‘To grasp the world of today we are using a language made for the world of yesterday. And the life of the past seems a better reflection of our nature, for the simple reason that it is a better reflection of our language.’ Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars (1939)
In the past, advances in science and technology helped humans to strip away some of the mystery of the world. Max Weber, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, identified the central feature of modernity as Entzauberung, translated as de-magification or disenchantment. This was the process by which magic and superstition were replaced by rational observation as the preferred means for explaining the mysteries of life. The present generation may be the first to experience the opposite effect, the re-magification of the world. As time goes on we’ll increasingly find ourselves surrounded by technologies of extraordinary power, subtlety, and complexity—most of which we can barely understand, let alone control. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology,’ says Arthur C. Clarke, ‘is indistinguishable from magic.’1 If that’s right, then the digital lifeworld holds in store a magic show quite unlike anything we’ve seen.
Before now, we’ve never had to coexist with nonhuman systems of exceptional power and autonomy. We’ve never lived in a world where technology is seamlessly integrated into the fabric of social life—pervasive, connective, sensitive, constitutive, and immersive all at once. We don’t know what it’s like for large swathes of our lives to be recorded, tracked, and processed. As we journey onward into the digital lifeworld, the main risk is that we lose track of our political and moral intuitions, unwilling or unprepared to think critically about changes that we come to take for granted. In this chapter, we examine the intellectual tools that can help us prevent this from happening.
We begin with the concept of politics itself, looking to find an appropriate definition for the twenty-first century. We then turn to political concepts more generally—the building blocks that frame and structure the way we think about politics. Next, we take a brief look at the discipline of political theory, which is concerned with the development and analysis of such concepts. Finally, we consider a bold new endeavour within that discipline, dedicated to understanding the future of political ideas. Politics, language, and time: these are the themes of this chapter.2 By the end, we will be well prepared for the analysis in Part II.
You may be relieved to learn that there is no inherently right or wrong definition of ‘politics’. Like all concepts, it is a construct of the human mind, invented to describe phenomena in the world. No activity comes labelled ‘political’ or ‘non-political’.3 Every linguistic community—that is, every group of people sharing the same expectations about the use of language—is free to say that some things are political and are others are not.
Most people have a rough idea of what they think politics is: how and why we live together, the ways we govern ourselves, and so forth. But we can be more precise. For some, politics is synonymous with government: the process by which lawmakers decide on society’s collective goals and devise laws and policies through which they can be realized. On this view, politics is something that takes place in parliaments, government buildings, and town halls, under the control of politicians and civil servants. The average citizen may participate in politics (so understood) to a greater or lesser extent, through voting or activism, depending on both the nature of the state and that citizen’s own inclinations.
An alternative view is that politics can be found almost everywhere,4 not just in the public realm but in private too: between friends and colleagues, and within families; in clubs, teams, and religious establishments; in government but also in art, architecture, science, literature, and embedded in language itself. Politics is present wherever there is cooperation, conflict, or control; or wherever it is possible that some particular social relation might be ordered differently, from workplace politics to sexual politics. On this view, politics isn’t something you can avoid or ignore.
Politics can therefore be understood narrowly or broadly, with a range of perspectives in between. And within every perspective there will always be a clutch of hotly contested sub-perspectives. One area of controversy, for instance, is whether a dictatorship can be called a political system. Some scholars say that reconciling differing interests through political institutions (like parliaments or congresses) is the very essence of politics. One person ruling brutally in his own interests isn’t merely a bad political system: it’s not a political system at all.5 Others disagree, arguing that this perspective wrongly elevates one particular conception of politics—a liberal one—above all others, including dictatorship, which can qualify as political just the same. Another grey area is whether war is part of politics as opposed to something distinct. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz famously believed that war is the ‘continuation of politics by other means’, yet scholars such as Sir Bernard Crick and Hannah Arendt argue that war represents the breakdown of politics, not politics itself.6
You may already be clutching your cranium in despair. How are we supposed to make sense of the future of politics when we can’t even agree on what politics is? The good news is that, as I mentioned before, there is no inherently right or wrong answer. The bad news is that it does still matter—a lot—which definition we choose to adopt. This is because a too-narrow definition can wrongly exclude certain topics from the political agenda. A classic example relates to the treatment of gender and sexuality. As Judith Squires argues, a narrow conception of politics-as-government excludes, by definition, the private sphere of domesticity and sexuality from political discourse.7 This is significant because, as anyone who has chaired a meeting knows, the surest way to stop something being done or changed is to prevent it from being on the agenda in the first place.8 A definition of politics that only includes the formal institutions of government means that the issue of male violence against women is never even discussed. This gives rise to a political discourse which is not merely incomplete, but prejudicial. This—brace yourself—has been called ‘the politics of politics’.9
But hold on, it might be objected, what’s wrong with saying that gendered violence should be part of the discussion, but it doesn’t have to be part of political discussion? Just as scientists shouldn’t lose sleep over whether a particular discovery can properly be called a development in biology, chemistry, or medicine, why should it matter whether a thing counts as ‘politics’ or not?
