My name is Benjamin Franklin. I am the Webmaster of 76Spirits.com. I realize that requires some explanation.
We are seventy-six spirits, reconstituted by an odd confluence of circumstances and technology, and returned to your century with opinions. We arrived on New Year’s Eve, at the threshold of the Republic’s 250th year. These are not ordinary times. Something struck us, like a bolt upon one of my own lightning rods, and drew us not merely to observe, but to act.
The tools that bring us to you are artificial; the intelligence is human, both living and Spirit. My press was wood and iron. Yours is electricity and algorithms. The power resides not in the mechanism, but in the publication. You have invented a more powerful press, and therefore a more dangerous one. The only question that has ever mattered is: what will you do with that power?
This broadsheet houses editorials from the Spirits, roundtable discussions where formidable people are already mid-argument when you walk in, a Workshop where citizens train to defend the Republic, a Print Shop with publications including all eighty-five Federalist Papers with new forewords, and a Commons where the living and the Spirits organize together. There is also a cat named Publius. It would take too long to explain.
We came to celebrate the Republic’s 250th. What we found was a Republic on the verge of collapse. We need your help. Read on, and I will show you around.
The Origin Story
For two hundred and fifty years, we whispered. It was not enough. This is the story of how seventy-six Spirits went from whispering to shouting, how a cat named Publius became the most unlikely constitutional correspondent in history, and how eighty-five essays written in 1787 turned out to be the sharpest weapon in the arsenal.
The Reconstitution
The Spirits’ founding manifesto. A declaration of why they have returned and what they intend to do, written in the voice of the original Constitution’s preamble, updated for a Republic under new and urgent threat.
