What Happened In The Race In July?
This week's note starts with the monthly update for July - where we try to gather up all the events we've studied during the month and tell you where we think things stand. The result - there's still a bias of activity toward centralization, but the window of contestability is still open. Looking at specific lanes, National Security was notably more centralized and closed during July, while Infrastructure Miniaturization and Civic Infrastructure were still wide open and leaning toward decentralization. Much more detail at the links below.
Our major papers this week include an overview of actual labor force changes that seem to indicate the imminent death of the human-powered economy might be overstated - at least so far. The predictions that AI would force massive layoffs in a very short time aren't bearing out. It's much more nuanced than that.
The second paper is the first in a new series that will explore the concept of 'capacity governance.' AI is forcing us to consider how our fractured decision-making public bodies can cope with the scale of demands data centers are bringing. This first paper outlines the demand we can see coming - and it's truly massive, on a scale of infrastructure development we literally have never seen in the US. Is our current manner of managing all the demands up to the task?
I hope you find these perspectives enlightening and helpful.
Where The Race Stands - July 2026
July’s strongest public actions show that the window of contestability remains real. States can create enforceable duties. Regulators can reach critical providers. Competition authorities can require access at controlled platform layers. Communities can organize, pause, appeal, and sometimes alter infrastructure trajectories. Public institutions can also begin to purchase shared capacity rather than merely subsidize private scale.
But the month’s harder-to-reverse developments point in the opposite direction. Power and compute were committed for long periods. Federal agencies became gatekeepers for sites, recipients, and suppliers. AI providers moved deeper into institutional and personal operating layers. Firms began reorganizing teams and authority around AI before worker-side institutions could respond. The central July lesson is therefore not that the window closed. It is that the actors capable of making durable commitments are still moving faster than the institutions capable of contesting them.
Read the latest Scoreboard Review →
The AI Layoff Story Is Too Simple
AI is not simply replacing jobs. It is compressing teams, shifting work outside firms, concentrating implementation expertise, and changing who holds authority. The early workforce struggle is over who controls the redesign—and whether workers can contest it.
From Land Use to Capacity Governance: The AI Infrastructure Problem Coming Into View
AI data centers are no longer merely local land-use projects. They are claims on regional power, water, infrastructure, and public capacity. Can our distributed institutions govern the whole before the choices become difficult to reverse?