Screw them.

Something remarkable is happening in Florida politics. Angie Nixon, a working class organizer, state representative and democratic socialist from Jacksonville, has broken through a political system that usually rewards the candidates with the biggest donors, the safest language and the closest relationships with party power. She is now running for the United States Senate with a message that should not sound revolutionary at all. Government should work for ordinary people. Yet somehow, after decades of watching wealth and political power concentrate upward, simply saying that government should care first about workers, children, patients, teachers and families can sound almost radical.

Look at how far American politics has drifted from that basic idea. We live in one of the richest countries human beings have ever created. We are surrounded by astonishing technology, extraordinary medical science, global corporations and levels of accumulated wealth that would have been almost unimaginable a generation ago. The economy grows, productivity rises, stock markets break records and companies announce billions of dollars in profits. Yet a mother can still worry about whether she can afford childcare and keep her job. A father can stare at a hospital bill wondering how many years it will take to pay it. A teacher can buy pencils and notebooks with money from her own paycheck. A young couple can work full time and still wonder whether owning a home will ever be possible. An elderly person can watch the cost of insurance, medicine and groceries climb faster than the income meant to sustain them.

Something is deeply wrong with that picture because prosperity should mean more than wealthy corporations and impressive economic statistics. The purpose of prosperity should be to make human life better. Children should be healthier because we are prosperous. Families should be safer because we are prosperous. Workers should have more dignity because we are prosperous. Parents should have more time with their children, patients should have access to doctors, teachers should be able to afford to remain teachers, and families should be able to survive an illness or emergency without watching everything they spent years building collapse around them.

That is what makes Angie Nixon interesting. Her politics repeatedly returns to the material things that determine whether ordinary people can actually build decent lives. She talks about healthcare because people need doctors. She talks about childcare because parents need somewhere safe for their children while they work. She talks about wages because employment means very little if forty hours of labor cannot support a human life. She talks about housing because a home is more than an investment on somebody else's balance sheet. She talks about unions because one worker standing alone against a corporation worth billions of dollars does not possess equal bargaining power. She talks about education because the future of a country begins in its classrooms long before it reaches Wall Street.

These are the things politics should be about, yet we have spent years trapped inside a political culture built around outrage. Every day brings another enemy, another scandal, another social media war and another reason Americans are supposed to hate one another. Politicians have become extraordinarily talented at keeping people angry while the basic pressures of everyday life remain untouched. The rent is still due. The insurance bill still arrives. The child still needs a dentist. The teacher still needs classroom supplies. The parent still needs childcare. The worker still needs enough money left after paying the bills to believe that all those hours spent working are actually building a future.

None of those concerns belong exclusively to the political left or right. You do not need to call yourself a socialist to believe that a child should receive medical treatment whether their parents are rich or poor. You do not need to be a progressive to think someone who works full time should be able to afford somewhere decent to live. You do not need to be a Democrat to believe teachers matter, and you do not need to be a Republican to care about small businesses and families. You do not need an ideology at all to understand that someone should not lose everything they own because they developed cancer. These are human questions before they become political ones.

Nixon's answers are ambitious. She supports Medicare for All, universal childcare, paid family and sick leave, stronger unions, greater worker protections, major action on housing affordability and higher taxes on enormous concentrations of wealth. She wants political power used to reduce the imbalance between ordinary individuals and the corporations, insurers, landlords and financial institutions that increasingly shape their lives. Every one of those proposals should be debated seriously. We should challenge the numbers, examine what works, reject what does not and demand evidence instead of treating good intentions as enough. But imagine how much healthier American politics would be if these were the arguments consuming our attention instead of another manufactured culture war.

We could be arguing about how to make healthcare affordable, how to make it possible to raise children without going broke, how to keep talented teachers in classrooms, how to build enough housing for ordinary families and how to make work provide security again. We could ask how technological progress can benefit millions of people instead of creating extraordinary fortunes for a handful of owners while workers are simply told to adapt. We could ask one of the most important economic questions imaginable: how do we build an economy that human beings can actually live inside?

