Keen On America

“Orbán rigged the electoral system to highly benefit the winner. He thought he would never face the realistic possibility of losing. When someone actually threatened his plan, he just couldn’t imagine it. And that person got more than 55% — a two-thirds-plus majority. Orbán shot himself in the foot.” — Marc Loustau
 
On April 12, Viktor Orbán — the populist who invented the illiberal playbook — got booted out of office by the Hungarian electorate. His defeat, says Marc Loustau, Harvard PhD and fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, represents a playbook for defeating illiberalism. Orbán had rigged the electoral system so dramatically — giving the winner 1.5 votes for every vote the loser got — that when Péter Magyar got more than 55 percent of the vote, Orbán’s own system destroyed him. The gods must have their fun — Hungarian poetic justice.
 
Orbán’s cronies, Loustau reports, are fleeing to Dubai with their hot rod car collections and ill-gotten gains from sixteen years in power. But the mid- and upper-tier bureaucrats, Loustau warns, are still in office. Not having any other skills, they’re going to be difficult to dislodge. Making Hungary a functional democracy again won’t happen overnight.
 
The goal of Péter Magyar’s government, Loustau says, is to “make Hungary boring again.” That should be the lesson for the anti-Trumpists in his native America, Loustau says. Build the broadest possible coalition, never kick anyone out of it, and refuse to be drawn onto the deadly culture-war terrain. When Orbán banned the Budapest Pride parade to force Péter Magyar to take a stand on LGBTQ issues, Magyar flew to a Greek island. It was, Loustau says, the smartest move of the campaign. Make America boring again. The anti-Hollywood playbook for defeating illiberalism. Are you watching Gavin & Kamala?
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Poetic Justice: Orbán’s System Destroyed Him: Orbán rigged Hungary’s electoral system to massively benefit the winner: if you get more than 55 percent of the vote, you get roughly 70 percent of parliamentary seats, and effectively 1.5 votes for every vote your opponent receives. He did this because he never imagined anyone could get above 50 percent against him. When Péter Magyar did — comfortably — Orbán’s own system gave Magyar a supermajority. Loustau’s verdict: it is rare that there is genuine poetic justice in life. This is one of those moments.
 
•       The Cronies Are Heading for Dubai: Sixteen years of a two-thirds majority in parliament allowed Orbán to pack every institution in Hungary with loyalists — friends, family, friends of friends — from top to bottom. In the end, this became part of his undoing: when you bleed out talent and fill institutions with cronies, you end up with an inept government. The most visible Orbán figures are now heading to Dubai with their hot rod car collections. But the mid-level “authoritarian cadre circles” burrowed into every institution will be much harder to remove. It will take years to restore functional public services.
 
•       Make Hungary Boring Again: The incoming government’s agenda, in Loustau’s formulation, is to make Hungary boring again. No more brinkmanship between Russia, Brussels, and Washington. No more geopolitical risk-taking. Hungary belongs in the EU, and if the EU likes anything, it is stultifying bureaucracy. That, paradoxically, may be the best thing for ordinary Hungarians. It does not signal the end of the far-right threat globally. So long as Putin is alive, Loustau argues, we must remain vigilant.
 
•       Magyar Goes to Greece: The Culture War Lesson: One of Orbán’s favourite tactics was to force opposition politicians to take a stand on LGBTQ issues. He banned the Budapest Pride parade specifically to create a trap for Magyar — either come out against the ban and look soft on “family values,” or attend the parade and look radical. Magyar’s response: he went on holiday to Greece. He wasn’t even in the country. Loustau calls it one of the slyest moves of the campaign. The lesson for Trump’s opponents: never engage on the terrain your opponent has chosen.
 
•       Can Disaffected Trumpians Defeat Trumpism? Magyar came from within Orbán’s government and broke with him at a moment of genuine moral crisis — a scandal involving pardons for those who covered up sexual abuse at state-run orphanages. That moral authority gave him a platform. Loustau’s honest assessment: disaffected Trumpians who had any dealings with Trump are radioactive, perhaps permanently. But the broader lesson holds: when government inaction harms the innocent and powerless, someone who stands up and says “enough is enough” can build a majority. Magyar didn’t win on policy. He won on decency.
 
