AI for Non Profits event at World Trade Center, October 22, 2026

Personal Statement: Philanthropy, AI, and the Commons

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky)

We live in an era where some of the guiding principles of the wealthiest individuals in this country are anchored in the philosophy of the Dark Enlightenment—a worldview where democracy is treated as outdated hardware, and human self-governance is dismissed as an obsolete illusion. Alongside this, we have watched technocratic frameworks like Effective Altruism collapse under their own contradictions, proving problematic at best and catastrophic at worst.

Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled across a young United States to understand how a free society maintains its equilibrium. In Democracy in America, he arrived at a profound realization: in democratic nations, “the knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other knowledge; on it depends the progress of all the others.” Tocqueville recognized that democratic survival relies not on the benevolence of an aristocratic patron, but on the living capacity of citizens to associate, organize, and fund their own shared institutions. Yet in that same volume, Tocqueville sounded an urgent, prophetic warning: if a permanent aristocracy and entrenched inequality ever returned to the modern world, it would enter through the gates of industrial monopoly—where owners extract immense wealth from mechanization while leaving workers dependent and alienated.

Today, as artificial intelligence accelerates toward cognitive dominance, we face Tocqueville’s warning in real time. We are urgently tasked with forging fundamentally new perspectives on capital, technology, and the public commons.

The history of American giving has always carried this fundamental tension. In the 1640s, the New England Confederation organized what history records as America’s first community crowdsourcing campaign. Across colonial settlements, ordinary households were asked to contribute whatever humble assets they had—a peck of corn, a few yards of homespun cloth, a pewter spoon—to sustain scholars at Harvard College. It was heralded as the ultimate civic virtue: pooling communal sacrifice to nurture higher learning.

Fast forward a century. That very institution’s endowment, its leadership, and its physical expansion were inextricably entangled with the trade of human beings—profiting from Caribbean slave plantations, the trafficking of the auction block, and the forced campus labor of enslaved men, women, and children. The founding impulse was civic generosity; the system it erected legitimized human commodification.

Three centuries later, Simon Sebag Montefiore records a revealing moment in the Soviet countryside. Joseph Stalin was riding in an armored motorcade when he spotted an elderly peasant woman struggling to push a heavy, loaded wooden cart up a steep, rutted hill. Moved by a sudden philanthropic urge, Stalin ordered his entire convoy to halt. He stepped out, approached the woman, and asked what she needed, offering to give her money on the spot.

He turned to his ministers and security detail. Not a single person in the Politburo entourage had a single ruble. They were so thoroughly insulated by power, so completely elevated above ordinary life, that they had forgotten that people pushing carts cannot eat ideological promises.

Both moments expose the fundamental paradox of value that philanthropy always triggers. Wealth either rationalizes its own extraction through institutional prestige, or it becomes so detached from material reality that it arrives at the crisis with empty pockets.

Aristotle identified this enduring paradox over two millennia ago in Athens when he wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics that to give away money is an easy matter and in any man’s power; but to decide to whom to give it, how much, when, and for what purpose, is neither in every man’s power nor an easy matter.

Today, the ground beneath human labor, creativity, and knowledge is shifting faster than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. The World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, tasks performed exclusively by human beings will collapse to barely thirty percent. Over seventy percent of all productive work will be executed either by autonomous systems or through human-machine collaboration.

Technologists frequently present three diverging paths for this transition: a world of shared abundance where machines liberate human potential; a grinding plateau where workers become permanent gig laborers paying rent on their own productivity; or a white-collar collapse where entry-level apprenticeships vanish, and the holders of compute retreat into private enclaves.

Left to commercial incentives, the market has already chosen its default path. Capital does not fund the commons; it builds tollbooths. Two hundred and seventy years ago, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Discourse on Inequality that civil inequality was born the moment someone fenced off a piece of common earth and said, “This is mine.” Today, frontier AI labs have done the exact same thing to the common mind—extracting the uncompensated abstract labor of human writers, musicians, artists, and programmers to train closed models, and then charging those same creators perpetual subscription fees simply to access the tools of their own thought. That is not a technological Golden Age; that is digital sharecropping.

As Financial Times editor David Pilling observes in The Growth Delusion, our economic metrics deify transaction flows while ignoring collective well-being and the commons. Under Gross Domestic Product, open-source repositories and shared public libraries like Wikipedia register as economically invisible, while enclosing that same knowledge behind private paywalls registers as historic economic growth. If we allow market metrics alone to dictate the development of AI, GDP will soar precisely as the common intellectual wealth of humanity is enclosed.

Philanthropy cannot treat this historic rupture as another predictable grant cycle for workforce retraining. Handing out modest cash grants to displaced workers while five mega-cap balance sheets monopolize the operating system for human cognition is merely Stalin searching his pockets for nonexistent rubles.