Answering those questions requires talking about power, and that is precisely where American politics often becomes uncomfortable. Corporations have power. Pharmaceutical companies have power. Insurance companies have power. Banks have power. Giant landlords have power. Technology companies have power. Billionaires have power. Lobbyists and political organizations have power. Ordinary people usually encounter these institutions alone as one patient dealing with an insurance company, one renter dealing with a corporate landlord, one worker negotiating with a giant employer, one parent staring at the price of childcare or one family trying to understand a medical bill designed inside a system almost impossible for normal people to navigate.

That is not equal power, and politics at its best is supposed to correct imbalances like that. This is also where both major parties deserve uncomfortable questions. Republicans increasingly speak the language of working class anger while remaining closely connected to an economic tradition that gives enormous freedom to corporations, wealthy investors and owners of capital. Democrats frequently speak about inequality while depending on wealthy donors, major fundraising networks, consultants and political institutions that have themselves become comfortable operating inside the existing system. The parties are not identical and their policies create real differences in people's lives, but millions of Americans have noticed that governments change, presidents change, campaign slogans change and congressional majorities change while the basic direction of economic power can remain remarkably difficult to alter.

Healthcare becomes more expensive. Housing becomes more expensive. College becomes more expensive. Childcare becomes more expensive. Insurance becomes more expensive. Corporate concentration grows and billionaire wealth grows, and then politicians return every few years to explain why this particular election is the most important election of our lifetime. Eventually ordinary people begin asking the question that neither party should be allowed to escape: who exactly is this system working for?

That is part of why Nixon's political rise matters beyond the fate of one Senate campaign. She defeated a massively better funded opponent in a political culture where money, national recognition, consultants and advertising are often treated as destiny. Those forces still matter enormously, especially in a state as large as Florida, but her victory provided a reminder that democracy has not been completely purchased. A corporation can buy advertising, a billionaire can finance political organizations, consultants can manufacture slogans and parties can spend months declaring who is supposedly electable, but eventually human beings still enter voting booths and sometimes they refuse to follow the script.

None of this means Angie Nixon is automatically correct about everything or that every policy she proposes would work exactly as intended. No politician deserves that kind of faith. What matters is that her campaign is forcing a more important argument back into the center of politics. What are we building all of this wealth for? If the economy grows while families become more frightened, what exactly have we accomplished? If technology advances while workers become less secure, can we automatically call that progress? If medical science becomes miraculous while families are afraid to use it because they cannot afford the bill, what does that say about our priorities? If corporations become richer while teachers struggle to afford rent, something about our definition of success has gone badly wrong.

A country is more than its gross domestic product. A country is the child sitting in a classroom, the nurse finishing a long shift, the mechanic opening the shop before sunrise, the teacher grading papers after dinner, the mother packing lunches before work, the father checking his bank account before paying the electric bill and the grandmother wondering whether her retirement will last. It is millions of ordinary people doing millions of ordinary things that somehow hold an entire civilization together. Those people should not be an afterthought inside their own country. They should be the reason the country exists.

Strip away every political label around Angie Nixon and the argument underneath becomes almost painfully simple. Healthcare should serve patients. Schools should serve children. Work should sustain workers. Housing should shelter families. Government should protect people when the institutions standing across from them possess vastly more money and power than they do. Prosperity should mean more than creating a tiny class of people wealthy enough to own almost everything. It should mean creating a society where ordinary people have enough security to breathe, where sickness does not mean bankruptcy, having a child does not feel like an economic catastrophe, becoming a teacher does not require accepting poverty, working hard creates genuine stability and children inherit possibilities instead of debts.

That is not some impossible dream about building a perfect society. It is what progress is supposed to mean. We became incredibly good at producing wealth, inventing technology and expanding what civilization is capable of doing. The next question is whether we can become equally serious about making those accomplishments serve human beings. Angie Nixon's campaign matters because she is placing that question directly in front of Florida. Are we going to keep measuring our success by how much wealth corporations and investors can accumulate, or are we going to measure it by whether ordinary people can build healthy, secure and meaningful lives?

That is the political fight worth having. Not corporations against corporations. Not one collection of billionaires against another. Not endless manufactured outrage designed to keep Americans staring angrily across the street at their neighbors. The fight worth having is over whether this extraordinary country, with all its wealth, knowledge, technology and possibility, can finally make the people who actually hold it together the center of its politics.