There are at least two answers to these questions. The first is that political discourse is closely linked to political power: if a particular topic is part of mainstream political discussion, on the lips of politicians, commentators, academics, lobbyists, and campaigners, it’s likely to have more impact than one that is siphoned off into a separate conversation. The second answer, related to the first, is that politics has a special quality of seriousness and gravity. Yes, politics can be tawdry, sleazy, and frustrating; and political discourse is often shallow and crude. But to say something is a political issue is, implicitly, to say that it’s an issue of importance, of relevance to the community as a whole. Campaigners recognize this. It’s why the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s fought so hard to convince the world not merely that the personal is relevant, or the personal is important, but that the personal is political. It’s partly why, borrowing the phrase, I now say the digital is political.
How we choose to define politics will affect our ability to think incisively about politics in the digital lifeworld. There is a risk, in adopting crusty or timeworn definitions of politics, that we blind ourselves to new developments that would not fall under the old definition but which are plainly political in nature. For example, a popular view among scholars is that what makes politics truly distinctive is the notion of the use of force by the state.10 According to this view, the state is distinguished from other forms of collective association, like golf clubs, by the fact that it alone can compel you to obey its rules by the (more or less legitimate) threat or actual use of force. If you don’t pay your taxes, state officials can deprive you of your liberty by handcuffing you and hauling you off to prison. By contrast, if you fail to pay your membership fees at the golf club, the club cannot imprison you in the caddyshack. However, the ‘force’ definition of politics assumes that humans only govern themselves using rules set by the state, backed by the threat or use of force. While this may have been a reasonable assumption in the past, it won’t be in the future. As the next Part shows, in the digital lifeworld we’ll increasingly be subject to new forms of control where rules are embedded in the technology we encounter. A self-driving car that cannot drive over the speed limit because its software prevents it from doing so presents a quite different constraint on a human driver than a car which can drive at that speed but whose driver refrains from doing so in the face of potential punishment by the state. This raises fundamental questions of power and liberty—the very stuff of politics—even though no one has necessarily been forced to do anything by the state. The ‘force’ definition is thus inadequate because it excludes a relevant line of inquiry from the start.
I propose a broad and inclusive definition of politics that allows us to be confident that when we think about politics in the future, we don’t inadvertently close our minds to new and radical social formations not yet come into being. It’s as follows:
Politics refers to the collective life of human beings, including why we live together, how we order and bind our collective life, and the ways in which we could or should order and bind that collective life differently.
This definition does not presuppose any particular form of political system. In fact, all it assumes is (a) that humans will continue to live collectively, (b) that our collective life is capable of being ordered in more than one way, and (c) that our collective life is capable of being bound in more than one way. These are minimal suppositions, allowing us to proceed with an open mind.
Imagine it’s election season and you are watching a political advertisement. The clip shows a politician, mid-speech, standing behind a podium. He wears a dark suit and a warm smile. He’s reaching the climax of his speech: ‘Liberty. Justice. Democracy.’ With each word of the slogan, he brings his fist emphatically into an open palm. The crowd cheers and he continues, lifting his voice over the applause, ‘You know that’s what I stand for. And I promise you today, that if you give me your vote, I will make these ideals a reality for you, your families, and all the people of this great nation. That is my pledge.’ The oration ends, the crowd erupts, the politician waves, confetti cannon explode, music pumps, the advertisement finishes, and you switch off the television.
Has he won your support?
