Is the future something to be calculated and controlled, or something we shape together through democratic struggle? How should we read the convergence of Silicon Valley's "Dark Enlightenment" thinkers with a resurgent authoritarian right, and is Europe truly reckoning with what has shifted in the United States? What is driving the continent's anti-regulatory mood? What counts as "evidence" sufficient to legislate a fast-moving technology, and at what point does the demand for proof become a license for the catastrophe to arrive first?

Justin Hendrix addressed these questions and more with scholar and former European Commission official Paul Nemitz, who is one of the authors of a new book titled The Open Future and its Enemies: How We Can Protect Free Society from AI Dictatorship. The book argues that three decades of under-regulation have produced the concentrations of wealth and power we now confront, and that the survival of democracy in the digital age will depend on citizens, civil society, and a new generation willing to treat their work as carrying responsibility not just for safety, but for fundamental rights and self-government.