About the Guest
 
Marc Loustau is a Harvard PhD, Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest, and author of the At the Edges Substack. He writes on Central and Eastern European politics, religion, and society.
 
References:
 
•       At the Edges by Marc Loustau — his Substack on Central and Eastern European politics.
 
•       Episode 2880: Gal Beckerman on How to Be a Dissident — the companion episode on the theory of resistance that Magyar’s campaign enacted.
 
•       Episode 2881: Adrian Wooldridge on The Revolutionary Center — on the crisis of liberalism that Orbán exploited and Magyar may have reversed.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:31) - How significant was the Hungarian election in historical terms?

(01:30) - Orbán’s authoritarianism: model for the world, now defeated

(02:56) - Was the left paranoid? How did Orbán actually lose?

(03:50) - Poetic justice: Orbán rigged the system and it destroyed him

(05:46) - Corruption uncovered: the regime unraveling

(06:38) - Sixteen years of cronyism: what remains?

(07:51) - Authoritarian cadre circles: how long to dislodge them?

(08:24) - The cronies heading for Dubai with their hot rod collections

(10:38) - Romania, Ceauşescu, and celebrat...

“Anyone that’s properly using AI now knows that you tell it what you want, it gives you a plan, carries out the work, and you judge and tweak. You’re not a passive victim — you’re an active user with outcomes in mind.” — Keith Teare
 
Do we really want a no-hands job from Silicon Valley? That Was the Week newsletter publisher Keith Teare — who thinks all tech innovation results in human progress — thinks we do. No hands, no problem, Keith says. But I’m not sure. Especially given the powers-that-be giving us that no-hands job.
 
Keith welcomes the end of what he calls the “typed” and “touched” computing era — keyboards, mice, touchscreens, and all the manifold ways we have used our hands to interact with computers since the 1980s. That’s the outcome, he predicts, of the race to AGI. So far so good. But what happens if our no-hands AI future is controlled by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook? This week these four behemoths committed 00 billion to AI infrastructure investment in 2026 alone — 2 percent of all US GDP. These companies are racing to build (and own) the foundational mechanics of AGI.
 
That’s always how it’s been, Keith says, embracing our no-hands future. I’m less open-armed. What happens if we want our hands to fend off AGI? No, I’m not so keen on a no-hands job from Silicon Valley. Especially one couched in the altruism of human progress.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       The End of the Hand-Driven Computing Era: Andrej Karpathy’s observation at Sequoia’s AI Ascent: he no longer uses his hands to do his work. He speaks to the computer; the computer acts; he judges and refines. The keyboard, the mouse, the touchscreen — all the hand-driven interfaces that have defined computing since the 1980s are entering their twilight. Karpathy calls it “software 3.0”. Keith, two years ago, wrote an editorial called “eyes, hands, ears, and mouth” about the inclusion of other human attributes beyond hands. That prediction has arrived.
 
•       $700 Billion: The CapEx Explosion: A post by @Signal framed the week’s numbers: $700 billion in AI infrastructure spending in 2026, equivalent to 2 percent of all US GDP. This kind of spending, the post observes, usually happens via governments or wars. This time, it’s four private companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — racing to build the foundational mechanics of AGI. Meta was punished by Wall Street for overspending; Google was rewarded because its numbers were strong enough to justify it. The same bet, two different verdicts, depending on your quarterly earnings.
 
•       Was the Internet Privately Built? The ARPANET Argument: Keith’s claim: innovation waves have always been privately financed. The railways, the telephone, the electricity grid, the commercial internet. Andrew’s counter: ARPANET was a massive government investment that created the protocols on which the internet runs. Keith’s response: ARPANET was a university bulletin board that created the precedent, not the infrastructure. Andrew’s response: that’s not exactly what ARPANET was. They agree that government research matters. They disagree on how much credit it deserves for what became the commercial internet.
 
