumman | Defense, surveillance | Government surveillance systems; border technology | Military-industrial data integration; accountability gaps |
| Lockheed Martin | Defense, intelligence | Intelligence community systems; biometric databases | Revolving door with regulators; classification as opacity |
| Koch Industries | Industrial, political | Political influence networks; donor-advised funds | Dark money infrastructure; regulatory capture campaigns |
| Blackstone | Private equity, real estate | Housing financialization; data center investment | Algorithmic rent-setting; eviction optimization |
| BlackRock | Asset management, ESG data | Proxy voting concentration; corporate governance influence | Systemic ownership concentration; ESG as reputation management |
| Cambridge Analytica (legacy) | Political data analytics | Psychographic targeting; consent-laundering via apps | Election manipulation template; regulatory precedent |
When Tom said democracy is bargaining, he meant that political outcomes are negotiated. But bargaining assumes some rough equality of the parties. It assumes neither side can unilaterally set the terms.
What happens when one side owns the building?
It's not just that the wealthy can donate. It's that they can hire lobbyists who work full time on details that ordinary citizens cannot possibly track. They can fund think tanks that produce research-like arguments. They can purchase media. They can sponsor conferences. They can threaten to move jobs. They can promise jobs. They can litigate endlessly.
They can wait.
Patience is one of the richest resources. The poor cannot afford to wait.
And so the bargaining relationship becomes asymmetrical. The citizen becomes less of a partner and more of a spectator.
There is a particular sadness to being a spectator in one's own political life. It feels like watching your house being renovated by strangers who do not live there.
V. The Hospital Room
The hospital room returns to me now, because that's where Tom's thinking became clearest. Illness does something to people: it makes them either sentimental or precise. Tom became precise.
"Everybody keeps talking about opportunity," he said. "But opportunity isn't an atmosphere. It's engineered."
He told me that when people argue about inequality, they often focus on the richest individuals—names, faces, villains. But the deeper issue is structure: the way wealth accumulates and then defends itself. The way the returns on capital—money that already exists—can exceed the returns on labor. The way inheritance returns as a hidden government.
"I don't care if someone is rich," he said. "I care if the society becomes hereditary."
Hereditary is the word that always sounds like a medical condition. Perhaps it is.
A hereditary society is one where the future is distributed at birth. Some children are born into rooms with maps, tutors, connections, safety nets. Other children are born into rooms with thin walls and urgent bills. Both children may be told they can become anything. One child can believe it. The other child learns to call it "motivation."
A hereditary society is one where failure is not evenly priced. Some people can fail and recover. Some people fail and fall out of the story entirely.
The old promise of democracy was not that everyone would be equal in outcome, but that everyone would be equal in dignity and in political standing—one person, one vote, one voice.
But political standing becomes complicated when economic standing becomes extreme. A person with vast wealth does not simply have more comfort. He has more options. He has more leverage. He has more capacity to shape the environment in which everyone else chooses.
There is a reason the wealthy often speak fondly of "freedom." They live in an abundance of freedom. For them, freedom is not an abstraction. It is a daily experience. They can choose schools, neighborhoods, doctors, lawyers. They can choose privacy. They can choose to ignore bad news.
The poor live in a scarcity of freedom. Their choices are constrained not by moral weakness but by reality. They do not choose between schools; they choose between rent and groceries. They do not choose privacy; they choose compliance.
A society can call itself free while distributing freedom unevenly. That is one of the system's favorite tricks.
VI. Rights as Mundane Protections
There is a way to write about human rights that makes them sound like marble. Declarations. Principles. Universal truths carved into stone.
But rights are lived as mundane protections. A safe workplace. A fair wage. A landlord who cannot simply throw you out. A police officer who is accountable. A court that treats you as a person. A government agency that cannot sell your data. A platform that does not expose you to harassment as a form of engagement.
Rights die not only in dramatic tyrannies but in small defaults.
This is why the private ownership of digital infrastructure matters. A platform can decide whether your messages are encrypted. A platform can decide whether to cooperate with a government's demand for user data. A platform can decide whether political propaganda is labeled, or whether it is treated as "just content." A platform can decide whether harassment is punished, or whether it is allowed to flourish because it keeps people clicking.
A company can say it cares about rights and then design systems that erode them. The erosion is often subtle. It happens through friction, through opacity, through the slow normalization of surveillance.
