In the spring of 1722, a 16-year-old apprentice in a Boston print shop, Benjamin Franklin, invented a middle-aged widow named Silence Dogood to publish his writings. Franklin became a printer, postmaster, scientist, and founder of libraries, fire companies, and the United States. Historians argue that newspapers, pamphlets, and almanacs spread the Revolution, and by 1776, revolutionaries saw their struggles as one continental cause. Thomas Paine, with a letter from Franklin, published *Common Sense* anonymously in 1775, writing, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Today, Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, says he is building toward “a country of geniuses in a data center”: millions of AI minds, each sharper than a Nobel laureate. Jensen Huang, whose firm Nvidia makes the chips for AI, tells governments they need “sovereign AI” to “own the production of their own intelligence.” The automated geniuses in this “country” are inventory, not citizens. Paine could not change what every other reader saw, but the owner of a social media feed powered by AI can drastically transform what users see. Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and reshaped its feeds and algorithms. Print created shared stories; the machine age personalizes the feed to one reader.