Keen On America

• This Is Not a Browser—Did René Magritte Really Predict the End of the Web Age?

  The Belgian surrealist René Magritte was a smart artist, but could the 20th century futurist really have predicted the end of the Worldwide Web age? Not exactly, of course. But according to That Was The Week publisher, Keith Teare, Magritte’s 1929 painting, “The Treachery of Images” (featuring the image of a pipe with the immortal words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), is a helpful way of thinking about OpenAI’s introduction this week of their new Atlas “browser”. It’s not really a browser in the conventional way that we think about web browsers like Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer. And yet AI products like Atlas are about to once again revolutionize how we use the internet. They might even represent the end of the web age with its link architecture and advertising economics. So do we have words for what comes next? The not-a-browser age, perhaps. L’ère sans navigateur, to be exact. * The Browser Is Becoming an Agent, Not a Link Map - For thirty years, browsers like Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Chrome were rendering engines for HTML that displayed blue links to web pages. AI products like ChatGPT’s Atlas and Google’s AI mode in Chrome are transforming browsers into conversational agents that answer questions, summarize content, and even execute tasks like booking flights—pushing the traditional web “down a level” in the user interface hierarchy.* The Web’s Trillion-Dollar Advertising Model Must “Reprice Fast” - The web’s business model has been largely advertising-based, built on users clicking links that generate revenue. As AI interfaces replace link-based browsing, this nearly trillion-dollar annual revenue stream faces an existential threat. Publishers like Keith Teare and platforms like Google must figure out how to transition their economics to an AI-driven world where links aren’t surfaced by default.* Google Deserves Its Stock Price for “Being Brave in Undermining Its Own Business Model” - While AI threatens to upend Google’s AdWords cash cow, the company’s stock has surged roughly 50% over the past year. Keith argues Google has earned this bullishness by aggressively investing in AI infrastructure (like Anthropic’s $10 billion commitment to Google’s TPUs) and integrating AI features into Chrome—even though these moves could cannibalize its core search advertising business.* The “Victim Here Is the Publisher, Not the User” - Keith acknowledges that while the shift to AI agents feels like “an absolute change of paradigm,” it’s genuinely better for users who get more intuitive, conversational interfaces. Publishers and content creators are the ones facing disruption, as AI may eliminate their distribution channels without yet providing alternatives for reaching audiences or monetizing content. The challenge is that “most of the narrative that doesn’t like it is publisher-centric.”* Tim Wu and Antitrust Regulators Are “Fighting Yesterday’s War” - Columbia law professor Tim Wu’s new book The Age of Extraction focuses on the monopolistic dangers of Google, Amazon, and Facebook—but Keith argues this framing is already obsolete. The real competitive battlefield is AI, where Google is a “laggard” behind OpenAI and Anthropic. The underlying internet architecture (TCP/IP) remains neutral enough to allow challengers to emerge, making heavy-handed government intervention both unnecessary and potentially innovation-killing, as seen in the over-regulated EU.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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• The Panic of the Intellectuals: From Ezra Pound to the Trumpagies of Today

  American intellectuals always seem to believe they are living through the end times. From the fascist poet Ezra Pound in the 1930s to the historian of fascism Timothy Snyder today, they flee America in despair. In Seekers and Partisans,, Boston University historian David Mayers tells the story of these exiled thinkers between 1935 and 1941 — what he calls “the crisis years.” But crisis… what crisis? Compared to Germany, Russia, or even Western Europe, America’s troubles were relatively modest. So is history repeating itself nearly a century later? Are today’s “Trumpagies” — intellectuals disillusioned with Trump’s America — the second coming of Ezra Pound and his fellow seekers and partisans of the interwar years?1. History doesn’t repeat — but it rhymes.Mayers argues that the wave of “Trumpagies” today — intellectuals leaving America out of despair — echoes but doesn’t duplicate the 1930s exodus. Americans have long fled home in search of moral or political clarity abroad, though their motives shift with each crisis.2. The 1930s “crisis years” were more imagined than real.While Mayers’ book Seekers and Partisans frames 1935–1941 as “the crisis years,” he notes that America’s troubles then were mild compared to the totalitarian catastrophes of Europe. The panic, he suggests, often existed more in the minds of intellectuals than in the republic itself.3. Idealism and delusion often go hand in hand.Figures like Ezra Pound, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Anna Louise Strong reveal how moral passion can curdle into political blindness — from fascist sympathies to uncritical faith in communism or empire. Smart people, Mayers observes, can “get things dreadfully wrong.”4. The duty isn’t to flee — it’s to stay.Asked what lessons apply to Trump-era exiles, Mayers insists the responsible act is not flight but persistence: to “stay here and salvage the situation.” The illusion, he says, is that “things are all that brilliant elsewhere.”5. The American Dream includes its disillusionments.From the 1930s “seekers and partisans” to today’s disenchanted academics, the impulse to escape America reveals as much about its promise as its failures. The intellectual’s panic, Mayers suggests, is part of America’s enduring struggle to understand itself.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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• How to Choke Your Enemy: Why America Turned the World Economy into its Weapon of Global Domination