Philanthropy’s historic mandate has never been the passive infusion of cash. Its true power is doing what commercial markets refuse to do: absorbing pre-commercial risk, defending open digital public goods, and shifting sovereignty directly to the people on the ground.

Our task in this generational inflection point is not to marvel uncritically at code, nor to retreat into nostalgia. Our task is to decide whether we leave the cognitive architecture of tomorrow in the hands of an enclosed monopoly—or deploy patient capital to build the open infrastructure that lets the person pushing the cart take the wheel.

Fact-Checking, Philosophical & Research Dossier

1. Alexis de Tocqueville: The Art of Association & Industrial Aristocracy

Primary Source: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II (1840).
On the Art of Association (Book II, Chapter 5): “In democratic countries the knowledge of how to combine is the mother of all other knowledge; on it depends the progress of all the others.” Tocqueville identifies civic association and collective philanthropy as democracy’s foundational defense against bureaucratic despotism and elite capture.
On Industrial Aristocracy (Book II, Chapter 20): Tocqueville explicitly warns that the rise of industrial manufacturing and technological monopolies threatens to reintroduce feudal hierarchies: “The friends of democracy must keep their eyes anxiously turned in this direction; for if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter.”

2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Enclosure of the Commons

Primary Source: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Second Discourse, 1754).
Core Concept: Rousseau traces the origin of structural inequality to the enclosure of the common earth: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’… was the real founder of civil society.” This serves as the classical philosophical antecedent to the enclosure of digital training data, open-source code, and cultural archives by proprietary AI platforms.

3. Aristotle: The Ethics of Giving

Primary Source: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1109a27–30; also Book IV, Chapters 1–2 (Liberality and Magnificence).
Core Concept: Aristotle defines virtuous giving not by financial volume, but by proportionate moral judgment: giving to the right recipients, the right amount, at the right time, and for the right purpose. He distinguishes unreflective patronal spending from true civic beneficence.

4. The Dark Enlightenment & Neoreactionary Ideology

Primary Thinkers: Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) and Nick Land.
Philosophical Formulation: Explicitly critiques liberal democracy as an inefficient, obsolete administrative apparatus (“the Cathedral” / “outdated hardware”), proposing neocameralism—the reconstitution of sovereign states and public institutions as private joint-stock corporations governed by CEO-monarchs. Influential across select Silicon Valley venture circles and accelerationist tech leaders.
Effective Altruism (EA) & Longtermism: Critiqued extensively across political economy for subordinating immediate material justice to speculative, long-horizon risk modeling, frequently providing an ethical shield for unchecked capital accumulation.

5. Harvard “College Corn” & The Legacy of Slavery

The Crowdsourcing Campaign (1644): The Commissioners of the United Colonies, prompted by Rev. Thomas Shepard, asked every family in New England to contribute an annual “peck of corn, or twelve pence” to support scholars at Harvard College. Recognized in colonial historiography as North America’s earliest widespread public subscription drive for higher education.
The Legacy of Slavery (1636–1783): In 2022, the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery released its comprehensive report documenting that over 70 Black and Indigenous individuals were enslaved by Harvard leadership and faculty, with institutional endowment growth deeply dependent on Caribbean sugar plantations and the transatlantic slave trade.

6. Stalin’s Motorcade & The Moneyless Entourage

Primary Source: Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.
Historical Analysis: Demonstrates the absolute insulation of the Soviet command elite where money was irrelevant, rendering personal charity functionally impotent. Analyzed by Benn Jordan (You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism, 2025) as a metaphor for elite tech detachment.

7. World Economic Forum (WEF) Workforce Data

Task Shift Projection (2025 vs. 2030): The WEF Future of Jobs series measures the “Share of all work-tasks.” In 2025, human-only tasks represent ~48%, tech-performed tasks represent ~15%, and human-tech collaboration represents ~37%. By 2030, human-only tasks collapse to ~30%, while tasks executed primarily by technology (~28–30%) or through human-tech collaboration (~40%) expand to over 70%.
Job Churn: Projected displacement of 90M–92M jobs against 130M–170M new roles created.

8. David Pilling: The Growth Delusion & The Commons Paradox

Primary Source: David Pilling, The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations (Bloomsbury / Tim Duggan Books).
Core Concept: Pilling illustrates how Gross Domestic Product (GDP) deifies transaction velocity while ignoring unpriced human utility. Digital commons and open-source assets like Wikipedia contribute immense human value but register as near-zero in GDP, whereas enclosing that same knowledge behind private paywalls registers as artificial growth. Pilling highlights how aggregate growth metrics conceal extreme distribution inequality and structural precarity.

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