What I Would Tell the Founders About American Technology

Author: Christian Keil Publication: Arena Magazine (print quarterly, Technology section), January 25, 2026 URL: https://arenamag.com/articles/what-i-would-tell-the-founders-about-american-technology One-line: If you had five minutes with a Founding Father in the 250th year of the republic, the report would be two clauses long — the Union survived, and there’s an American flag on the moon — and the hard part would be explaining why Americans today talk as though neither had happened.

The argument

Keil opens with the thought experiment in the title and immediately contrasts two registers of the national conversation. On one side, the declinist register: Rolling Stone asking whether we are witnessing the fall of the American empire, Francis Ford Coppola quoted in the Guardian on possibly losing the republic, Vox asking after Charlie Kirk’s assassination whether America is on the brink of civil war. On the other side, the answer he would actually give, which he sets as its own paragraph and which is the essay’s spine: the Union survived, and there’s an American flag on the moon.

He lists the catalogue of things the country was supposed not to survive, each closing with the same refrain. A civil war in which eleven of thirty-four states seceded, 2% of all Americans died, the national debt rose 3,300% in five years, and habeas corpus was suspended — and the Union survived. Two global wars with Americans drafted across oceans against a dictatorship that had conquered continental Europe — and the Union survived. A social revolution extending the founding ideals to every American regardless of race or sex, alongside wave after wave of technological revolution — and the Union survived.

Then the present tense: 340 million Americans in 50 states; 0.5% infant mortality; average life expectancy of 78; under 2% in agriculture against 90% in 1776; fifteen times the daily energy consumption; instant conversation with almost any human on Earth from a pocket device; aircraft that reach anywhere within a day; rockets that leave the planet.

The structural move is the essay’s best idea, and it is a deliberate borrowing. Keil says the harder sell is not convincing a Founder that 2026 is astonishing — it is convincing you. His frame for that is David Foster Wallace’s fish parable, quoted directly: we are so completely immersed in engineered abundance that we cannot perceive it. The rest of the piece is a systematic attempt to make the water visible by describing 1776 in detail, category by category:

• Water. No household plumbing; every drop hauled; a few gallons a day; beer, cider or whiskey drunk instead out of fear of disease — a well-founded fear in a pre-filtration, pre-germ-theory world where water carried dysentery and typhoid.
• Food. Nine in ten Americans in agriculture; no refrigeration; salted meat requiring hours of soaking; scurvy a real winter threat because produce could not travel.
• Shelter. Insulation effectively unknown; smoky hearths as the only heat; Jefferson unable to write a complaint about the cold at Monticello because his inkwell had frozen. The detail that reframes the era: firewood may have been more than a quarter of the 1776 economy, with a typical household burning around forty cords — roughly 70 tons — a year.
• Sights and smells. Washington spending the equivalent of $15,000 a year on candles; a beeswax candle costing about a laborer’s daily wage; most people using putrid tallow or simply accepting the dark — and a sky “completely alive with stars,” which Keil says is the one part of 1776 he envies. Cities with no indoor plumbing, chamber pots emptied from windows for the “night soil man,” streets smelling of manure or rotting trash, and the nosegay worn to cope.
• Medicine. Doctors still balancing humors, no anesthesia; 40% of children dead before five; those who reached five could expect sixty years. Washington died at 67 of what was probably a survivable throat infection.
• Comfort. Hundreds of hours of labor in a single shirt — flax grown, harvested, retted, broken, scutched, heckled, spun, woven — so most people owned one good set of clothes, valuable enough to appear in wills.
• Energy and work. A human generates about 75 watts, a horse about 750, a gallon of gasoline 33,000 watt-hours. News moved at the speed of a horse: the Declaration took 29 days to travel the 550 miles from Philadelphia to Charleston.
• Travel. Rare to go more than a few dozen miles from home; Boston to New York a week on horseback, or five days on the stagecoach optimistically named “The Flying Machine.”

Against this he sets an ordinary evening in his own house, written as a single accumulating paragraph — a lit 72-degree room in winter, an electric car, a week of groceries, fresh vegetables in January, filtered on-demand water, a mother-in-law visiting from 2,000 miles away, children born safely in clean hospitals, a basketball game from Seattle on half a screen, and a $5.43 scented candle that is not made of spermaceti.

His conclusion is conditional and he is precise about it: America is not perfect and still faces profound challenges, but material progress is demonstrably possible. “I do not believe things automatically will get better, but I know that things can get better if we make them so.”

The essay closes on a joke that is also a thesis about the word in its title — that “Founder” is used considerably more liberally in 2026 than it once was, especially in one region of Northern California.

Notable quotes

The Union survived, and there’s an American flag on the moon.

I do not believe things automatically will get better, but I know that things can get better if we make them so.

Its pair

This essay and More Perfect are one argument in two formats, and Keil says so in the text: he mentions having written “a 350-page presentation explaining why” and later directs readers to “my report, More Perfect.” The essay is the thesis at a few thousand words; the report is the same thesis as 346 sourced slides. Read either alone and it looks like an op-ed or a data dump; read together and the essay is the claim and the deck is the evidence.

Archived text

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Connections

• Christian Keil — the author; per his bio he invests in startups that promote the national interest as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and posts as @pronounced_kyle.
• More Perfect — the companion report. Cross-linked deliberately; see “Its pair” above.
• Historical Futurism — the essay is a pure worked example: reason about the future by taking the full 250-year baseline seriously rather than extrapolating from this year’s mood.
• Progress Studies — the 1776-vs-now inventory is the genre’s standard move, done unusually well because the categories are domestic rather than macroeconomic.
• Optimism — and specifically Keil’s careful qualification of it: proactive rather than automatic, conditional on people acting.
• This Is Water — the borrowed frame. Keil quotes Wallace’s fish parable directly to explain why invisible progress is the hardest kind to argue for.
• American Dynamism — the investment thesis this essay is the public case for.
• Energy — the human-75W / horse-750W / gallon-of-gasoline-33,000Wh comparison is the cleanest statement of what the energy transition actually bought.