  How should America choke enemies like Iran, Russia and China? Not on the battlefield—according to Edward Fishman, that’s yesterday’s game. Today, Fishman argues in Chokepoint, America has turned the world economy into its weapon of global domination. In his bestseller, already shortlisted for the FT’s best business books of the year, Fishman reveals that 21st century American power relies on economic warfare. From Treasury Department lawyers weaponizing the dollar-based financial system to Silicon Valley’s semiconductor stranglehold, sanctions, export controls and financial coercion have replaced military force as America’s primary tools of statecraft. Every U.S. president this century has doubled their predecessor’s use of sanctions—a staggering escalation that has fundamentally reshaped the global economic order and may ultimately lead to less interdependence and, paradoxically, more military conflict. But what about Trump’s tariffs? According to Fishman, Trump has made two critical errors: weaponizing America’s economic power against allies like Europe, Canada and India rather than just adversaries, and relying on import tariffs—where the U.S. controls only 13% of global imports—instead of the true chokepoints where America dominates 90% of foreign exchange transactions and 80% of advanced AI chips. So it is Trump himself who has choked rather than successfully choking America’s enemies. 1. Every US President This Century Has Doubled Sanctions Usage The escalation is relentless and bipartisan: from George W. Bush to Obama to Trump’s first term to Biden, each administration imposed sanctions at twice the rate of their predecessor—revealing economic warfare as a defining trend of 21st century American power, not a partisan aberration.2. The Dollar System is America’s True Superweapon The US doesn’t need naval blockades anymore. Because the dollar is involved in 90% of global foreign exchange transactions, America can choke off countries like Iran simply by threatening banks, oil traders, and refineries worldwide with exclusion from the dollar-based financial system—making economic warfare both more powerful and more invisible than traditional military force.3. Trump Weaponized the Wrong Tools Against the Wrong Targets Trump broke with predecessors in two critical ways: he’s using economic warfare against allies (Europe, Canada, India) not just adversaries, and he’s relying on tariffs where the US controls only 13% of global imports instead of leveraging the true chokepoints—the dollar (90% of forex) and semiconductors (80% of advanced AI chips)—where American dominance is overwhelming.4. Economic Warfare Isn’t Bloodless—It Creates Real Human Suffering Sanctions designed for coercion must inflict broad macroeconomic harm: inflation, currency debasement, unemployment. Fishman warns against treating these tools as cost-free alternatives to military action—they should only be deployed when vital national security interests are at stake, like stopping Russian imperialism in Ukraine, not for routine diplomatic leverage.5. The “Geoeconomic Impossible Trinity” Means Decoupling is Inevitable Only two of three factors can coexist: economic interdependence, economic security, and geopolitical competition. Since US-China and Europe-Russia rivalry isn’t disappearing, interdependence must unravel over the next decade. The danger: when countries can’t secure resources through trade, history shows they turn to conquest and imperialism—meaning economic warfare could paradoxically lead back to military conflict.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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• All Religions Absurd Because We Are Absurd: How the Internet is Creating the First New Form of Religious Community in 250,000 Years