Liberty, justice, and democracy. Your first thought is that the country could certainly do with more of those. But after a moment you begin to wonder: if he’s for liberty, justice, and democracy, what’s the other candidate for? Unfreedom? Injustice? Tyranny? It can’t be that simple. In fact, you begin to recall, doesn’t she also say that she’s in favour of those things? Isn’t it just that her ideas of liberty, justice, and democracy mean something different?
Next, imagine that you’re at a dinner party and the person next to you begins to lecture you about her political views. You listen, politely and noncommittally, as she gets more and more animated, concluding, with a flourish of her fork, ‘anyway, it doesn’t matter what I think. Or what you think. We don’t live in a democracy any more. All the power in this country is in the hands of business élites and the mainstream media.’ Walking home that evening, you wonder whether you agree with what she said. If by ‘democracy’ she meant the formal system by which citizens of a country elect political leaders to generate legislation, then you don’t agree. Private interests may have a powerful influence on the legislative process—too powerful in your view—but that hasn’t done away with the democratic system altogether. But if by ‘democracy’ she meant something broader, like the general principle that every person ought to have an equal say in the political decisions that govern their lives, then maybe she has a point. What hope do ordinary folk have to make their voices heard equally when corporate lobbyists can schmooze politicians in expensive hotels and resorts? And what did she mean by power? If she meant that business and the media literally control the country—setting the agenda, making rules, enforcing them—then that would be going too far. Perhaps what she really meant was that business, lobbyists, and the media disproportionately influence the laws of the land.
Power, liberty, democracy, justice—these are fundamental political concepts. We use them when thinking and speaking about politics.11 Yet as the tales of the politician and the dinner party show, each concept can have more than one meaning. It’s possible, for example, that I define the concept liberty as being freedom from government intrusion, while you define it as the ability to choose your own goals and pursue them to the best of your natural ability. Both of us are still using the concept of liberty acceptably. Neither of us is wrong. We say that these are different conceptions of the same concept.12 The only limit on the way we use concepts is that each one has some part of it, some irreducible core, that cannot be taken away without the concept ceasing to mean what it means.13 The irreducible core of liberty, arguably, is the absence of restraint—which was present in both our definitions. We just differed on the nature of the restraint in question—government intrusion or lack of autonomy.
Who determines what the irreducible core of a given concept should be? Everyone. Or at least, everyone in the same linguistic community. The meaning of a concept is determined by how it’s used by the community as a whole. I can’t sensibly use a word to mean one thing if everyone else thinks it means something different. That’s why I can’t meaningfully say that liberty means ice cream, or that justice means the colour blue: there wouldn’t be enough peers in my linguistic community who recognized that as an acceptable definition. Concepts have no objectively right or wrong definition; what matters is whether a particular usage would be acceptable—or becoming acceptable—‘to a significant number’ of its users.14
The difference between linguistic communities’ usage of concepts can be crucial. When a British person hears the word ‘liberal’, she might think of someone who supports minimal government interference in the economy and civil society. An American who hears the word ‘liberal’ may imagine precisely the opposite—something more akin to a socialist who favours a larger welfare state. The differences are even starker when time, as well as place, is introduced as a variable. Take the concept of property. To us, property generally refers to things. This seems obvious, but it was not always the case. In Babylon in around 1776 BC, property could just as easily refer to people, as children were owned by their parents. If I killed your daughter, my own daughter would be executed in restitution.15 Similarly, today we consider it obvious that property can be bought and sold. Yet in very early Greek and Roman law, the sale of property was pretty much forbidden, as it belonged not to individuals but to families, including dead ancestors and unborn descendants.16 Hence Plato’s Athenian in the Laws:17
you are the owners neither of yourselves nor of this property, which belongs to your family as a whole, past and to come
There are many other examples. In seventeenth-century England, the concept of revolution, borrowed from astronomy, meant the restoration of a previous form of government. After the French Revolution in 1789 it assumed entirely the opposite meaning—that of abrupt and violent political change.18 The term ‘new media’ is widely used today to describe online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. Back in the early 1940s, the US Supreme Court used the term to refer to a truck carrying a bullhorn.19
It’s not just political concepts that change in meaning across time and place. The same has historically been true of terms in science and technology. Before Sir Isaac Newton, for instance, the words force, mass, motion, and time had no precise scientific meaning. Newton endowed them with the strict definitions that have lasted for centuries. Similarly, in the nineteenth century, natural philosophers ‘mathematicized’ the word energy, which previously meant vigour or intensity, into a central concept in the discipline of physics.20 Today, a computer is a machine that sits on your desk. A hundred years ago, a computer was a person, usually a woman, who performed arithmetic and tabulation.21
Why might the same concept mean something different in a different time or place? In short, communities adapt their language to the political, social, and cultural needs of their time. As Karl Marx observes, the ‘production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness,’ is ‘at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men.’ 22 What we call our perspective is drawn deeply from our cultural and social environment. For this reason, the sociologist Karl Mannheim argues in Ideology and Utopia (1929) that even knowledge can be dated according to its historical style, just like works of art or architecture. ‘Strictly speaking’ he says:23
it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him.
