Dead Air
Congress was Built for an Old Public Square
Every day, a new horror pops up on your feed. Something terrible has emerged from an AI model, something has gone viral that shouldn’t exist, something fake has been taken as real.
You look up from this Lovecraftian whack-a-mole and shoot an exasperated glance in the direction of Washington D.C. “Why won’t they do anything?”
The oft-made argument for Congress’s inability to address tech grievances is generational: older people are less fluent in the digital world. Everyone point at Mitch McConnell and laugh. This is an easy, surface-level answer to a critical institutional problem: the town square has moved to a place that elected Americans largely do not access, much less understand.
Congress is staffed, scheduled, and incentivized for an era when public discourse was slower, more legible, and mediated by gatekeepers. This worked in a world where society-altering problems moved at the same pace as democratic legislation. Those problems were articulated to the public by a few major networks, watched by the legislators and public alike.
This dynamic has collapsed. Society-altering problems now metastasize through rapidly evolving algorithms, and they are mediated in spaces largely foreign to legislators. They are not just unable to control the narrative; they do not know what or where the narrative is. Powerless and confused, they can only ride the waves as they come.
Walter Cronkite does not appear at 8:00 pm to get everyone on the same page. Influence is fragmented across apps, pseudonymous networks, recommender systems, micro-communities, and rapidly shifting norms. These forces shape public discourse at a pace legislators are unable to match.
In fact, modern movements are the opposite of modern legislation. They do not require formal organizations, long lead times, or centralized leadership. They form around shared content, memes, inside language, and trusted micro-influencers; they can route around censorship with VPNs and mirror channels; they can coordinate logistics in group chats and shift platforms faster than state messaging can follow.
Even when politicians are “online”, it’s a sanitized internet; more institutional, partisan, and PR-oriented. Their feeds are managed and filtered through staff, alerts, and verified-account discourse. It took politicians a decade to realize podcasts were influential. Wait until they hear about Discord.
As public opinion is increasingly mediated through these spaces, legislators become increasingly disconnected from public opinion. As the pace of society-altering changes accelerates, public opinion will become increasingly volatile.
AI accelerates this trend while making lawmakers’ ignorance painfully obvious. The most consequential effects of AI in the next few years likely won’t be sci-fi superintelligence. They’ll be amplification, persuasion, fraud, and labor displacement, all of which flow through online platforms and digital norms. If you don’t understand how attention, status, and trust are already manufactured in these spaces, you won’t understand how AI affects average people.
Last September, in the Senate Hearing “Examining the Harm of AI Chatbots”, Senator Marsha Blackburn opined: “What kids don’t realize when they are in the Metaverse and when they’re having these conversations with these chatbots, they’re not distinguishing between real life and what is going on virtually.” Probably a well-intentioned point. But what kid is engaging with a chatbot in the Metaverse? Everyone with an online presence remembers the Metaverse as that thing that crashed and burned. There was a whole discourse about it. An uncanny cartoon Mark Zuckerberg in an empty landscape posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, et cetera. Blackburn, it seems, is under the impression that AI is synonymous with the Metaverse. That might seem pedantic, but it offers a critical window into the socially and technologically clueless average congressional perspective. If Blackburn comes across one of the many articles circulating about the demise of the Metaverse, will she assume mission accomplished? Dangerous AI defeated?
When you are not present in the town square, you are ignorant of the problems presented there. By nature of misunderstanding the problem, you misunderstand solutions.
Later that same hearing, Senator Dick Durbin offered his view on how to deal with the issue at hand: “Back in the day... I was in battle with big tobacco... The net result today, fewer than 5% [kids smoking].” Any well-informed American knows AI poses a serious risk, and cigarettes pose a serious risk. Any well-informed tech-literate American knows a comparison between the two is totally non-analogous. In fact, such a comparison again belies total ignorance of the AI issue. AI is not something we can regulate away and collectively reject as a bad habit. Cigarettes didn’t threaten to unemploy a generation. Cigarettes were not at risk of supercharging fraud, misinformation, and manipulation.
For better or worse, how much of your lived experience now takes place in an app, or in a chatroom? How much of your worldview is shaped by your interactions and content seen online? As a result, what policy priorities do you have? Consider how different the world must look if you never engage in that raw digital world. That is the vantage point from the Capitol Building. They are largely unaware of problems shaping behavior because they don’t see the patterns as they emerge the way platform users do.
We increasingly find ourselves in a situation where legislators are both ignorant of the problems at hand and how the public is interpreting it. What happens then?
The “Gen Z Protests” swept the planet over the past several years. Young protesters wielded online ecosystems as weapons, toppling governments which did not speak the language of dissent.
Nepal offers the most prescient example. Reuters reports protesters used TikTok, Viber, and VPNs to mobilize thousands after the government banned Facebook. Organizers publicly named a Discord channel as a central communication system for the protests. The organizers used memes and vernacular that state and legacy outlets struggled to decode. The state could literally not understand the movement.
When officials don’t understand the grammar of online coordination or the places they occur, they often respond to the wrong thing: banning a platform rather than undermining the incentive structures; targeting viral posts rather than the distribution systems; treating memes as trivial rather than as compression algorithms for ideology. The intentions may be noble, but broad-stroke solutions inherently expose ignorance of the root problems at hand.
The federal government, then, increasingly feels like workers on a production line manufacturing a product they do not understand. Unable to build anything productive, they throw together a distraction or stop-gap solution. The production line will only speed up in coming years. Representation means a shared information environment. It necessitates fluency in the language of the modern. It requires presence in the places the population vents frustrations. Otherwise, you will be caught by surprise when the digital town square begins a march to the physical.