  Twenty years ago, the religious scholar Reza Aslan wrote his first book, There is No god but God, about the origins, evolution and future of Islam. It was a huge hit which lead to many other bestselling books on Islam and Christianity. Now Aslan has released a twentieth anniversary version of There is No god But God suggesting that the internet is reinventing Islam in ways that even he couldn’t have imagined back in 2005. The creation of what he calls the “cyber ummah” is destroying traditional religious authorities, enabling experimental communities like LGBTQ Catholics and Quranist Muslims, and redefining the very concept of community for the first time in 250,000 years of human history. And yet, for these profound changes, there are some things about not just Islam, but about all monotheistic faiths, that are unchanging. Religion is our human creation, he reminds us. So every religion will always be absurd because we are absurd. * Islam Follows the Same Patterns as All Religions - Aslan’s core argument in “No god but God” is that Islam isn’t uniquely violent, inflexible, or problematic. Like Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism, it has evolved through the same historical conflicts, splits, and adaptations that characterize all major faiths.* The Internet Is Creating the First New Form of Community in 250,000 Years - For the entirety of human history, community was geographically bound. Social media has fundamentally redefined this, allowing a Muslim kid in Jakarta who loves heavy metal to have more in common with a Muslim in Detroit than with anyone physically around them.* Traditional Religious Authority Is Collapsing Online - Muslims no longer need to rely solely on their local imam for religious guidance. Websites like fatwaonline.net offer 500,000 ready-made fatwas, and “cyber muftis” answer custom questions, democratizing religious knowledge and undermining centralized clerical power.* Religion Is Hardwired Into Human Cognition - The “cognitive study of religion” reveals that religious impulse is part of our evolutionary process and the proper functioning of our brains. Whether this is an accident, an illusion, or something fundamental to being human remains debated.* All Religions Are “Absurd” Because They’re Human Creations - Aslan argues that religions are petty, violent, and prone to schisms not despite being sacred, but because they’re human institutions. We create religions in our own image, complete with all our contradictions and flaws.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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• Why the Real Road to Serfdom Runs Through Silicon Valley: Tim Wu on the Extractive Economics of Platform Capitalism

  Last time the anti-monopoly crusader Tim Wu appeared on the show, he was warning broadly about the road to serfdom. But in his new book, The Age of Extraction, Wu gets much more specific. The real road to serfdom, he warns, runs through Silicon Valley. Forget for a moment about surveillance capitalism, Wu suggests, and imagine that the most existential threat to 21st century freedom and prosperity is the “platform capitalism” of tech behemoths like Google and Amazon. These multi-trillion-dollar companies, he argues, have transformed the very places where we do business—digital marketplaces that once promised democratization—into sophisticated extraction machines. Like the robber barons of the late 19th century, today’s tech platforms have concentrated unprecedented wealth and power, creating an economic system that lends itself to the most Hayekian of medieval metaphors. The Silicon Valley business model is turning us into digital serfs, he warns starkly. That’s the extractive goal—the ‘Zero to One,’ as its most prominent ideologue Peter Thiel would say—of platform capitalism.1. On the core thesis of extraction: Wu defines the economic reality that now dominates our digital economy and explains why “extraction” is the word that best captures our era.“We have entered a world where we tolerate extreme levels of concentrated private power who try in every way they can to extract from weaker entities as much as possible. Much of the economy has become a resource for extraction by economically powerful actors.”2. On tech billionaires as modern sovereigns: Wu describes the mindset that has emerged among Silicon Valley’s elite and why their detachment from reality has become dangerous.“They desire to be treated like kings of small countries. They want immunity from ordinary laws. If no one ever says no to you, whether you’re an autocrat or a tech billionaire, that starts to become very bad for your character.”3. On Silicon Valley’s ideological transformation: Wu traces how the tech industry abandoned its founding principles and embraced the very monopoly power it once claimed to despise.“Silicon Valley once glamorized small inventive firms and brilliant scientists who gave their work to the public. Peter Thiel said every company should aim for monopoly. That’s basically where we live today. Everyone wants to be the platform.”4. On the fragility of centralized systems: Wu warns that the concentration of power in a few platforms has made our entire economic system dangerously unstable.“Centralized systems tend to be very fragile. They offer great advantages, but when they crash, they tend to crash hard. Whether it’s the economy or web services, I think we’re in for a hard crash coming at some point.”5. On history’s verdict: Wu issues his starkest warning about what happens if America fails to address concentrated economic power voluntarily.“If we can’t find some way to redistribute economic power, I think that history will redistribute it for us. The main and most effective tool of fundamental redistribution across the scope of history has been world wars and major revolutions. In a sense, we’re being tested.”Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

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