A still more radical position, championed by Marx, holds that in every epoch ‘the ruling ideas’ are ‘the ideas of the ruling class’.24 On this view, a particular group of people produces and distributes ideas that serve its own selfish interests.
We do not need to go as far as Marx or even Mannheim to see the wisdom in what they say. Political concepts do not fall from the sky. Each one is dreamed up and used by persons living and thinking in a particular time and place. As the examples of property and revolution show, when times change, we adapt our old concepts to deal with the new facts of life. Old ideas can be salvaged and repurposed for new ends. As you’ll see in the remainder of this book, many venerable concepts, categories, distinctions, theories, and arguments can (with a little care) continue to guide us in the future as they did in the past.
Sometimes, however, an epoch breaks so comprehensively from the past that it requires the coinage of entirely new concepts. ‘In such busie, and active times,’ said Thomas Sprat in 1667, ‘there arise more new thoughts of men, which must be signifi’d, and varied by new expressions.’25 In The Age of Revolution (1996) Eric Hobsbawm lists some of the words that were invented or gained their modern meanings in the short period from 1789 to 1848:26
‘industry’, ‘industrialist’, ‘factory’, ‘middle class’, ‘capitalism’, and ‘socialism’. They include ‘aristocracy’ as well as ‘railway’, ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ as political terms, ‘nationality’, ‘scientist’, and ‘engineer’, ‘proletariat’, and (economic) ‘crisis’. ‘Utilitarian’ and ‘statistics’, ‘sociology’ and several other names of modern sciences, ‘journalism’ and ‘ideology’, are all coinages or adaptations of this period. So is ‘strike’ and ‘pauperism’.
What new words have come about in our own time? Since 2000, the Oxford English Dictionary has admitted the words ‘internet’, ‘CCTV’, and ‘geek’, together with ‘wiki’, ‘microchip’, ‘metadata’, ‘machine learning’, ‘double click’, ‘cyber-’, ‘glitch’, ‘genetic engineering’, ‘transhumanism’, ‘text message’, ‘upload’, and ‘web site’, as well as many others. Some entries, like ‘world wide web’ and ‘Information Superhighway’, already sound dated.
Political language is supple: concepts are subject to change depending on the usage of the linguistic community at any given time. There are no eternal concepts, no eternal meanings. This also means that we cannot simply assume that there is any universal political truth, scary though that may be. In a fast-changing world, political theorists have a duty to ask how much of our current wisdom is based on the way we currently live, or used to live, and whether it would still make sense if our experience was transformed beyond recognition. Cultures that treat ideas as eternal, when in fact they are specific to a particular time, are condemned forever to describe the new in terms of the old. Their concepts, developed to explain and understand the world, instead become ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ that serve only to obscure it.27 That’s why it is necessary, from time to time, to test whether our political vocabulary is up to the task of interpreting and ordering the world. This, in large part, is the role of political theory. It is also one of the purposes of this book.
‘Politics’ is also an academic discipline. This book draws on the ideas and methods of one sub-discipline in particular: political theory. (I do not maintain a rigid distinction between the terms ‘political theory,’ ‘political philosophy,’ ‘political ideas,’ and ‘political thought’. There is no consensus on what the distinction should be, it’s hard to draw, unwieldy to sustain, and of no practical significance.) Political theorists develop and study the concepts we use to think and speak about politics, asking what they mean, where they come from, and whether it can be said that they are true, false, right, or wrong. Political concepts, which we’ve been looking at, are the substance of political theory. The next few pages are dedicated to understanding its methods. There are three: conceptual analysis, normative analysis, and contextual analysis. Don’t worry if you find them unfamiliar to begin with. This book, and not just this chapter, is dedicated to the practice of thinking like a theorist.
