Front Porch Republic

The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human scale, the distribution of power, and our responsibility to the future have been eliminated from the public conversation. The response to that crisis only worsened the political and economic centralization and atomization that have accompanied the century-long unholy marriage between consumer capitalism and the modern bureaucratic state. The techno optimists promising better living through AI only exacerbate our challenges. We live in a world characterized by a flattened culture and increasingly meaningless freedoms. Little regard is paid to the necessity for those overlapping local and regional groups, communities, and associations that provide a matrix for human flourishing. We’re in a bad way, and the spokesmen and spokeswomen of both our Left and our Right are, for the most part, seriously misguided in their attempts to provide diagnoses, let alone solutions.

Country of Publication & Year Established

AI Policy

Human-created work only; no AI use allowed