Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University. He previously clerked for the Montana Supreme Court.
The "pacing problem" is the most worrying phenomenon you've never heard of but already understand. In short, it refers to technological advances outpacing laws and regulations. It's as easy to observe as a streaker at a football game.
Here's a quick summary: It took 30 years from the introduction of electricity for 10 percent of households to be able to turn on the lights; 25 years for the same percentage of Americans to be able to pick up the phone; about five years for the internet to hit that mark; and, seemingly, about five weeks for ChatGPT to spread around the world.
Ask any high schooler and they’ll tell you that a longer deadline will lead to a better grade. Well, what’s true of juniors and seniors is true of senators and House members – they can develop better policies when they have more time to respond to an emerging technology. The pacing problem, though, robs our elected officials of the time to ponder how best to regulate something like artificial intelligence: As the rate of adoption increases, the window for action shrinks.
A little more than a year out from the release of ChatGPT, it’s already clear that generative AI tools have become entrenched in society. Lawyers are attempting to use it. Students are hoping to rely on it. And, of course, businesses are successfully exploiting it to increase their bottom lines. As a result, any attempt by Congress to regulate AI will be greeted by an ever expanding and well-paid army of advocates who want to make sure AI is only regulated in a way that doesn’t inhibit their client’s use of the novel technology.
ChatGPT is the beginning of the Age of AI. Another wave of transformational technologies is inevitable. What’s uncertain is whether we will recognize the need for some regulatory imagination. If we stick with the status quo – governance by a Congress operated by expert fundraisers more so than expert policymakers – then the pacing problem will only get worse. If we instead opt to use our regulatory imaginations, then there’s a chance that future surges in technology can be directed to align with the public interest.
Regulatory imagination is like a pink pony – theoretically, easy to spot; in reality, difficult to create. The first step is to encourage our regulators to dream big. One small step toward that goal: Create an innovation team within each agency. These teams would have a mandate to study how the sausage is made and analyze and share ways to make that process faster, smarter and more responsive to changes in technology.
The second step would be to embrace experimentation. Congress currently operates like someone trying to break the home run record – they only take big swings and they commonly miss. A wiser strategy would be to bunt and see if we can get any runners in scoring position; in other words, Congress should lean into testing novel policy ideas by passing laws with sunset clauses. Laws with expiration dates would increase Congress’ willingness to test new ideas and monitor their effectiveness.
Third, and finally, Congress should work more closely with the leading developers of emerging technologies. Case in point, Americans would benefit from AI labs like OpenAI and Google being more transparent with Congress about what technology they plan to release and when. Surprise announcements may please stakeholders but companies should instead aim to minimize their odds of disrupting society. This sort of information sharing, even if not made public, could go a long way toward closing the pacing problem.
Technological “progress” does not always move society forward. We’ve got to address the pacing problem if advances in technology are going to serve the common good.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.