Ambiguity is everywhere in politics—in speeches, conversations, manifestos, pamphlets, articles, books, and blogs. A good deal of political argument, particularly on social media, is dissatisfying because participants misunderstand, misinterpret, or don’t bother to find out what the other person actually means. This is where conceptual analysis comes in. As Adam Swift explains, ‘Before we know whether we agree with someone . . . we have to know what it is she is saying’.28 Conceptual analysis is the process of trying to understand what people mean when they say things about politics.29 It involves subjecting political utterances to careful probing and questioning, teasing out definitions and distinctions in order to find clarity, consistency, and simplicity. In academic political theory, this sort of work is done in books and articles. A large amount has been written, for instance, about the different conceptions of power, liberty, justice, and democracy. In university seminars, good professors quiz their students until all ambiguity has been squeezed from their arguments. In ordinary life, conceptual analysis begins less formally, with asking someone, ‘what exactly do you mean by that?’ To the politician in the story above, we might ask: Liberty to do what? Justice for whom? And how does your vision of democracy differ from the version we currently live with?
Conceptual analysis can slice through the waffle—and, let’s be honest, bullshit—that make up so much political discourse, whether in parliaments, the media, or the academy. Political speech is sometimes designed to deceive, shut down argument, obfuscate, and bamboozle; in Orwell’s words, ‘to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind’.30 And while such trickery might be expected of a politician, it cannot be so easily forgiven in a theorist, whose role is to clarify rather than confuse. Those who insist on saying things in a complicated way, where a simple expression would do, give the discipline a bad name. (This, by the way, is also true of writing on tech.)
Of course, not all political speech can be crystal clear. Some is unclear because the world is complicated and political ideas are not always easy to explain or understand. And some is deliberately stylized or rhetorical, designed to inspire or enrage rather than clarify or classify. Confronted with the rousing battle-cry, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’ only the dorkiest pedant would reply, ‘Yes, but, pausing there, what kind of liberty are you referring to?’ In the cut-and-thrust of real-world politics, a degree of imprecision can give politicians the wiggle-room they need to reach a compromise. This is perhaps what Winston Churchill had in mind when he spoke of the ‘enormous and unquestionably helpful part that humbug plays in the social life of great peoples dwelling in a state of democratic freedom’.31 But there is enough obfuscation in the world. For our purposes it is better to remember Wittgenstein’s dictum, that ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly’.32
Conceptual analysis also involves trying to understand the moral connotations of concepts as well as their meaning. To call something gorgeous is to say both that it has certain characteristics and that those characteristics are in some way desirable. To call something foolish or repulsive is to say that it has certain characteristics and that those characteristics are undesirable. The same is true in politics. To describe something as corruption, for instance, is both to describe a state of affairs and implicitly to ascribe a negative quality to it. Nowadays, to say a process is democratic is (generally) to ascribe a positive quality to it. Words like corruption and democracy are appraisive—they have a recognized moral connotation as well as a recognized meaning.33 Not all political speech is appraisive—to call something property, for instance, is not necessarily to say something good or bad about it either way. Part of conceptual analysis is trying to understand whether a concept is being used appraisively or not.
Conceptual analysis is particularly helpful when new technologies are the focus of discussion. Technology invites the use of weird terminology which can be vague or hard to understand. Exciting new gadgets can lead even the most sober writers into foaming hyperbole. The result, too often, is analysis that is both unintelligible and hysterical. The purpose of conceptual analysis, which prizes precision above all, is to clear away the fog.
‘Normative analysis’ is simply about trying to work out what is right and wrong, good or bad, in the domain of politics. It is closely related to the disciplines of moral philosophy and ethics. What duties of justice do we owe to one another? Should we be obliged to participate in public life? What should we be free to do, and what should we be prevented from doing? Is it ever acceptable to disobey the law? These are normative questions. Normative analysis allows us, through reflection and argument, to identify principles to guide us in how we live together. It helps us to work out the difference between what is and what ought to be. As one scholar observes, ‘You could pile up a mountain of data about the differences between, say, democracies and dictatorships, but without the normative element . . . nothing would follow about which form of government ought to be implemented.’34 The most influential political theory (John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), for instance) tends to consist largely of normative analysis. But normative analysis is also something we commonly engage in during casual discussion. The rights and wrongs of collective life are what make politics interesting.
