Epilogue
Some time has passed since I finished this book. I expected distance to soften its conclusion. Instead, distance sharpened it and left me with the writer’s oldest regret: I did not say exactly what I meant. So let me say it now.
The danger of AI was never the technology. It is the power the technology inherited and leveraged. A handful of companies now command the capital, the data, the models, and the infrastructure of daily life. They shape what we read, what we earn, what we pay, and what we come to believe. And they answer to shareholders, not to the people their systems decide about.
The framers never imagined this. They chained every power they could see, and the only power they could see was government. They wrote no limit on corporations, and no inviolable rights for people: positive rights that no corporation or government could cross. Corporate power grew up in the Constitution’s silence. It now occupies every domain that will decide the next decade.
Call it what it is: capture. Of money, of power, of politics, of culture, and increasingly of thought. History offers no precedent for its scale. But history’s verdict on monopoly is unanimous: monopoly of anything essential is the enemy of progress and freedom, because it starves the one thing a free society runs on. Public spirit.
A self-governing people survives only by practicing self-government: participation, engagement, tolerance for ideas that offend us, pluralism. We cohere not despite our differences but through the shared practice of managing them, the daily, unglamorous work of living together as equals who disagree.
Now measure AI against that standard. The most consequential technology of our lifetime was developed without the participation of the people it will govern. No vote was taken. No consent was asked. Our words, our images, and our voices, the record of our lives, are what I have called human data. That data trained the models. We were present at the creation only as raw material. Decisions that will reshape work, speech, childhood, and truth itself were made in closed rooms, by people no one elected, on timelines set by competition rather than deliberation. We were not participants. We were inputs.
That practice of self-government is what is being taken. We the People are being remade into We the Consumers (and We the Consumed), each of us alone with a screen, a self, and a cart.
My law partner and closest friend, Charles, loved Learned Hand’s speech “The Spirit of Liberty.”[1] Hand, speaking in wartime to a park filled with new citizens, said the spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right. He said liberty lives in the hearts of men and women, and when it dies there, no constitution, no law, and no court can do much to save it. Charles practiced that spirit in every hard conversation of his life. I finished this book trying to keep it.
But there is a second spirit, older and fiercer. Edward Gibbon, at the opening of his monumentally influential book, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” pauses over the one people whose forests Rome could not conquer: the tribes of Germany, who “despised life when it was separated from freedom.”[2] What I am calling for is both at once, Hand’s humility and the tribes’ defiance.
So, the remedy must match the problem. Where power went unchecked, chain it, the way the framers chained every power they could see: Corporate power reined in beneath the rights of the people, and those rights made positive, inviolable, and supreme. People first, as the supreme law of the land. And where the spirit has thinned, restore it the only way it has ever been restored: turn outward. Show up. Help other people. Disagree, in person, with people you refuse to hate.
We are not data. We are not a market. We are the People, and a free people does not remain free beside a power that answers to no one. It brings that power to account, by law, together, in the open. The tribes described by Gibbon had no constitution, no courts, and no rights on paper. They had only each other and the shared conviction that life separated from freedom was not worth living, and that was enough to turn back an empire. We have each other, our conviction, and a Constitution besides. Nothing about this is decided, and none of it will be decided without us, unless we consent by staying silent.
This is what we owe each other. This is the fight for what money cannot buy. It is our fight for each other, and for our freedom. And it has already begun.
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[1] Hand, Learned. “The Spirit of Liberty.” 21 May 1944. Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, www.fire.org/research-learn/spirit-liberty-speech-judge-learned-hand-1944. Accessed 21 July 2026.
[2] Gibbon, Edward. “Chapter I.” The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 1, 1776. Christian Classics Ethereal Library, www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap1.htm. Accessed 21 July 2026.
