The Betrayal in the People’s Department Inside the battle that redefined the Republican party’s relationship with corporate power, and a secretive struggle at the Department of Justice that one insider called a “coup.” It began, as so many stories do in Washington, with a deal. A very big deal. But the real story wasn’t about the mega-merger itself, a transaction that would reshape an industry and test the very definition of monopoly power. The real story was about a promise. It was a promise made by a new, disruptive political force that had ridden into town on a wave of populist anger, vowing to challenge the cozy consensus that had governed Washington for decades—the one that always seemed to benefit the powerful at the expense of the ordinary citizen. This new force had a name—Trumpism—and it had found an unlikely home in, of all places, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. For years, the division had been the domain of a specific breed of conservative: market-purist, li...
The Fight to Protect Music in the Age of AI In a small studio in Georgia, surrounded by the hum of high-powered GPUs and the faint glow of solar panels, musician and technologist Benn Jordan is waging a quiet war. For over 25 years, Jordan has carved out a living as an independent artist, releasing music under various pseudonyms and building a loyal following. But in recent years, the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has threatened the very foundation of his craft. Tech companies, armed with billions in venture capital, have been scraping music from platforms like Spotify and YouTube, using it to train AI models that generate derivative tracks—often without the consent of the original artists. For Jordan, this wasn’t just an ethical violation; it was a direct assault on his livelihood. “I still enjoy making music all the time,” he says in a YouTube video that has garnered over 600,000 views, “but I have entirely stopped releasing it.” Jordan’s response to this cris...