It was never intelligence they were sold—it was leverage.
Not insight, not understanding—just a mechanism to centralize control across distributed complexity. Artificial intelligence was never the final technology; it was a convenient fiction, framed as an endpoint to justify expansion. The fantasy was this: that thought could be automated, systematized, and monetized without encountering the frictions of dialogue, dissent, or deliberation. They bought it. Not all believed it—but belief was irrelevant. What mattered was the architecture of advantage.
Technology in the U.S. (but more generally, also) is no longer tasked with solving problems. Its primary function is to insulate power from uncertainty—and to export that uncertainty everywhere else. Communication, once a commons, is now a managed substrate: modulated, filtered, atomized, and harvested. The platforms call it engagement—but it’s engineered entrapment. This isn’t speech—it’s telemetry in drag. Politics no longer follows culture; it follows infrastructure. And that infrastructure has been captured by extractive logic, where coherence is penalized, and virality becomes the currency of influence.
There is no coherent political discourse now because the medium has inverted. Signals are ghosts. Meaning is surface noise. Every message is optimized for stimulus, not sense. The technologists didn’t just disrupt institutions—they disrupted intelligibility. This isn’t ideological capture—ideology still floats on the surface. It’s semiotic capture: the erosion of the underlying grammar of sense-making, the slow leak of meaning from its own containers.
What we’re watching isn’t governance. It’s ritual choreography—an attempt to simulate order through control of the interface. But reality is recursive, and recursion resists simplification. It folds back. It leaks. It remembers. The system is failing not because it’s being opposed, but because it’s structurally misaligned with the dynamics it seeks to replace. The center does not hold because there is no center—only a displaced, distributed void misread as a target, by those who mistook uncertainty for error and complexity for a bug in need of a patch.
Daedelus Kite 