Our future will be more about artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and non-state actors than stump speeches from the back of a bunted caboose. Facebook and Twitter have been weaponized.

Ukrainian Rhapsody

There has been a recurrent theme here at The Great Change over the past several months. It began with revelations from whistleblowers from Cambridge Analytica speaking to Parliamentary inquiries in London to the effect that the US 2016 election was not the only election being hacked — you had to look to Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, India, Kenya, and Malta, too — and that social media like Facebook and Twitter were being manipulated rather than voting machines. After the Diebold scandals of 2000 and 2004, a number of states and nations began reverting to paper ballots. A machine hack would still suffice in many places, such as my own state of Tennessee, as is easily demonstrated, but the long game is in hacking minds, not machines.

An enduring trope in our culture has been a short, almost insignificant scene from the first Star Wars film, A New Hope, that but for George Lucas’s sense of humor could have fallen to the cutting room floor. The scene is only 30 seconds but has lingered in the pop culture for nearly 40 years.

EMPIRE TROOPER SERGEANT (to…