The future is going to be so great, I just can’t wait. I mean, whirring effortlessly in flying robot cars from home to the country club (never work, the robots do the work) sounds great, doesn’t it? Living essentially for free on a surplus of energy and resources? And oh yeah it’s all on Mars? Gosh it’s going to be great.

I mean, we could live in a worry-free state of bliss, for chrissake. Did you know that on Mars gravity is, like, a third of what it is on Earth? We’ll be able to jump really high. It’s going to be sweet (although we may have to change spec on basketball courts). It’s the true leaders that will get us there.

Because like it or not, the leaders of the free world are no longer in government, they’re in technology. Our (humanity’s) largest economies are led, now, by retrograde nationalists who are making calls out of a playbook from 1936. Somehow we have plowed through a second industrial revolution, one where the internet has fundamentally, irrevocably, changed what it means to work, and yet our governments cling to environmental, immigration, energy, and diplomatic policy that assumes the means of production and labor are unchanged from when we first deployed the steam engine.

The void left by our elected leadership to tackle the problems of global warming, historic human migration, and energy production (/storage!?) has been filled by a cast of megalomaniacal iconoclasts at the helms of companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. These companies were founded at a time when “don’t be evil” was good enough for a code of conduct, but embraced a business model of disrupting the status quo in pursuit of profit and information hegemony.

Of course outside-the-box thinking has done a lot of good, but it comes in a mixed bag. On the one hand, the “legal” system of taxi medallions and livery service is really just the mafia and was probably due for some competition; then of course on the other hand we have basically everything about Uber. Is there no middle ground? Wildly radical thinking can solve a lot of problems, but there’s not always a reason to throw away everything that we have right now to start over.

For an extreme example, let’s look at Elon Musk’s premise that we should just give up on earth and move to Mars. Sure, it sounds like maybe it’s a decent plan for if we totally screw the pooch and need a mulligan on our first planet, but isn’t that maybe a bit too far? And shouldn’t any technology that renders Mars inhabitable also render an uninhabitable Earth inhabitable without the trouble of leaving orbit and travelling 140 million miles?

And also, isn’t it just a little bit creepy? Is the whole “settle Mars” thing really just a eugenics wet dream for billionaires and their harems? A vaguely biblical nod to paradise filled with virgins? The logical extreme of Silicon Valley’s new infatuation with prepping for the apocalypse?

In the more immediate, more tangible sense, we have the same players dabbling in transportation. No one likes sitting in traffic, and there’s no secret that snarled city streets are an increasing reality for Americans even outside of Los Angeles, New York, Houston. Even in sleepy Missoula, Montana “rush hour” has become a thing you need to think about before heading across town. We have rightly identified travel and infrastructure shortcomings as a central hurdle to improved quality of life, efficiency, and, well, the sustainability of our ecosystem.

Fortunately, we have the benefit of leaders like Elon Musk, with the vision and resources to solve the Great Transportation Problem. First we all buy new electric cars, then we have them drive themselves, then we bore giant tunnels underground so everyone can ride on a hyperloop sleds from place to place at 500mph.

I guess Occam’s Razor is a bit dull.

What if we just rode bikes when we’re not going that far? What if we just threw a few million bucks to utilize the vast rail network that currently exists? Sure, it’s not as flashy as self-driving hovering bullet cars, I get that. But if Donald Trump had invested his inheritance in index funds instead of plastering his name in rhinestones all over the place, he would have been three times richer than he is today. SAD!

Radical shifts in thinking by the wealthiest people on earth are essential to correcting our obviously unsustainable status quo. But that starts with radically shifting who we think those people are. The American middle class is shrinking, but we are still far and away the richest people on the planet. 56% of Americans live on more than $50 per day, compared with 7% of the global population. We are the wealthiest people on earth, and fundamental changes are up to us.

In the very early hours of April 28, 2014, Markus Kaarma stepped through the front door of his sprawling suburban home to investigate the sounds of someone rummaging through his garage. He wore a baggy cotton t-shirt and flannel pajama pants, and after listening for a moment to the sounds inside, fired a 12-guage shotgun through the door four times. When the ringing in his ears finally stopped, 17 year-old Diren Dede lay dead on the concrete floor.

