Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.
Americans have become accustomed to leaving bread crumbs of personal information scattered across the internet. Our scrolls are tracked. Our website histories are logged. Our searches are analyzed. For a long time, the practice of ignoring this data collection seemed sensible. Who would bother to pick up and reconfigure those crumbs?
In the off chance someone did manage to hoover up some important information about you, the costs seemed manageable. Haven’t we all been notified that our password is insecure or our email has been leaked? The sky didn’t fall for most of us, so we persisted with admittedly lazy but defensible internet behavior.
Artificial intelligence has made what was once defensible a threat to our personal autonomy. Our indifference to data collection now exposes us to long-lasting and significant harms. We now live in the “inference economy,” according to professor Alicia Solow-Niederman. Information that used to be swept up in the tumult of the Internet can now be scrapped, aggregated and exploited to decipher sensitive information about you. As Solow-Niederman explains, “seemingly innocuous or irrelevant data can generate machine learning insights, making it impossible for an individual to anticipate what kinds of data warrant protection.”
Our legal system does not seem ready to protect us. Privacy laws enacted in the early years of the internet reflect a bygone era. They protect bits and pieces of sensitive information but they do not create the sort of broad shield that’s required in an inference economy.
The shortcomings of our current system don’t end there. AI allows a broader set of bad actors to engage in fraudulent and deceptive practices. The fault in this case isn’t the substance of the law — such practices have long been illegal — but rather enforcement of those laws. As more actors learn how to exploit AI, it will become harder and harder for law enforcement to keep pace.
Privacy has been a regulatory weak point for the United States. A federal data privacy law has been discussed for decades and kicked down the road for just as long. This trend must come to an end.
The speed, scale and severity of privacy risks posed by AI require a significant update to our privacy laws and enforcement agencies. Rather than attempt to outline each of those updates, I’ll focus on two key actions.
First, enact a data minimization requirement. In other words, mandate that companies collect and retain only essential information to whatever service they provide to a consumer. Relatedly, companies should delete that information once the service has been rendered. This straightforward provision would reduce the total number of bread crumbs and, consequently, reduce the odds of a bad actor gathering personal and important information about you.
Second, invest in the Office of Technology at the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC plays a key role in identifying emerging unfair and deceptive practices. Whether the agency can perform that important role turns on its expertise and resources. Chair Lina Khan recognized as much when she initially created the office. Congress is now debating how much funding to provide to this essential part of privacy regulation and enforcement. Lawmakers should follow the guidance of a bipartisan group of FTC commissioners and ensure that office can recruit and retain leading experts as well as obtain new technological resources.
It took decades after the introduction of the automobile for the American public to support seat belt requirements. Only after folks like Ralph Nader thoroughly documented that we were unsafe at any speed did popular support squarely come to the side of additional protections. Let’s not wait for decades of privacy catastrophes to realize that we’re currently unsafe upon any scroll. Now’s the time for robust and sustained action to further consumer privacy.
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.