There is an old trick in governance: turn moral questions into technical ones. When you can describe an issue as "optimization," you can make it seem natural. When you can describe an issue as "efficiency," you can hide the human cost.
But efficiency for whom? Optimization toward what? Those are always political questions.
VII. Climate as a Second Ledger
Climate enters the story like a second ledger.
There is a particular kind of modern comfort that comes from beautiful numbers. Targets. Timelines. Commitments. Scope 1, 2, 3. Offsets. Net-zero.
Numbers can be honest. They can also be ceremonial. A company can publish a glossy report and lobby against climate policy. A company can buy offsets and avoid changing its own supply chain. A company can claim progress while shifting emissions elsewhere.
Here, too, the structure matters.
Climate is not just a technical problem. It is a distributional problem. Who benefits from the carbon economy? Who pays the costs? Who can adapt? Who can move? Who can buy insurance? Who will be forced to migrate? Who will die in heat waves?
The same inequality that shapes political influence shapes climate vulnerability. People with money can buy protection. People without money live with exposure.
And technology companies—especially those building energy-hungry systems—occupy a complicated role. They can help reduce emissions in some sectors through efficiency. But they also build new appetites. Data centers hum. Devices multiply. AI systems demand power. The future is being built in server farms that feel like factories without the romance.
The question is not whether a company says it is sustainable. The question is whether its sustainability requires real structural change or merely elegant accounting.
Elegant accounting is to climate what legal corruption is to democracy: it makes wrongdoing feel respectable.
VIII. The Body as Data Stream
Employee rights are often discussed as though they were an internal corporate matter. They are not. They are a public matter. The conditions of work shape the distribution of power in society.
When workers cannot bargain collectively, wages stagnate. When wages stagnate, families become fragile. When families become fragile, politics becomes volatile. Volatility becomes profitable for those who can monetize attention. The system feeds itself.
Work in the modern economy is increasingly monitored. Productivity is measured. Behavior is scored. In some workplaces, the body becomes a data stream: scans per hour, "time off task." In other workplaces, the mind becomes a data stream: engagement metrics, performance dashboards, surveillance disguised as "collaboration tools."
Measurement can be useful. It can also be coercive.
Surveillance at work does not merely optimize labor. It changes the human experience of labor. It turns autonomy into compliance. It turns dignity into a variable.
The most unsettling part is how quickly people normalize it. They begin to speak of being tracked the way they speak of weather—unpleasant, but inevitable.
Nothing is inevitable. Systems are designed.
When a society accepts the erosion of worker power, it accepts a future in which inequality becomes stable. Stable inequality is not merely unfair. It is politically dangerous. It creates a permanent class of people who feel excluded from the bargain.
IX. The Ledger's Tone
The ledger's most haunting feature was not the money. It was the tone.
The tone was not conspiratorial. It was managerial.
The notes were written the way one writes about scheduling: "call," "follow up," "discuss." It made influence feel like routine maintenance. Which, of course, it often is.
There is a particular cruelty to managerial language. It can describe moral harm as though it were logistics. It can treat the shaping of policy like the ordering of office chairs.
This tone is also the tone of many tech governance documents. Terms of service. Trust and safety policies. Community guidelines. Everything is rendered into the language of management.
The country becomes a platform. The citizen becomes a user. The constitution becomes a set of guidelines. The public sphere becomes a feed.
In this translation, something is lost: the sense that politics is not a service but a shared fate.
X. The System's Hunger
At this point, you may be tempted to ask: what does any of this have to do with "right-wing politics"?
The honest answer is that the system does not care about left or right. It cares about incentives. If outrage is profitable, outrage will be cultivated. If deregulation is profitable, deregulation will be supported. If labor weakness is profitable, labor will be weakened. If political polarization makes users more engaged, polarization becomes a feature.
Extremist movements—often on the right in many contemporary contexts, sometimes elsewhere—have learned to exploit this. They use the efficiency of outrage. They use the simplicity of scapegoats. They use the algorithm's hunger.
Support does not always look like endorsement. Often it looks like permissiveness. It looks like "neutrality." It looks like platforms insisting they are merely conduits while their design choices act as accelerants.
A platform can say, sincerely, "We don't take sides," while its systems amplify the side that best exploits engagement mechanics.
Neutrality, in a world of asymmetric propaganda, is not neutral. It is a structural choice.