In the court proceedings that followed, jurors were presented with two images of the man with gun: was he a new father, concerned about an increasingly bold series of burglaries, and well within his rights to defend his home and family? Or had he laid a trap, with an open door, motion sensors, and surveillance cameras, and waited to “shoot some fucking kids,” as he described to a hair stylist earlier that day?

The jury was left to measure his actions against those of a reasonable person.

Of course there is no such “reasonable person” to ask how he or she might have behaved (although that would make things much easier). Instead the reasonable person is meant to represent a decent, boring, law-abiding person of average intelligence and no latent misanthropy. It is meant to be the average feeling of the culture today.

As the trial churned through its due process in pursuit of a verdict the court of public opinion was somewhat more swift, and a reasonable person was hard to come by. The case polarized Kaarma’s and Dede’s community. It was quite clear to every observer that a crime occurred that night, but the people were divided on whether the criminal was a murderer or a burglar. No single reasonable narrative emerged, but rather parallel reasonable extremes that each laid claim to common sense.

This comes at a time when our leadership has more or less embraced the premise that we, humanity, are not reasonable at all. And by leadership of course I do not mean this administration, or congress, or anyone like that. I mean the technology industry, who, for better or worse, are the most influential actors actually looking forward and who are making every effort to engineer discretion out of our daily lives.

Our shopping preferences are cataloged and optimized so that we barely need to look for the things we cannot live without. Self-driving cars promise to take human error out of driving and finally make our roads and highways safe (except for when pedestrians wander into traffic). Diplomacy and disaster response is now reduced to a series of game theory simulations and logic models.

Amazon, Google, Tesla, Apple, have (not incorrectly, necessarily) concluded that the “reasonable person” is a fable. That what humanity needs is to outsource the decision making to a tool that is even capable of making an informed decision.

Now, as we grapple with the reality that the notion of truth is a point of contention, and they, those guys over there, are simply pawns of a corrupt elite, it can be hard to argue that Bezos and Musk are necessarily wrong.

Consider looking across a courtroom to a jury of your peers and seeing nine people who thought that The Big Bang Theory was a good show. Or that you could be exonerated by DNA evidence if only those peers of yours respected scientific consensus. Or that some of the people on that jury do not see you as their peer, but as something somewhat less, an outsider, an interloper, who is, perhaps, undeserving of the laws that keep them, the citizens of the jury, safe.

To look across that courtroom you would not be wrong to wonder if the reasonable person against which that jury will measure your actions is very reasonable at all. And if a reasonable man simply evaluates facts in an impartial way, isn’t that really only a problem of logic? And isn’t that what computers are for? It seems almost that machines really are better suited to arbitrate our high crimes and misdemeanors than a peer who can’t even spot fake news.

But a computer cannot think, for now. Its underpinnings are in the goals and assumptions of the engineer, and I hope that we can agree that Jeff Bezos is not a picture of a reasonable man. And so we’re left to sit and watch them all go red faced screaming through their daily lives, and mourn the loss of reason.

Armed men, they say, are citizens, and unarmed men are subjects. The fever dream goes something like a Federal Government run amok, and a motley, merry band of misfits takes to the hills with rifles.

They see themselves in Catalonia, perhaps, with Hemingway and Orwell, when good defeated evil for a while, or arm-in-arm with Camus as they burned the swastikas from France like as many warts from an old and gnarled foot.

Or there they see themselves, the Patriots, defending our homeland against enemies foreign and domestic, in the Colorado hills with the Eckert boys, and Danny, Daryl, Aardvark, and oh wait shoot actually that’s the plot from Red Dawn. I get so confused sometimes.

