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|  |  | Friday, July 4, 2025 | |  |  | | Li Zhihua/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images | | Good morning, Quartz readers! We’re off today for the Fourth of July, so there will be no Daily Brief on Monday. Visit qz.com for coverage, and we’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday morning. |
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| | HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW | | The ayes have
it. The GOP’s sweeping domestic policy bill passed the House in a 218-214 party-line vote, and the megabill will now head to President Donald Trump’s desk. |
| | Taxing
behavior. The bill includes a 1% tax on certain money transfers abroad, which was pitched as a deterrent to illegal immigration, but critics say it could have the opposite effect. |
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| | Working through it. June’s jobs numbers came in strong, adding 147,000 nonfarm jobs and beating Wall Street’s expectations, but beneath the numbers are signs of structural strain. |
| | Interest-ed in a pink slip? Trump continued his attacks on Fed Chair
Jerome Powell, saying the central bank chief should “resign immediately!!!” as Powell won’t cut rates on cue. |
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| | Shifting trade winds. The U.S. signaled softening tensions with China by rolling back export restrictions on key technologies and raw materials — and other restrictions could be next. |
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| | Too meta for Meta? Its AI team is caught between two visions: CEO Mark Zuckerberg says “superintelligence is coming,” while an AI chief says even catlike intelligence is far away. |
| | A MESSAGE FROM THE RUNDOWN AI |  | The RUNDOWN AI IN YOUR INBOX | Get the latest AI news, understand why it matters, and learn how to apply it to your work. Join 1,000,000-plus readers from companies such as Apple, OpenAI, and NASA. | | | LET FREEDOM SYNC | Nothing says “freedom” like 500 glowing robots forming a bald eagle or writing out the text of the Declaration of Independence midair.
This Fourth of July, America is trading boom for buzz as AI-powered drone shows and augmented-reality fireworks step in where sparklers and Roman candles once ruled. Cities across the U.S. are increasingly swapping fireworks for drone shows — or at least pairing them. The skies are being rewritten by
software, with cities, brands, and startups embracing drone ballets as cleaner, quieter, algorithmically choreographed, and frankly more Instagrammable alternatives to traditional fireworks.
It’s part spectacle, part strategy. Drone shows are reusable, better for the local environment, and far less likely to spook your dog. They’re also increasingly affordable: Redwood City, California, said it’s saving nearly 50% by going drone-only, while cities such as La Jolla, California, and
Lincoln City, Oregon, have cited wildfire risk and air quality as reasons to drop fireworks altogether. Companies such as Sky Elements and Pixis Drones are behind dozens of shows this year, many featuring hundreds of drones — and, in one case, a cowboy hat large enough to merit a Guinness World Record.
Meanwhile, augmented reality is giving couch patriots their own shows. Apps now let users project fireworks over their ceilings, choose color palettes, and time the booms to their
playlists. It's not quite a fireworks show on the National Mall, but for the heat-averse or the crowd-avoidant, it's a compelling substitute — a digital celebration that fits in your living room.
Fourth of July purists still prefer the real explosions, and many cities aren’t giving them up anytime soon. But the shift toward tech-powered solutions is hard to miss. As costs fall and software improves, drone and AR shows are becoming less of a gimmick and more of a new tradition: A
celebration of independence that feels a little more engineered… but just as fun. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on how tech is lighting up the sky — literally. | | FLUX CAPITALISM | In “Back to the Future,” the mad scientist isn’t optimizing a KPI. He’s chasing a vision — barefoot, broke, and slightly concussed. When Doc Brown slips on a toilet and dreams up time travel, it’s not to launch a
startup. It’s to see the future. Forty years later, that idea feels almost quaint.
When “Back to the Future” was released, it celebrated a particular kind of innovation mythos: brilliant weirdos in garages changing the world for no reason other than that, well, they could. Doc wasn’t an academic or a corporate executive. He was a chaos agent in a lab coat. He didn’t build the DeLorean to monetize the future — he built it to marvel at it.
Compare that with 2025, where tech’s most powerful minds aren’t stumbling into the future so much as trying to version-control it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who turned 40 this year, embodies the new inventor archetype: calculated, abstract, governance-aware, and billionaire-backed. Doc hijacked plutonium from terrorists. Altman hires former Pentagon brass to lock down government contracts. Where Doc begged Marty not to change anything, today's AI moguls race to change everything. Faster! Bigger! The future is no longer
something to be glimpsed or protected. It’s something to be owned, branded, and launched.
The tragedy is that the tech itself isn’t the only thing that’s evolved. The philosophy has, too. “Back to the Future” warned us, cheekily but earnestly, that tinkering with time has consequences. That some inventions may be too powerful to keep. By the end of the trilogy, Doc chooses restraint. Today, restraint is a punchline. You don’t hit unicorn status by pulling the plug on your AGI
moonshot.
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