•       The Revenge of the Idea Guy: Sam Altman’s line of the week. In the past, an idea person came up with a concept and then needed expensive engineers to build it. Many ideas never saw the light of day because the engineering cost was prohibitive. Now, anyone can speak an idea into existence. AI builds the plan, executes the work, and you judge and refine. That changes the economics of creativity, advertising, software development, and anything else that used to require specialist execution. The specialist is not dead — but specialists will increasingly use AI to scale themselves, rather than being hired one at a time.
 
•       Should Kids Use AI in Schools? A New Yorker piece asks what it would take to get AI out of schools. Keith’s view: the premise misunderstands how AI works now. The fear is passive students asking chatbots for answers and having their brains atrophy. The reality is that proper AI use requires active judgment at every step — telling it what you want, refining the plan, evaluating the output. If schools understand that, they embrace AI. If they don’t, they produce graduates unequipped for a world in which the idea guy with AI tools now has the power the engineering team used to have. Andrew’s prediction: the kids whose parents ban AI will eventually sue them.
 
About the Guest
 
Keith Teare is a British-American entrepreneur, investor, and publisher of the That Was the Week newsletter — a daily curation of the most important stories at the intersection of technology, business, and culture. He is a co-founder of TechCrunch and a long-time interlocutor on Keen On America.
 
References:
 
•       That Was the Week newsletter by Keith Teare — this week’s editorial: “Hand Job?”
 
•       Andrej Karpathy at Sequoia Capital AI Ascent 2026 — the Karpathy interview on Software 3.0 and the end of typed input.
 
•       @Signal, “$700 billion on AI infrastructure” — the post that framed the CapEx question.
 
•       Jessica Winter, “What Will It Take to Get AI Out of Schools?” The New Yorker, 2026.
 
•       Episode 2891: John Steele Gordon on how information technology knitted America together — the ARPANET backstory that feeds directly into this week’s argument.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:31) - Keith leads with “Hand Job?” — explaining the headline

(03:27) - Karpathy at Sequoia: the end of typed and touched input

(04:30) - CapEx: the real story of the week

(05:35) - $700 billion — 2% of US GDP on AI infrastructure

(06:38) - Was the commercial internet privately built?

(07:35) - ARPANET: pathetic bulletin board or foundational infrastructure?

(09:08) - Keith and Andrew agree to disagree on government’s role

(11:00) - Big Tech earnings: Google up, Meta down, and why

(17:00) - OpenAI’s strategy: the long game

“Trump has no strategy and no endgame. No amount of success in tactics will win. No military campaign has ever been won solely from the air.” — Jason Pack
 
Happy May Day! Today’s papers are leading with stories about Obamacare, a Gaza flotilla, and the price of oil. Everything but the story at both the front and back of our minds. Only the Wall Street Journal leads with Iran. Which is more than a bit odd, given that America is supposed to be at war there. Or is it? Jason Pack — Middle East analyst, host of the Disorder podcast, and our man in London — joins for a special May Day show on the most surreal conflict in recent memory.
 
Both sides, Pack argues, care more about the narrative war than about actual military strategy. The official word out of DC and Tehran is the same: we’re winning. But no military campaign in history has been won solely on the airwaves. Pack sees two sides that are doing their surreal best to ignore a war that they are both fighting. If you pretend it’s not happening, then maybe it isn’t. Don’t mention the war. On this May Day, everyone is Basil Fawlty.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Two Sides with No Strategy: Both Trump and the Iranian regime are more invested in the narrative war — the story of who is winning — than in having an actual endgame. Trump says the blockade will make the Iranians cry uncle. The Iranians say they are surviving and therefore winning. Neither has clearly stated what they want from this conflict: not on the nuclear file, not on territory, not on regime change. Pack’s verdict: he sees two sides that don’t even know what they want to get out of a war they’re both pretending is going well.
 
•       No Campaign Has Ever Been Won Solely from the Air: The American military has showcased extraordinary AI-enabled tactical capability in the Iran conflict. But war is about outcomes and strategy. Territory must be controlled. New leaders must be installed. These things cannot be done from altitude. The Israeli Twelve-Day War hit the head of the snake — the Iranian regime — but may have overplayed its hand. A Shia axis that was being systematically degraded could come back like a phoenix if the narrative of martyrdom and resistance is allowed to reconsolidate around shared injury.
 
