The Age of Abundance Arrives Misspelled
The pattern was on full display this Tuesday: the state and capital, side by side, laying down the architecture of an artificial-intelligence order that will be built whether working people consent to it or not. The same day Trump hosted the heads of Nvidia, Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon for lunch at the White House and condemned any government oversight of the sector, he and industry leaders signed a document that spelled the country the "Unites States" rather than the "United States." The men reshaping how the country works could not proofread the paper announcing it — and told the government charged with checking them to stand aside.
The pitch came from Elon Musk, who outlined his vision next to Trump. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO promised an "age of abundance" in which everyone is rich and has stellar healthcare, then conceded in the same breath that jobs will "change" — brushing it off as something that has happened throughout history. That is the whole trick in a single sentence. The abundance is a promise, held out for some distant tomorrow; the disruption is the plan, arriving now. When a man of Musk's fortune tells you your work will simply change, he is describing a transfer: the productivity gains flow up to the people who own the machines, and the risk flows down to the people replaced by them.
Strip away the language of abundance and you find the concrete buildout underneath — and who it is really for. In the Senate, GOP leaders are pushing a data center bill built to help Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio in his re-election, with Democrats poised to block it and call it a ploy. Name it plainly: the physical infrastructure of the AI economy — the warehouses of servers that consume land, water and power in host communities — is being wielded as an electoral prop. The buildout is real, but here it is sold not as public benefit but as a favor to an incumbent.
And the same technology that is supposed to make everyone rich is already being turned on them. Sen. Josh Hawley is introducing legislation to establish guardrails for Flock cameras and other AI-powered surveillance technology. When even a sitting Republican senator moves to rein in the abuse of automated camera networks, the surveillance is not hypothetical — it is the other face of the AI order those same men celebrated on Tuesday. Abundance for the owners; monitoring for everyone else.
Behind all of it is the money, and the money has names. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin this week pledged $3 billion to Carnegie Mellon University, a gift that includes $2 billion to establish a new campus in Miami. A single hedge-fund billionaire can direct a sum that dwarfs the budgets of entire public systems into the institutions that will train and legitimize the next wave of this technology. That is what concentrated wealth buys: not just factories and servers, but the universities, the research, and the story the whole enterprise tells about itself.
Read together, these are not separate news items. They are one operation. A document signed with fanfare and a spelling error. A demand that the state get out of the way. A promise of universal wealth paired with a shrug about your livelihood. A data-center bill dressed up as a campaign gift. A surveillance apparatus a senator now scrambles to put guardrails on. And billions in private fortune steering the institutions that will bless it all. The abundance is already theirs. The change — the lost job, the watched street, the ratepayer's bill, the public dollar redirected to a billionaire's vision — is what they are handing to the rest of us.