Meanwhile, money flows through politics in a way that rarely advertises itself as ideology. Donations are framed as "access," not alignment. Lobbying is framed as "education," not coercion. Trade groups speak in the language of "competitiveness," which is a polite word for "let us keep our advantage."
The result is that certain political outcomes become more likely—not because a company loves a particular ideology, but because it loves the conditions under which it thrives: low regulation, weak labor, low taxes, permissive data extraction, tolerance for monopoly.
When a society is stressed by inequality, some political entrepreneurs offer a story: your pain is not caused by structural distribution. Your pain is caused by them—immigrants, minorities, cosmopolitans, intellectuals, the media, the "deep state." The story is emotionally satisfying. It converts diffuse economic anxiety into moral anger.
Anger is extremely clickable.
The system smiles.
XI. The Ordinary City
After I finished reading Tom's ledger, I went outside. Not because I had somewhere to go, but because the archive's air had become too thick with implication.
The city around me was doing ordinary things. People bought coffee. They hurried. They checked their phones. They kissed each other quickly at street corners as though affection were an appointment. The ordinary is where the grand structures hide. A society is not built out of speeches; it is built out of routines.
I thought about the mirror again. The mirror charges admission.
What does it mean to charge admission to recognition?
It means that to understand what is happening—to see clearly who benefits, who pays, how decisions are made—you need resources. You need time to read. You need access to information. You need the ability to interpret it. You need the energy to keep caring after you've been disappointed.
The wealthy can buy this. They can hire people to do it for them. They can buy expertise. They can buy legal defense. They can buy policy influence. They can buy privacy. They can buy insulation from consequences.
Most people cannot.
So the system begins to feel like a kind of theater in which you are allowed to attend, but only some people are allowed backstage. The audience is told it is participating because it is clapping.
When Tom said democracy is bargaining, he meant that without rough equality, bargaining becomes domination with polite language.
The mirror, then, is not merely reflective. It is transactional.
XII. The Borgesian Superstition
There is a Borgesian superstition that a book can contain the fate of a person, and that a person can mistake the book for the world. In that superstition, the danger is not the book's lies but its completeness. If the book feels complete, you stop looking elsewhere.
Tom's ledger felt complete in a way that scared me. It explained too much. And explanations can become cages.
A society that sees itself clearly might decide to change. A society that sees itself only through paid mirrors might decide it has no choice.
I don't want inevitability. I distrust inevitability the way I distrust people who are never wrong.
Systems are built. Laws are written. Defaults are chosen. Incentives are engineered. That means they can be rebuilt, rewritten, re-chosen, re-engineered.
But rebuilding requires something that is scarce: collective will.
Collective will is hard to manufacture in a society that has been atomized. A society that has been trained to think of itself as a marketplace struggles to act like a community. Consumers demand. Citizens deliberate. Deliberation is slower, less intoxicating, less profitable.
This is why the architecture of attention matters so much. A society cannot govern itself if it cannot sustain shared attention long enough to understand shared problems.
If the public sphere is a feed optimized for arousal, self-government becomes a performance.
A performance is not a bargain. It is a show.
XIII. Are We Still a People?
Tom's last letter to me was short. He was never sentimental on paper; he saved sentimentality for jokes.
He wrote:
"People keep asking whether we're still a democracy. Wrong question. The question is: are we still a people?"
I reread that sentence now and think about what it implies.
A people is not merely a population. A people is a shared sense of obligation. It is the belief that the bargain includes everyone, even those who cannot pay the admission fee.
A people is the opposite of hereditary distribution. It is the opposite of privatized persuasion. It is the opposite of a system that reduces humans to profiles.
To be a people is to insist that the mirror be free.
XIV. The Objections
I can imagine the objections, because I have made them myself.
"This is just how modern life is."
"No one has time for this."
"The system is too big."
"They'll always find a loophole."
All of these may be true, and still be a surrender.
The most damaging political emotion is not anger; it is resignation.
Resignation is the emotion that makes domination durable. It is the emotion that tells people: the bargain is over; you were never invited.
Tom refused resignation. Not because he was optimistic—he wasn't—but because he had a craftsman's pride. He believed systems could be repaired. He believed that if you knew where the pipes were, you could reroute them.
His ledger was not only an indictment. It was a map.
Maps, of course, can be used by anyone.
