Death by Lightning: The Algorithm of Power

The Algorithm of Power

The Netflix limited series Death by Lightning was an excellent show and well worth watching, but it sent me on a field trip.

I’ve walked past the Garfield monument on Capitol grounds over a dozen times with only a vague understanding of the assassination. I trekked into DC and stood next to it with purpose this time. Tourists walked past without looking up. A few glanced at the inscription, “James A. Garfield, 1831-1881," and kept moving toward the dome.

I suspect the human side of the story transcends time and genre.

Glitch One: The Man Who Didn’t Want It

Garfield didn’t campaign for the presidency. He went to the 1880 Republican convention to nominate someone else. After 36 deadlocked ballots, the convention turned to him.

He tried to say no. They nominated him anyway.

What followed was four months of a man trying to quietly do good with power he never sought: fighting corruption in the spoils system, protecting the rights of Black Americans to education, and attempting to reshape a government built on patronage into something resembling a meritocracy.

Then a bullet ended it.

What strikes me about Garfield isn’t the tragedy. It was his temperament. He was a man who understood that power is a tool, not a prize. He picked it up because someone had to, did what he could with it, and the machine eventually destroyed him for trying to change it.

We don’t make many stories about that kind of leader. Mostly because that kind of leader doesn’t make for good television or reading. There’s no hunger. No ruthlessness. No wanting it badly enough.

We find that boring. I find that terrifying.

Glitch Two: The Man Who Wanted It and Had No Idea Why

Charles Guiteau is the character who haunted me.

He wasn’t a political operative. He wasn’t a radical ideologue with a manifesto. He was a failed lawyer, a failed cult member, a failed everything, who had convinced himself that he deserved a consulship in Paris because he had written a speech supporting Garfield’s campaign that almost nobody read.

He wanted power the way a drowning man wants a life preserver. Desperately. Completely. Without any plan for what to do once he had it.

When he didn’t get what he felt he was owed, he bought a gun and went to a train station.

Here’s the glitch. Guiteau is not a 19th-century aberration. He is a very modern psychological profile.

The man who is certain of his own importance. The man who confuses visibility with influence. The man who, when the system doesn’t recognize his genius, decides the system must be destroyed.

In 1881, he had pamphlets and delusions.

In 2026, he would have had a platform.

I keep thinking about what Guiteau would look like today. Not the violence, but the pattern leading up to it. The grievance threads. The audience that validates the spiral. The comment sections that mistake outrage for insight. The algorithm that cannot distinguish between a man who has something to say and a man who simply cannot stop screaming.

Guiteau didn’t lack ambition. He lacked an algorithm. And I genuinely don’t know if that would have saved him — or just made him more dangerous before the breaking point.

If Guiteau had gone viral before the assassination, would the attention have saved him or accelerated his downfall?

Glitch Three: The Persistence of Forgetting

Here is a deeper thing that I simply cannot get past. The assassination of James Garfield and the subsequent trial of Charles Guiteau was the O.J. Simpson case of the 1880s. It consumed the national conversation for over a year. Newspapers covered every detail. The country was riveted.

Both men are footnotes now.

I stood at that monument and watched tourists walk past, and I thought about the fundamental promise of the digital age that you will not be forgotten. Everything is recorded. Everything is archived. Every thought, every post, every moment of outrage or tenderness or brilliance is indexed, stored, retrievable.

And yet.

I think we risk confusing indexed with remembered.

To be remembered is to matter to someone who is thinking about you right now. To be indexed is to exist in a server somewhere, waiting for a search query that may never come.

Garfield is indexed. Nobody is thinking about him.

Does persistent presence actually change anything? Or does the volume of content just accelerate the forgetting, because there is so much more to forget?

A hundred and forty years from now, will someone stand in front of a monument, physical or digital, and ask who we were?

Will they look it up?

Will they care?

I don’t have a clean answer, but I’ll tell you what I walked away with. Garfield picked up power like it was a responsibility, trying to do something decent with it. The machine ate him.

Guiteau wanted power as if it were a cure for something broken inside him. The machine eventually consumed him too, just more slowly and more publicly.

The machine doesn’t care about your intentions. It cares about what you feed it.

We are all feeding the machine now. Every day. Every post.

So, are you Garfield or Guiteau? Not in the dramatic sense. In the quiet, daily sense.

I think that’s the choice worth making consciously before the algorithm makes it for you.