•       Trump Does Projection: Pack’s most pointed observation: track what Trump accuses his adversaries of, and you learn what he is about to do. He says the blockade will make the Iranians cry uncle. Which means he is on the verge of backing down. The absolute worst outcome, Pack argues, would be Trump as the one who folds — not because America loses a war, but because it loses the credibility that underwrites the entire international order. His fear: that is exactly what is about to happen.
 
•       Pakistan: The Sleeping Giant: The story the world’s media has mostly not told: Pakistan’s role. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Pakistan has a large Shia minority and a complex relationship with Iran. It also has a complex relationship with China, with the Gulf states, and with the United States. Any escalation that involves Iran necessarily involves the question of what Pakistan does. Pack considers this one of the most under-covered dimensions of the conflict and one of the most consequential. The sleeping giant has not yet been asked to choose sides. That moment may be coming.
 
•       The First AI War: London Antisemitism and Russian Disinformation: Six antisemitic attacks in London in six weeks since the Iran war began. Pack’s argument: the disinformation driving radicalisation on social media is not purely Iranian. Russia and North Korea are seeding the most outlandish conspiracy theories about Jewish people — great replacement, Epstein, the rest — and someone with mental health problems eventually acts. This, combined with AI-enabled targeteering and logistics in the actual conflict, makes this the first AI war. Future historians will untangle what that means. For now, it means the world is more disordered than it looks from any single headline.
 
About the Guest
 
Jason Pack is a Middle East analyst, host of the Disorder podcast, and a Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He is the author of Libya and the Global Enduring Disorder and a regular contributor to international media on North Africa, the Middle East, and great power competition.
 
References:
 
•       Disorder podcast by Jason Pack — disorder.fm.
 
•       Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous — the Silicon Valley seminary argument, now tested in the first AI war.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:00) - Chapter 1

(00:31) - May Day check-in: is there even a war happening?

(02:09) - Both sides care more about the narrative than strategy

(02:37) - Trump’s lack of endgame: no military campaign is won from the air

(04:18) - How is the war covered in the Middle East?

(06:09) - Shia vs Sunni: does it still matter?

(07:54) - Hussein, martyrology, and the Shia willingness to fight the losing battle

(09:21) - Syria and the Alawis: off the map?

(11:00) - Pakistan: the sleeping giant

(14:00) - Is this the equivalent of Suez?

(18:00) - A new world order: does America want to lead it?

(22:00) - The Gulf states and the new regional order

(26:00) - Trump does projection: crying uncle

(30:00) - China, Russia, and who benefits

(34:22) - The first AI war: what will historians say?

(37:25) - AI company stocks keep going up

(38:02) - London antisemitism: six attacks in six weeks

(40:12) - Russian and North Korean disinformation driving radicalization

(42:13) - Disorder podcast: subscribe. The world needs it.

“Nobody has ever made money selling America short. We’re an extraordinary country.” — John Steele Gordon
 
To honor America’s semiquincentennial birthday, the Wall Street Journal has been celebrating the most impactful American inventions of all time:
 
1. Internet
2. Light bulb
3. Integrated circuit
4. Personal computer
5. Airplane
 
The railroad doesn’t even make the top twenty. But the business historian John Steele Gordon validates the list. Gordon’s piece for the WSJ series is titled “From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation.” His argument is that the United States was always in danger of falling apart and the telegraph saved the republic. Then radio, television, and even the now vilified internet knitted it even closer together.
 
Otto von Bismarck quipped that God looks after three things: fools, drunks, and the United States of America. Gordon agrees with the Prussian unifier of Germany. Nobody, he notes, has ever made money selling America short. As for the now venerable republic, he thinks it’s still in pretty good hands. The ever expanding national debt, however, is another matter. That certainly wouldn’t get onto Gordon’s top 250 most impactful American inventions.
 