In any conversation about gun policy, 2nd Amendment activists will be quick to remind you that the Bill of Rights is not about hunting. That rifles are not just to put meat in the freezer, and that an AR-15 is simply a modern musket. That a “gun behind every blade of grass” is the reason Japan never invaded in the second world war, and, more importantly, that an armed and organized electorate is the final failsafe against an autocratic regime. That the Bill of Rights is about individual freedom, sure, but is a pillar of our functioning democracy. That it’s not only a right to own a gun, but a responsibility.

To be fair, they’re not exactly wrong. The Bill of Rights was conceived in a time when the wounds of tyranny were raw and soothed by armed and skilled militias. And they are right that Bill of Rights is every bit as relevant now as it was in the 18th century, but defending the United States from tyranny today has nothing to do with the 2nd Amendment, and everything to do with the 4th.

Because ultimately armed insurrection in the modern age has been tried and tried again. At Ruby Ridge and Waco, TX we have seen in no uncertain terms both the asymmetry between our armed forces and even the most equipped militia, and the government’s willingness to use that force.

And this is, of course, to say nothing of the drone strikes and attack helicopters in any cartoon dictator’s arsenal – just ask the children of Yemen. The thought of an honest guerrilla war, with civilian firearms, against the might of the US military is laughable. To suggest otherwise is fantasy, to provision is a hobby.

I do not mean to say that the threat of tyranny is not real, only that fighting tyrants in the thickets of New Hampshire is at once foolish and quaint. I mean that bullets are for proxy wars; a modern autocracy is won with thought.

Large scale data breaches have become commonplace in the last decade. The companies we trust, or are indifferent enough not to distrust, have made a habit out of carelessness. Equifax compromised the birth dates and Social Security numbers of 143 million people, after collecting and storing that information without consent. EBay lost control of personal information and passwords to of 145 million customers in 2014. And in late-2017 Yahoo, one of the largest tech companies on earth, conceded finally that yes, all three billion of its customers’ accounts had been accessed by “state sponsored actors.”

It has become clear in recent years that data and information collected under the premise of confidentiality is anything but. Even the largest, most well-funded companies have proven that they are incapable of managing these databases, and that most our personal information is probably being bought and sold on clandestine marketplaces right now, as you read.

This is a bummer, sure, but also not necessarily the end of the world. The nice thing is that you’re not alone! Billions of people have had their information stolen, and there’s a degree of safety in anonymity. Take the time to have strong, unique passwords on your accounts, sign up for two-stage authentication when possible, and keep an eye on credit and accounts. Sure, it’s not convenient, but that’s what will set you apart. Because the economics of convenience are much more dangerous than Russian hackers or Cuban paratroopers.

Far more troubling than the information we give away to the false promise of security is the information we give away with ambiguous assumptions of privacy. Recent revelations about the use of Facebook information by the data company Cambridge Analytica represent a threat to democracy that cannot be fought with rifles.

Consider that information was collected on millions of users in the shadows of legitimacy, and under the auspices of data research. The firm leveraged Facebook’s entire business model, one designed to sell advertising, to construct psychological profiles of voters and influence their behavior. It did so in dissonance with Facebook’s privacy policy but without, apparently, breaking the law. This is happening against the backdrop, and to the benefit, of an administration that is actively attacking the nature of truth.

MKUltra and Manchurian Candidates are the stuff of conspiracy theories and ghost stories, but government mind control is very real. It comes when the stalwarts of propaganda are refined and amplified by big data, and presents the realest threat to democracy we face today.

As the information analytics crisis unfolds in the west, we need only look east to see how it unfolds. Since 2007 China’s Social Credit System has scored its citizens on trustworthiness, collecting credit and banking information and analyzing it against petty crimes like jaywalking. This year those scores are used to bar bad actors from booking flights and rewarding model citizens with gym memberships and medical care.

China has transcended the simple data-driven propaganda that the US is currently coping with, and created a candid system of social engineering. The greatest threat to our modern republic is not that the state will disarm its citizens, it is that it will not have to – the information coup is bloodless.

Rifles will not protect us, of course. But if we’re not careful our disregard for privacy and our eagerness for validation can do far more damage with the intangible Armalite design than a firearm ever could.