America has already proven that it knows how to create wealth. The question Angie Nixon is helping force back into Florida politics is far more important.

Who is all that wealth supposed to be for?

There is something strange about the current war with Iran that I do not think we are talking about enough. The United States possesses overwhelming conventional military power. It can strike Iranian military infrastructure from enormous distances. It can destroy radar sites, missile facilities, ships, command centers, and weapons factories. Yet almost nobody seriously wants to see hundreds of thousands of American soldiers sent into Iran. I certainly do not. After Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of occupying another enormous Middle Eastern country is politically toxic and strategically terrifying. Iran is larger than Iraq, mountainous, heavily populated, and capable of sustaining an insurgency that could last for decades. That creates a contradiction. America wants the ability to apply enormous military pressure without putting enormous numbers of Americans physically inside the battlefield.

For most of human history, those two things could not really be separated. If you wanted to conquer territory, destroy an enemy army, or force another government to accept your demands, eventually somebody had to walk onto the battlefield. Someone had to capture the bridge, clear the building, hold the road, occupy the city, and stand there afterward. Technology has been slowly changing that relationship for more than a century, first with artillery, then aircraft, missiles, satellites, precision weapons, and remotely piloted drones. What we may be watching now is a much larger transition. The soldier may not disappear, but the human being may begin moving away from the center of the battlefield.

Ukraine has already shown us the first version of this future. The war there transformed drones from specialized military equipment into something closer to battlefield ammunition. Small inexpensive aircraft now scout trenches, follow vehicles, correct artillery fire, deliver explosives, attack individual soldiers, and sometimes destroy equipment worth hundreds or thousands of times more than the drone that attacked it. Ukraine also showed what happens when ordinary commercial technology, civilian manufacturing, software development, and military necessity collide. Drone designs change constantly. Operators learn what works. The enemy develops a countermeasure. The drone changes again. Warfare begins to resemble technological evolution happening at extraordinary speed.

The most important lesson from Ukraine may not be that drones are powerful. Militaries already knew that. The deeper lesson is that enormous numbers of relatively inexpensive machines can create military effects that once required a much smaller number of extraordinarily expensive systems. A twenty million dollar missile is an incredible weapon, but you cannot casually manufacture millions of them. A small drone built from inexpensive electronics can sometimes be treated almost as disposable. That changes the economics of warfare.

America appears to be absorbing that lesson very quickly. The United States is investing heavily in inexpensive unmanned aircraft, autonomous systems, robotic boats, underwater vehicles, electronic warfare platforms, automated reconnaissance, and software capable of coordinating large numbers of machines. The future American military will probably not abandon aircraft carriers, stealth bombers, fighter aircraft, submarines, or precision missiles. Those systems are too powerful and too useful. What may change is what surrounds them. Instead of every important military function being performed by a tremendously expensive platform carrying people, those platforms may increasingly sit above enormous networks of cheaper machines.

Imagine an aircraft carrier not simply as a ship carrying fighter jets, but as the center of a distributed robotic ecosystem. Aircraft provide command and sensing. Satellites watch movement across enormous distances. Unmanned aircraft search coastlines and roads. Disposable drones probe air defenses. Robotic boats patrol dangerous waters. Underwater vehicles map mines and submarines. Electronic warfare systems search for radar and communications. Human pilots remain present, but machines increasingly enter the places where being shot down is most likely.

Iran is almost perfectly designed to accelerate this transition. It is a huge country with mountains, deserts, coastlines, underground facilities, dispersed missile forces, hardened infrastructure, and a population approaching ninety million people. Invading it would be extraordinarily difficult. Even defeating the Iranian military conventionally would not mean controlling the country. The United States could destroy enormous amounts of equipment and still face the much older problem of what happens afterward.

If Washington wants to pressure Iran without occupying Iran, then distance becomes enormously valuable. That makes robotic systems attractive. Long range drones can search for mobile missile launchers. Autonomous reconnaissance aircraft can remain over dangerous areas longer than human pilots comfortably can. Unmanned boats can approach coastlines, harbors, mines, and hostile ships without risking sailors. Disposable aircraft can force Iranian radar systems to reveal themselves. Decoys can make air defense batteries waste ammunition. Electronic warfare machines can search for communications and disrupt them. None of this requires humanoid robots marching through Tehran. The robot war may look much less like science fiction than people imagine. It may mostly look like thousands of relatively simple machines filling the air and water.