That is the small hope inside the archive: that the record of how power works can become the instruction manual for how to limit it.
XV. The Scenery of Loss
I sometimes think about that donor at the fundraiser, telling Tom that his town was "one of those places." I think about the contempt disguised as nostalgia. I think about how easy it is to treat other people's lives as scenery.
A society that allows extreme inequality trains its elites to lose empathy. It trains its non-elites to lose trust. The bargain becomes brittle. Politics becomes theatrical. Every election begins to feel like a disaster movie with familiar special effects.
In such a society, people crave simple stories. They crave enemies. They crave certainty.
The worst political entrepreneurs offer certainty in exchange for cruelty.
The system, hungry for engagement, amplifies them.
The mirror becomes a weapon.
XVI. The Unfamiliar Suspicion
A few weeks after the archive, I found myself looking at my phone with an unfamiliar suspicion. I could feel the device measuring me, not in any supernatural way, but in a banal, statistical way. I could feel the invisible economy of my attention.
I imagined a stranger—no, not a stranger; a system—knowing what makes me angry, what makes me lonely, what makes me want to belong. I imagined that knowledge being sold.
It is one thing to be influenced by a newspaper editorial. It is another thing to be influenced by a personalized stream designed to keep you emotionally activated.
The latter feels like a private invasion.
And the invasion is often legal.
Legal invasions are the most comfortable kind for invaders.
XVII. The Terms of the Bargain
So where does this leave us—those of us who are not donors with ski houses, not executives with glossy reports, not lawmakers with fundraising schedules?
It leaves us in the bargain.
A bargain, at minimum, requires terms. It requires boundaries. It requires enforcement. It requires the possibility of saying no.
A society that wants to remain a people must insist on certain conditions:
That personal information not be treated as a natural resource to be extracted.
That political influence not be sold like advertising inventory.
That work not be reduced to surveillance.
That climate commitments be structural rather than ceremonial.
That the public sphere be governed in the public interest, not as a revenue machine.
I'm aware these sound like ideals, and ideals are easy to mock. But the alternative is resignation, and resignation is a kind of slow civic death.
The bargain can be repaired. But only if enough people believe it is still a bargain, and not a trick.
XVIII. The Brown Cardboard Sleep
I returned the ledger to the box, tied the letters back with the twine, and slid everything into its brown cardboard sleep. The clerk in the cardigan did not look up. She had the calm of someone who has learned that history is endless.
Outside, the winter light was still undecided.
I walked past a bookstore window where a children's book about democracy sat on display. The cover showed smiling people voting. It was cheerful, the way children's books are cheerful about difficult things.
I tried to imagine a children's book about democracy that included lobbying, data brokers, monopolies, and algorithmic outrage. It would not be cheerful. It would be true. It would probably not be purchased by many parents.
But perhaps that is the point: we prefer the cheerful mirror, even when it lies. We prefer the mirror that flatters us, even when it charges admission.
Tom's sentence, however, did not flatter.
The country is a mirror, but the mirror charges admission.
If we want to remain a people, we will have to do something that is both ordinary and revolutionary:
We will have to make the mirror free.
And then, having made it free, we will have to look.
References & Notes
Political economy of data:
- Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
- Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015)
- Julie Cohen, Between Truth and Power (2019)
Lobbying and political influence:
- Lee Drutman, The Business of America Is Lobbying (2015)
- Jacob Hacker & Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics (2010)
- OpenSecrets data on tech industry lobbying expenditures
Platform governance:
- Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet (2018)
- Kate Klonick, "The New Governors," Harvard Law Review (2018)
- EU Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act frameworks
Algorithmic amplification:
- Eytan Bakshy et al., "Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News," Science (2015)
- Filippo Menczer & Thomas Hills, "The Attention Economy," Scientific American (2020)
- Congressional testimony on recommendation algorithms and radicalization
Data brokerage and surveillance:
- FTC reports on data broker practices
- Privacy International investigations
- State-level data privacy legislation (CCPA, state comprehensive laws)
Labor and workplace surveillance:
- Ifeoma Ajunwa, "The Quantified Worker," Columbia Law Review (2018)
- National Labor Relations Board guidance on electronic monitoring
- Amazon warehouse surveillance documentation
Climate and corporate accountability:
- InfluenceMap reports on climate lobbying
- Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor methodologies
- SEC climate disclosure rule developments
(All legal and market developments current to December 2025.)