Five Takeaways
 
•       Hanging by a Thread: The Communication Crisis at the Founding: George Washington’s fear was not philosophical: it was geographic. The original United States, stretching to the Mississippi, was larger than all of Western Europe. The trans-Appalachian West couldn’t get its commerce over the mountains — it had to go down the Mississippi, which was controlled by Spain. Washington said the West was hanging by a thread. Every subsequent expansion — to California in 1850, to Oregon and Washington — only deepened the crisis. The republic could not exist without communication. That is why the post office was almost constitutionally important in Washington’s time, and why the telegraph and the transatlantic cable were understood as national security technology, not merely as business.
 
•       The Atlantic Cable: Ten Days to Ten Seconds: In 1800, a transatlantic crossing took two months westbound and six weeks eastbound. By the 1850s, with steam, it was ten days either way. Cyrus Field — a paper merchant who knew nothing about cable technology — read about undersea cables and decided to lay one across the Atlantic Ocean. Gordon compares this to reading about Sputnik and deciding to go to Mars. It took six tries and ten years. William Thomson — Lord Kelvin — did the physics. The result: ten days to ten seconds. Basically simultaneous. The nineteenth century was right to call itself an age of miracles.
 
•       The Robber Barons Were Misunderstood: As early as the 1850s, the New York Times was calling Commodore Vanderbilt a “robber baron” — after the medieval German toll barons on the Rhine who wouldn’t let your boat pass without paying. Gordon’s verdict: the dead can’t sue, but they should. Vanderbilt built a faster, safer, cheaper transportation network than had existed before. He died the richest man in America in 1877, worth $105 million. Henry Ford did the same thing with the automobile: took a rich man’s toy invented in Germany and built one the average man could afford. Gordon sees Elon Musk’s reusable rocket in the same tradition. Nobody complained about their products. They complained about their wealth.
 
•       The Internet Is the Greatest American Invention: The Wall Street Journal’s ranking puts the Internet at number one, above the light bulb, the integrated circuit, and the personal computer. Gordon agrees. The Internet has changed everything in thirty years, and — he thinks — we’ve basically seen nothing yet. Scholars bless Google every day. Gordon spent decades going from index to index in the books behind him; today the entire intellectual world is at everyone’s fingertips. The railway, which actually unified the national economy by allowing factories in Worcester, Massachusetts to ship shoes across the continent at lower prices, doesn’t make the list. Gordon doesn’t quarrel with that either.
 
•       God Looks After Fools, Drunks, and the United States: Gordon’s July 4th assessment: optimistic about the republic, alarmed about the national debt. The debt, he says, used to be used only for wars and great depressions. It is now used to ensure that no member of Congress ever loses an election. The budget system of the federal government is an unbelievable national disgrace. But the republic itself? Bismarck was right. Nobody has ever made money selling America short. It remains, Gordon believes, a blessed country beyond any other in the history of the world. He’s not sure about the fools and the drunks. But he’s pretty sure about the Americans.
 
About the Guest
 
John Steele Gordon is an American business and technology historian and journalist. He is the author of An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power, A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable, and many other books. He writes for The Wall Street Journal and Commentary.
 
References:
 
•       John Steele Gordon, “From the Telegraph to the Smartphone: How Information Technology Unified a Nation,” The Wall Street Journal, 2026.
 
•       An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power by John Steele Gordon.
 
•       A Thread Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon.
 
•       Episode 2874: Don Watson on From One Mad King to Another — the companion episode on American history and what has always made America America.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.
 
Website
Substack
YouTube
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
 
Chapters:
 

(00:31) - The Wall Street Journal’s most impactful US inventions: Internet at number one

(01:52) - The founding fear: the US was t...

“It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland
 
Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gangs encrypt your servers and hold your data hostage until you pay — cost victims somewhere between fifty and seventy-five billion dollars a year in damage. The hackers themselves pocket around a billion. As Anja Shortland, professor of political economy at King’s College London and author of Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware, puts it: “it’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses.” The sunglasses are the ransom. The wrecked car is the damage to the rest of us.
 