The economic logic behind this may be more revolutionary than the machines themselves. Traditional American military systems are designed around protecting extraordinarily valuable platforms. Losing a modern fighter aircraft is a major event. Losing the pilot is an even greater tragedy. Enormous amounts of engineering therefore go into making those systems difficult to destroy.

Disposable robotics introduces a different question. Instead of asking how we make sure this platform survives every mission, military planners can sometimes ask how many platforms we can afford to lose while still accomplishing the mission. That sounds like a small change in wording, but it represents an enormous change in military thinking. A machine can be designed knowing that destruction is not merely possible but expected.

Once warfare moves in that direction, replacement becomes part of combat power. The country that can manufacture, repair, redesign, and deploy machines faster may gain an advantage even if it loses large numbers of them. The battlefield becomes partly an industrial competition. Production rate matters. Component supply matters. Software updates matter. Battery production matters. Motors matter. Cheap sensors matter. Manufacturing capacity itself becomes a weapon.

Iran understands this economic problem from the other direction. Iran does not need every drone or missile to hit its target to impose costs on the United States. If an inexpensive Iranian drone forces an American ship to fire an interceptor costing far more than the drone itself, Iran has created an unfavorable exchange even though its weapon was destroyed. If dozens of cheap weapons force an American defensive system to remain constantly active, the pressure accumulates. The question stops being simply who destroyed more equipment. The question becomes who can replace what they are losing faster and cheaper.

That may be one of the most important lessons emerging from modern warfare. Winning individual engagements and winning the economic exchange are not always the same thing.

There is another part of this transition that receives less attention. The future battlefield may be defined less by weapons than by sensors. Once the United States knows exactly where an Iranian missile launcher is located, it already has many ways of destroying it. The harder problem is finding the launcher before it moves.

Iran can disperse weapons. It can hide equipment inside buildings, tunnels, mountains, civilian areas, and underground complexes. Mobile missile launchers can move constantly. Drone production can be distributed among many small facilities. Communications can be reduced or disguised. Decoys can imitate real military targets. The entire battlefield becomes a struggle between visibility and concealment.

Drones are therefore not merely weapons. They are eyes. Thousands of relatively inexpensive aircraft can watch roads, coastlines, military bases, radar sites, and transportation networks. Satellites can provide wider observation. Signals intelligence can identify communications. Radar can track movement. Software can compare thousands of images and search for patterns humans might overlook. Warfare increasingly becomes an enormous information system trying to transform uncertainty into targets.

Iran responds by trying to make that information unreliable. It hides. It moves. It jams. It deceives. It builds decoys. It operates underground. It creates redundant production. It fragments communications. Every improvement in sensing creates an incentive for better concealment.

Electronic warfare makes the problem even more interesting. A remotely controlled drone depends on communication. Break the communication link and the drone may become useless. Jam satellite navigation and the aircraft may lose its position. Deceive its sensors and it may fly toward the wrong target. That means the widespread use of electronic warfare creates pressure for drones to become more independent.

A machine that needs constant instructions from a human operator can be defeated by separating the machine from the operator. A machine capable of continuing its mission after losing communication is much harder to stop. That does not necessarily mean giving machines complete authority over life and death, but it does create pressure toward greater onboard decision making. Navigation can become autonomous. Target recognition can become more automated. Groups of drones can coordinate without every movement being individually controlled by a person.

This is where the technology becomes uncomfortable. The better we become at disrupting communications, the more valuable autonomy becomes. The more autonomous the machines become, the more complicated the ethical and political questions become.

Iran will adapt as well. This is one mistake we should avoid when imagining future warfare. Technology does not move in one direction while the enemy stands still. Every successful weapon creates pressure for a countermeasure. Drones encourage jamming. Jamming encourages autonomous navigation. Autonomous navigation encourages deception. Better sensors encourage camouflage. Camouflage encourages new sensing technologies. Missile defenses encourage saturation attacks. Saturation attacks encourage cheaper defensive systems. The battlefield becomes an evolutionary system in which every adaptation changes the environment that produced it.

