How AI Plans to Buy 2026

I want to tell you why this election should be a slam dunk. But absolutely is not, and not just because the Republicans on the Supreme Court invited the South to go Jim Crow in its attacks on Black voting power.

Let me tell you a story. It’s a story about democracy working. Ok, not democracy in general. But what we have to call our democracy.

This week, the Senate Banking Committee advanced the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. Bipartisan. Historic. A landmark foothold, the headlines said, for the cryptocurrency industry as it reshapes the American financial system.

Why did our dysfunctional upper House of Congress suddenly show the alacrity of a functioning democracy for an industry that has few, if any, legitimate purposes?

Well, it ain’t because of the voters. A new poll finds only 4% of American voters give a shit about a candidate’s crypto stance at the ballot box. Housing affordability: 49 percent. Consumer fraud: 36 percent. Crypto: 4.

But you already guessed it.

“A rich and powerful industry,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren said, “drives the agenda in the United States Senate.”

Sen. Bernie Moreno, for the industry, offered the epitaph of American representative democracy by asking himself a question that should end his career: “Does it kind of suck a little bit that there’s money in politics? Of course. But that’s just the way it works.”

So that is where we are with crypto. Now consider what the polls say about AI.

Nearly three out of four Americans want it to slow down. They don’t want data centers in their neighborhoods. They did not vote for the technology to accelerate into every corner of their working lives, and they are, in poll after poll, uneasy about the pace and the power of the people holding the controls.

Now, here is what crypto and AI have in common, beyond the obvious overlap of donors and ambition: they are the two halves of the same machine.

The machine has a name, as the great Gil Durán, author of the forthcoming tome on the topic The Nerd Reich, has been trying to tell us. Tech investor Balaji Srinivasan formalized it in 2022 as the Network State, the ideological project beneath the venture capital, the think-tank papers, the Freedom City proposals, Trump’s Gaza “freedom zone” fantasies, and the already-operational prototype: Próspera, a privately-run charter city in Honduras under its own legal system, backed by Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Srinivasan through a fund called Pronomos Capital.

The Network State offers tech capital two escapes from any semblance of democratic accountability. The first is Voice: capture governments through elections. The second is Exit: acquire or clear territory and build privately controlled zones where democracy, taxes, and regulations do not apply, what Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has openly called for: ten zones on federal land, each “exempt from federal and state law.”

Crypto is the financial infrastructure for Exit, stateless money for stateless cities, a parallel economy that doesn’t pass through the institutions of democratic accountability at all. AI is the weapon for Voice, the dirty digital dissembler, the machine for winning enough elections to make Exit a real estate transaction rather than a revolution. After calling crypto a scam, Trump and his family went all-in; two crypto projects raised the family’s estimated net worth by $2.9 billion.

And even if the dorm-lounge fantasies never come to fruition, the damage is already compounding. AI and its now-symbiotic relationship with the carbon-burning energy cartels making fortunes off powering endless data centers have created a new center of gravity for the American economy, fueling nearly all our recent economic growth while engineering the destruction of the jobs that growth is supposed to serve. This is the future the right has long fantasized about: a machine that produces capital, anonymously concentrates it, and feeds it upward or laterally to politicians who need some encouragement, while methodically eliminating the worker power that might check it.

Now buckle up.

Andreessen Horowitz has committed $115 million to this election cycle so far, the largest disclosed donor in the midterms, ahead of George Soros and Elon Musk. Forty-seven and a half million went to Fairshake, the crypto super PAC that just delivered the Clarity Act. Fifty million went to Leading the Future, a network built to elect pro-AI legislators, modeled directly on Fairshake. Marc Andreessen spent the transition at Mar-a-Lago, advised DOGE, and now sits on the White House tech council. The crypto bill proved the method works. An industry young enough to need a learner’s permit bent the United States Senate on legislation 96 percent of voters never thought about. The AI industry is older, richer, and has already converted the executive branch. The Voice strategy is not coming. It is here.

But how does it win votes if everyone hates it? Pretty simple, it aims to capture both parties with its big money, and it leaves the rest to lies.

The dirty digital dissembler handles the electorate. In 2024, advisers to Musk ran a $45 million false-flag campaign so precise in its cynicism that it deserves to be described slowly and disdainfully. Muslim voters in Michigan received pro-Israel ads designed to look like Harris campaign materials. Jewish voters in Pennsylvania received the opposite message from the same shop. Young liberals got videos about how Harris had betrayed the progressive movement. Working-class white men in the Midwest got warnings that Harris would institute racial quotas and take away their Zyn pouches. Four brand names, zero common origin, one coordinating strategy. They called it “false positives” internally. The goal was not persuasion. It was subtraction — push enough Democratic-leaning voters into confusion, disgust, or exhausted abstention. Harris dropped eight million votes from Biden’s 2020 total. Trump gained fewer than two million. The election was decided, as the architects intended, by subtraction.

Peter Thiel’s blood boy JD Vance, who smuggled the cats-and-dogs story from neo-Nazis into the national bloodstream and understands disinformation the way a musician understands rhythm, is already running the 2026 frame: corruption and fraud, defined as Somalian fraudsters and immigrants draining programs meant for you. A rural organizing group found 58 percent of rural voters already believe Democrats are the most corrupt party. AI does not need to create that belief. It scales it with a hundred variations of the same message, each calibrated to a distinct psychological profile, none traceable to a common origin, arriving faster than any correction can travel. Kate Starbird The University of Washington has spent years documenting how misleading election content spreads: misinterpreted evidence, omitted context, exaggerated impact, falsely attributed intent, each handoff up the legitimacy chain, leaving no single actor caught having to answer for the lies. The template has been known to the right for years. What AI adds is scale, speed, and the terrifying capacity for individual targeting, the right lie, for the right voter, at the right moment of doubt.

The voters in the crosshairs are the genuinely movable ones, according to G. Eliott Morris: working-class, multiracial, heavily independent, nearly 40 percent of whom didn’t vote in 2024. Three percent of them name crime as their top issue. Thirty-eight percent name prices. They are reachable on the economy. They are precisely the voters the dirty digital dissembler is designed to reach first with something else entirely, leaving them too confused or disgusted to act.

This midterm is not a normal check on a horrendously unpopular president, though it is that too.

It is the election that sets the template for 2028 and the decade beyond for whether the regulatory architecture governing AI gets built before the industry captures the builders, for whether the Voice strategy consolidates enough power that Exit stops being a thought experiment and starts skipping zoning applications.

Crypto proved in one Senate markup that voter indifference means nothing. The Network State’s backers are betting that by the time the public understands what is being decided, the decision will already be permanent.

They have the money, the machines, and the method. What the opposition has is November and the fact that there are, as there have always been, more of us than there are of them.

But we’re not going to be able to fact-check our way out of this; we’re going to need a better story. And a better way of telling it.

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