Shortland is an expert in extortive crime — transactions where a legal entity has to make a deal with a criminal group under conditions of zero trust. She has studied kidnap for ransom, Somali piracy, art theft, and now the booming business of ransomware. What fascinates her is not the crime itself but the institutions that emerge in the space between the legal world and the criminal underworld: the insurance companies that price the risk, the negotiators who manage the transaction, the norms that make it possible for a corporation to pay a criminal gang and actually get its data back. In Russia, hacking Westerners isn’t even a crime. In North Korea, it’s an actual department with a small army of government employees. In Iran, it’s a foreign policy. Criminality, Shortland thus argues, is defined by whoever holds power.
 
The game-changer, she argues, is cryptocurrency. Without it, ransomware doesn’t work — you can’t move money anonymously at scale without it. Regulate cryptocurrency, and you take the profit motive out of most of what she studies. The irony is that the current American administration is amongst the most crypto-friendly in history. Meanwhile, AI — specifically Anthropic’s Claude Mythos, the hacking model that was leaked rather than released — is about to give criminals tools that only well-resourced banks and corporations can currently deploy defensively. So cybercrime will continue to boom. Expect a pile-up of wrecked cars on our information highway.
Five Takeaways
 
•       We Know You Can Pay a Million: The title of the UK edition of Shortland’s book is the most revealing line in ransomware. Criminal gangs don’t pick ransom figures arbitrarily. They spend weeks inside the victim’s systems, studying cash flow, cash reserves, and insurance coverage, before setting a demand on the painful side of affordable. The victim usually pays — because the alternative is losing access to patient records, customer data, or patents permanently. The hackers know this. The negotiation that follows is, in Shortland’s framing, a transaction between parties with zero trust and one thing in common: both want a deal.
 
•       In Russia, It’s Not a Crime: Ransomware is not a uniform global crime. In Russia, theft and extortion directed at Westerners is not considered a criminal act. In North Korea, hacking is organised as a government department — a state revenue stream, not a criminal enterprise. The line between crime and legitimacy is drawn by whoever holds power. This complicates any enforcement response: you cannot extradite a North Korean government employee. You cannot prosecute a Russian hacker in a Russian court. The only effective levers are diplomatic, financial, and technical — and all three are currently being weakened.
 
•       Insurance Orders Criminality: Shortland’s most counterintuitive argument: insurance companies are not passive bystanders in ransomware. They are active market-makers. By pricing the risk, they create the conditions under which a corporation can make a rational decision to pay. By negotiating on behalf of victims, they create norms — what a fair ransom looks like, what proof of decryption looks like, what happens if the hackers don’t deliver. Insurance, in Shortland’s telling, is what makes the criminal market function. Most people think insurance is boring. They are not thinking about this.
 
•       Cryptocurrency Is the Real Game-Changer: Ransomware as a profitable business model did not exist before cryptocurrency. Without the ability to move money anonymously at scale, without blockchain verification that payment has been received, the transaction between criminal and victim cannot be completed. Regulate cryptocurrency — apply the anti-money-laundering frameworks that govern wire transfers and bank accounts — and you take the profit motive out of most of what Shortland studies. The irony: the current American administration is among the most crypto-friendly in history, and the president’s own family has direct financial interests in the sector.
 
•       Claude Mythos and the Asymmetric AI Problem: Anthropic’s Claude Mythos — the AI model built to find software vulnerabilities, which was leaked rather than formally released — is the next phase of this war. The defensive use case is real: a well-resourced bank can use it to find and fix its vulnerabilities before attackers do. The problem is asymmetry. A large financial institution can deploy Claude Mythos defensively. Wiltshire County Council, a local hospital, a dental practice, a legal firm — the soft targets that ransomware gangs prefer — cannot. The hackers will eventually get it. The debate about who should be allowed to use it, and under what conditions, has not happened. That is what worries Shortland most.
 
About the Guest
 
Anja Shortland is a Professor of Political Economy at King’s College London and the author of Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware (Princeton University Press, 2025; US edition April 2026) and Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business. She was a member of the Ransomware Task Force.
 
References:
 
•       Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware by Anja Shortland (Princeton University Press, US edition April 2026).
 
•       Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) — referenced in the interview as the origin story of hacking culture.
 
•       Episode 2885: Keith Teare on Adulting — the week Anthropic’s Claude Mythos was discussed; the Shortland interview is the companion piece on what it means in practice.
 
About Keen On America
 
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the histo...