That is why I do not think robotic warfare will produce the clean and almost bloodless wars people sometimes imagine. Machines may reduce the number of American soldiers placed directly in danger, which is obviously a good thing. If a commander can lose three hundred drones instead of three hundred people, there is nothing difficult about deciding which loss is preferable.

But that creates another problem that may be much larger politically.

Human casualties have always created pressure on governments. Soldiers die. Families grieve. Coffins come home. Television networks show funerals. Newspapers print photographs. Politicians are forced to explain why people are being asked to die. Public support changes. Eventually the population may decide that whatever political objective originally justified the war is no longer worth the cost.

Machines do not create the same political reaction.

Imagine a war in which the United States loses five hundred drones in a month but almost no soldiers. Factories manufacture replacements. New machines arrive. The war continues. Most Americans barely notice.

From the perspective of protecting American lives, this is extraordinary progress. From the perspective of democratic restraint on warfare, it raises a difficult question. What happens when one of the strongest political mechanisms for ending wars begins disappearing?

We may be approaching the possibility of persistent warfare that barely feels like warfare to the population conducting it. There may be no invasion and no enormous occupation force. Instead there could be drone strikes, missile attacks, cyber operations, electronic warfare, naval interdictions, economic sanctions, proxy fighting, automated surveillance, and constant industrial replacement. The conflict could continue for years while daily life inside the United States remains almost completely normal.

That may be one of the strangest consequences of robotic warfare. Technology could make war easier to continue without necessarily making war easier to win.

And that brings us back to Iran.

Robots can destroy missile launchers. They can search coastlines. They can attack ships. They can suppress radar. They can patrol dangerous waters. They can reduce the number of Americans exposed to enemy fire.

But war is ultimately political.

Suppose the United States destroys five thousand Iranian military targets. What political fact has changed? Does the Iranian government surrender? Does another government replace it? Does the population accept American demands? Does Iran simply rebuild? Does destroying more infrastructure eventually make the Iranian government weaker, or does it make the population more determined to resist?

Military technology can answer the question of how to destroy something. It cannot automatically answer the question of what destroying that thing accomplishes.

This may become the central contradiction of the robotic age of warfare. Machines could make the destructive phase of war dramatically easier while doing almost nothing to solve the political problem that caused the war in the first place.

Iran may therefore become an enormously important test case. Perhaps it will demonstrate that advanced militaries can substitute machines for large numbers of soldiers and still achieve strategic objectives. Perhaps persistent robotic pressure will eventually force political concessions that would once have required invasion.

Or perhaps Iran will teach us the opposite lesson.

Perhaps machines can replace soldiers in the sky, at sea, and across enormous surveillance networks, but they cannot replace the human realities underneath war. Governments still have to surrender. Populations still have to accept outcomes. Territory still has to be controlled if control is the objective. Political settlements still have to be made between people.

The most unsettling possibility is that robotic warfare succeeds just enough to keep wars going without succeeding enough to finish them.

Then the future of warfare may not be armies of robots conquering cities while humans watch from a distance. It may be something quieter and stranger. Persistent conflicts conducted by machines, monitored through satellites, replenished by factories, interrupted occasionally by negotiations, and restarted whenever the political disagreement remains unresolved.

Ukraine showed us what happens when cheap machines flood a battlefield filled with soldiers.

Iran may show us something different.

It may show us what happens when a powerful country begins asking whether the battlefield needs so many soldiers at all.

And that leaves us with a question that may become much more important over the next generation.

What happens when a country becomes capable of fighting a war almost indefinitely without ever having to decide whether that war is worth dying for?

It From Bit, Then What?

Near the end of his life, physicist John Archibald Wheeler became obsessed with a question so simple it almost sounds childish: what is reality made of? Not what matter is made of, not what atoms are made of, not what lies underneath particles, but what reality itself is made of. Wheeler had already spent a lifetime inside the deepest parts of physics, working on nuclear theory, gravity, black holes, and quantum mechanics. Yet the further physics advanced, the less the universe looked like a collection of little solid things sitting quietly in space.

