For decades, institutional power rested on a single advantage: controlling what individuals could access, know, and do. AI is removing that advantage. What comes next is not a better institution. It is the empowered individual. The most powerful thing about artificial intelligence is not what it can do. It is what it makes unnecessary. Specifically: the gatekeeper. The person, the institution, the platform that sits between you and what you need, and extracts value from that

William the Conqueror (1028-1087) and the Lords in the House of Lords 18 March 2026. On this date, the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act received Royal Assent, ending a system that had existed, in one form or another, since the eleventh century. Ninety-two hereditary peers — dukes, viscounts, earls, barons — lost the right that their families had held, in some cases, for nearly a thousand years: the right to sit in Parliament by virtue of birth alone. One of the departing