Normative theories are used to illuminate the moral rightness or wrongness of particular systems, policies, or principles. Sometimes we expect language to do the arguing for us—when use appraisive terms like corrupt or democratic—but part of normative analysis is asking not just whether a word carries a normative connotation, but whether it deserves to. Although today the word democratic is positively appraisive, for most of human history it was used as a term of insult (chapter twelve).
Contextual analysis, finally, is the work of finding out where concepts come from, why they came into existence, what they meant in the context in which they were conceived, and how their meaning has changed over time. It is closely linked to the discipline of history, specifically ‘intellectual history’ or the ‘history of ideas’. One reason to study concepts in context is that, as discussed, they change in meaning from time to time and place to place. We can’t assume that someone demanding liberty in eighteenth-century France meant the same as someone demanding liberty in twenty-first century England.
The three methods—conceptual, normative, contextual—can be fruitfully blended together. Conceptual analysis, for example, normally comes before normative analysis: it’s helpful to understand the meaning of a political statement before arguing whether it is right or wrong. But the different methods are not always kept separate. When you say, ‘Democracy means majority rule’ and I say, ‘No, democracy means full respect for the rights of minorities’, both of us are trying to say what democracy means (a conceptual claim) and what it ought to mean (a normative claim). If you then say, ‘In America in 2018, democracy means nothing if it does not mean full respect for the rights of minorities’, you’re making a point that is contextual, conceptual, and normative all at once. The idea is not to insist on the rigid separation of the three methods, but rather to be mindful about when we are thinking conceptually, when normatively, and when contextually. This will help us when we come to think about the future of politics.
Political theory is sometimes criticized for not being useful in the rough-and-tumble of real-world politics. Abstract ideas might be interesting in lecture halls and debating societies, it is said, but can do little to solve actual political problems. Theory doesn’t make the trains run on time. An idea never fed a hungry child. Your average citizen wants decent local schools and pothole-free roads, not a dreary seminar on Hegel’s theory of the dialectic. I have some sympathy with this sort of argument. Too many works of political theory get bogged down in ‘navel-gazing, intellectual masturbation’35—of the kind that seldom leads to satisfaction. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Political theory can help to provide answers to the urgent political problems of the day. Some of our greatest theory has come in times of upheaval—revolutions, world wars, civil wars—when people desperately sought to understand the crises unfolding before them. Our most powerful writing on civil disobedience, for instance, comes from the 1960s, the decade of the civil rights movement and Vietnam.
We are living through a time of equivalent upheaval. So where’s the theory?
There are three thoughts to take away from this chapter. The first is that we’re all political theorists, whether we like it or not. There is no such thing as a value-free or neutral political stance; every political utterance, act (like voting), or omission (like not voting) contains within it an implicit hierarchy of priorities and values. Political theory matters so much because it brings those priorities into focus and makes them available for rational debate. Second, political theory should be firmly rooted in the facts of life. That way, theory never becomes divorced from reality. Instead of starting with abstract ideas and theories about human nature, or the good life, we should start with the world as we expect to find it—moving from the ‘earth’ of reality to the ‘heaven’ of ideas rather than the other way round.36 Third, and most importantly, political theory should be able to give practical guidance as to how we live together.
My hope is that anyone who cares about the future of politics will contribute to the great effort of imagination that the digital lifeworld is going to require. Thinking about the future is difficult but the theoretical method, at least, ought to be simple: begin by adopting a series of predictions about the future. Then see what light our existing political ideas might shed on such a future. This could mean asking what Alexis de Tocqueville would have thought about the idea of tech-enabled direct democracy, or how Marx’s theories could be applied to the ownership and control of AI systems. If it turns out that our concepts are inadequate to describe or critique the world that’s emerging, then the final task is to develop a new political vocabulary that can better make sense of the world we’re building. That’s the approach I take from here on in.
We are ready, now, to take the first steps into virgin political territory, beginning with the most fundamental political concept of all: power.