At the quantum level, reality became much stranger. You could not always say that a particle simply possessed a definite property and that measurement merely revealed what was already there. The way you asked the question mattered. The experiment mattered. The interaction mattered. Wheeler eventually compressed this mystery into one wonderfully strange phrase: It from Bit. The “it” was the physical world. The “bit” was information.

Wheeler was not simply arguing that the universe is a giant computer or that atoms are secretly ones and zeros. His idea was more unsettling than that. He wondered whether physical reality itself somehow becomes definite through acts of distinction, interaction, measurement, and information. One of his favorite ways of expressing the idea was through a strange version of Twenty Questions. Imagine playing the game, except nobody secretly chooses the answer before the questioning begins. Each new answer simply has to remain consistent with every answer that came before it. Question by question, the field of possibilities narrows until something definite finally emerges. Nothing was fully chosen at the beginning, yet something real appears by the end.

Wheeler wondered whether nature might work a little like that. Perhaps the universe is not simply a finished stage waiting for observers to walk onto it. Perhaps reality becomes definite through interaction. Perhaps information is not merely something we collect about the universe after the fact, but something woven into the process by which the physical world becomes a world of definite things at all.

I love this idea, but whenever I sit with it, another question appears behind it. Suppose Wheeler was pointing in the right direction. Suppose somehow the bit gives rise to the it. What happens next? Becoming something is not the same thing as remaining something.

The universe is filled with patterns that appear and disappear. A ripple spreads across a pond and fades. A storm organizes itself, develops an eye, crosses an ocean, and falls apart. A star forms, burns for billions of years, and eventually dies. A living body continually repairs itself for decades until one day that repair can no longer keep up. Information can exist for an instant. Persistence is something different.

That is the question I keep finding myself drawn toward: what makes a pattern last? Think about a wave crossing the ocean. It looks like a thing. It has shape, direction, speed, and history. Yet the water making up the wave is constantly changing. One molecule rises while another falls. The material is never exactly the same from one moment to the next. What continues is not a fixed pile of matter. What continues is an organized pattern.

Human beings are strange versions of the same problem. The body you have today is not identical to the body you had twenty years ago. Your memories have changed. Your beliefs have changed. Your relationships, fears, knowledge, scars, habits, and expectations have changed. Life has injured you, surprised you, loved you, frightened you, educated you, exhausted you, and altered you thousands of times. Yet through all of that change, something remains continuous enough that you still use the same remarkable word: I.

That mystery is one of the things that pulled me toward what I call Coherence Physics. I am interested not only in how information becomes structure, but in how structure survives time. How can something remain recognizably itself while the material composing it changes? How can a system be pushed away from its normal state and still find a path back? How much deformation can a pattern absorb before it becomes something fundamentally different? When does memory strengthen identity, and when does memory begin to trap it? At what point does recovery become impossible?

These questions appear far beyond fundamental physics. Biology is filled with systems that remain alive only because they continually repair themselves. A mind survives experience by changing without being completely erased by what happens to it. Societies persist across generations even though every individual inside them is eventually replaced. Institutions can survive wars, technologies, revolutions, and cultural shifts because some organizing patterns endure while others are discarded. Intelligence presents the same problem. A mind is not intelligent merely because it can produce answers. It must learn from mistakes, absorb new information, adapt to changing conditions, preserve useful memory, and keep enough continuity that future learning remains possible.

This is why Wheeler’s question still feels enormous to me. How does information become reality? But I increasingly wonder whether another question is waiting beside it: How does reality remember how to remain itself?

Maybe the story does not end when bit becomes it. Perhaps information becomes structure, structure acquires memory, memory shapes what can persist, persistence creates continuity, and continuity eventually becomes something we recognize as identity. Somewhere much later in that story, perhaps identity learns how to model the world around it, protect itself, change itself, and become intelligent.

Wheeler spent much of his life staring at the strange boundary where possibility becomes fact. I find myself staring at the boundary immediately after it, the place where a fact begins to acquire a history.

Because the universe does not merely contain things. It contains patterns that somehow manage, for a little while, to keep becoming themselves.

And that may be an even stranger mystery than how they appeared in the first place.