American AI Will Destroy Capitalism

KW Norton — March 26, 2026

Life is risky. Existing at all in the universe is full of risks and danger. As all of you who have followed the surfing metaphor through this series understand, the how and the why of riding these waves exists deep in our human consciousness.

Life as President of the United States is perhaps one of the most dangerous professions on Earth, especially right now. Turns out that our current POTUS is many times more intelligent than almost anyone gave him credit for. Trump's signature moves are straight out of the rock-and-roll culture most of us grew up in.

When I think of Trump I think of Warren Zevon — one of the most interesting human beings in the California music scene. Right now I think of Warren's great song "Mohammed's Radio." For POTUS Trump, he has served as the lightning rod for enormous amounts of national energy, with massive issues weighing on him daily. My admiration for his skill as a human being and as a disruptor grows even when I disagree with his choices. Trump is far from perfect and has often earned my profound discontent — but he remains the most fascinatingly consequential political figure of my lifetime.

Emad Mostaque is a technology genius whose personal tragedy motivated him to use AI to solve an intractable problem. Mo Gawdat also experienced tragedy that inspired him to write books that have inspired others toward genius. Mostaque's son was born with autism, leading him to do a deep dive into AI — his research led to a discovery that allowed doctors to alleviate his son's condition. Here are three very different men who have faced tragedy, using it not only to improve their own lives but to change the world for the better.

Yesterday Trump angered many by placing technocrats — David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and others — in charge of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) to steer American AI. It was a genius move. This allows Trump to keep them close enough to direct AI development synchronized with American values and used for human flourishing — because Chinese AI or old-school Silicon Valley AI would lead to increased autocracy, whereas American-style AI is being steered toward individual and national sovereignty.

Trump did not hand the keys to the kingdom to these technocrats out of weakness. He embedded them inside the machinery of government to harness their brilliance while forcing their output to serve American ends — individual liberty, national sovereignty, and open-source abundance instead of closed-door control.

"Capitalism, in its current form, runs on scarcity. Limited resources. Gatekept knowledge. Centralized power. American AI, unleashed under this framework, obliterates scarcity at its root."

When AI tools for design, manufacturing, energy, medicine, and education become exponentially cheaper, faster, and more powerful — and when they are deliberately steered toward open architectures rather than proprietary black boxes — the entire economic model built on "own the factory, own the worker, own the customer" begins to collapse. Abundance replaces rationing. Anyone with a laptop and curiosity can build, heal, innovate, and create at scales that once required billion-dollar corporations or nation-state backing. That is the beginning of the end of capitalism as a scarcity-driven system.

In its place? A fully democratized civilization. Not the fake "democratization" Silicon Valley once sold us — where a handful of coastal elites decided what the rest of humanity could see, say, or build. Real democratization: AI that empowers the individual citizen, the small business, the sovereign nation-state.

• Tools that let a farmer optimize crops with the same precision as a megacorporation.

• Tools that let a doctor in a rural clinic diagnose with superhuman accuracy.

• Tools that let citizens audit their own governments in real time.

Chinese AI leads to surveillance autocracy. Old Silicon Valley AI leads to corporate feudalism. American AI — directed by a disruptor-in-chief who understands power — leads to sovereignty at every level: the person, the family, the community, the nation.

The chaos of this transition is not a bug. It is the feature. Just as stars are born in the collapse of gas clouds, just as life itself exploded from primordial soup, American AI will birth a new order from the death throes of the old. The technocrats are not the masters. They are the accelerant. The conductor is human consciousness itself — choosing love over fear, abundance over scarcity, sovereignty over control.

The symphony that is coming is one that Warren Zevon himself would have recognized: raw, loud, a little dangerous, and ultimately life-affirming.

The age of artificial scarcity is ending. The age of American abundance — for everyone — is just beginning.