The Technological Republic: The End of the Democratic Narrative?

Guest author: Natalia Razovich

B.A. in International Relations from the National University of Rosario and M.A. in Sociology from Corvinus University of Budapest.

In 1979, Lyotard described the “postmodern condition” as an incredulity toward metanarratives and the end of grand narratives. He was referring, in part, to a loss of faith in the narrative of modernity and to disenchantment with the Enlightenment as a project meant to benefit all of humanity, legitimize the social order, and sustain the institutions that contributed to the emancipation of the subject as the end and meaning of history. Taking that reference as a conceptual license, it is worth asking whether we are now facing the end of the liberal democratic narrative as we know it.

On April 19, the social network X woke up to a post by Palantir, the world’s largest surveillance and data analytics company, publishing a ten-point set of principles in the form of a manifesto. The text presented a synthesis of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, written by its CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska in 2025, which openly and unreservedly proclaims the failure of the West’s democratic consensus. At least that is what follows from the maxim that “the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.”

Democracy, Platforms, and Artificial Intelligence

Since the 2008 financial crisis, two processes have grown in parallel: the crisis of liberal representative democracy and the rise of new digital media technologies. The influence of social media and digital platforms has been ambiguous and ambivalent toward democracy. At first, with the Arab Spring as the clearest example, they were interpreted as horizontal, democratic, liberating, and emancipatory tools. Yet social media quickly became echo chambers where hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and conservative, authoritarian, and nationalist currents flourished. Citizen indignation and demands for real democracy gave way to the highest levels of democratic disaffection worldwide, alongside the rise of a new wave of reactionary right-wing movements that knew how to read and use the digital ecosystem to their advantage, opening the way to an era of post-democracy.

With the emergence of generative AI, concern over its relationship with democracy moved to the center of media and academic debate, as well as into multilateral governance forums. In the end, these are two systems designed for decision-making: votes in democracy, and algorithms in almost every individual sphere of life. Once again, dichotomous readings emerged, placing the relationship between AI and democracy between optimistic and pessimistic expectations that highlight risks and opportunities, utopias and dystopias. Both perspectives seem to share the idea that technology and AI could become a significant element of politics, even to the point of replacing it entirely (Innerarity, 2020:94).

Between the Algorithmic Promise and Authoritarian Risks

Among techno-optimist narratives, there are, on the one hand, those that see access to massive amounts of data as an opportunity to improve the efficiency of public management and citizen participation in the decision-making processes of a complex democracy (Innerarity, 2020b). On the other hand, there are visions that, paradoxically, argue for dispensing with the political system in favor of a larger algorithmic entity. The latter are found mainly among engineers and technology entrepreneurs associated with Silicon Valley’s “techno-libertarian ontology,” whose dogma is that of the “invisible hand” in an automated phase. 

This view delegitimizes and dispenses with human action, treating AI as an entity capable of guiding individuals better than they can guide themselves, destined to lead them into the “best of all possible worlds” or an “artificial paradise.” In this way, liberation and emancipation would come from eliminating the human factor in politics, represented by the state, its rules, and its institutions, and delegating full authority, or the parental role, to an algorithmic superego (Sadin, 2020). Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land are exponents of what they call the “Dark Enlightenment,” which rejects the Enlightenment project, democracy, and equality, except for technology, proposing instead that the state be managed as a large platform corporation through acceleration and technical globalization. Associated with neo-reactionary movements, this group sees political institutions as having little use, except for their provisional function of guaranteeing the transition (Borovinsky, 2020:127).

For its part, the techno-pessimist narrative focuses on the risks AI poses to democracy: the loss of citizens’ political autonomy and epistemic agency, information manipulation, and the emergence of new forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism (Bengio et al., 2023; Arocena et al., 2022; Coeckelbergh, 2022; Kreps & Kriner, 2023; Park, 2023; Helbing et al., 2018; Risse, 2022). As Zuboff (2019) argues, what is at stake, given the political effects of algorithmic processes that model and anticipate behavior and the oligopolistic concentration of Big Tech, is the dominant principle of social order: Who decides? Who decides who decides? Zuboff was among the first to point out the intrinsic contradiction between liberal democracy and the current logic of Big Data accumulation, which she called “surveillance capitalism”: a zero-sum game in which one institution limits the other (Zuboff, 2022). Along the same lines, Han (2021:81) points to the control and surveillance of data even at the prereflective level, so that “as a practical microphysics of power, microtargeting is data-driven psychopolitics.” Early on, Cathy O’Neil (2016) referred to algorithms as “weapons of math destruction” because of the obscurity with which they operate and the biases embedded in their design. Beyond questions of privacy and surveillance, microtargeting is also a matter of social justice because of the unequal effects of modeling.

Technology as a Political Project

Paradoxically, on many occasions, the risks AI poses to society and humanity are pointed out even by the very people who help develop these technologies and bring them to market. Those with the greatest responsibility warn against them, which raises the suspicion that they may be trying to preserve room for maneuvering and secure regulatory frameworks tailored to their interests. As Latour notes (1983:160, cited in Sismondo, 2010:83), “it is in laboratories that most new sources of power are found.” Today, political revolutions take place in laboratories and technology companies, which decide whether the future will be in our hands and how (Innerarity, 2019).

In broad terms, scenarios that are dystopian for some actors are utopian for others. At their most extreme, techno-optimism and techno-pessimism converge in imagining an incompatibility with democracy, though from different angles: in the first, through the defense of the freedom to innovate and technological determinism; in the second, through criticism of the logic of data accumulation and extractivism. In effect, the elimination of politics as a human component, as a celebration of difference, and as a democratic system appears in pessimistic narratives as a dystopian scenario, while in Silicon Valley’s techno-optimist narratives it appears as an aspiration for progress and the promise of a better future.

After all, behind every technical project lies a political project, and, as such, we need to remember the performative power of narratives. Technologies are not neutral, and their technical design is also a political design, carrying within it a narrative of values, ideals, and social order. Ironically, it is possible to suspect the emergence of a new global metanarrative: that of the Technological Republic, led by Big Tech in alignment with the values of the global right, as the democratic narrative slowly comes undone.

References

Arocena, F., Sansone, S., & Alvarez, N. (2022). Technological disruption and democracy in the twenty-first century. European Journal of Futures Research, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-022-00189-4

Bengio, Y., Hinton, G. E., Yao, A. C., Song, D., Abbeel, P., Harari, Y. N., Zhang, Y., Xue, L., Shalev‐Shwartz, S., Hadfield, G. K., Clune, J., Maharaj, T., Hutter, F., Baydin, A. G., McIlraith, S. A., Gao, Q., Acharya, A., Krueger, D. A., Dragan, A. D., . . . Mindermann, S. (2023). Managing AI risks in an era of rapid progress. arXiv (Cornell University). https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2310.17688

Borovinsky, T. (2020). Fragmentar el futuro: Hacia una nueva relación humano/no humano. Nueva Sociedad, 118-130.

Lyotard, J-F. (1984). La condición post moderna. Madrid: Cátedra.

Coeckelbergh, M. (2022). Democracy, epistemic agency, and AI: political epistemology in times of artificial intelligence. AI Ethics, 1341–1350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-022-00239-4

Kreps, S. E., & Kriner, D. L. (2023). How AI threatens democracy. Journal of Democracy, 34(4), 122–131. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2023.a907693

Han, B-C. (2021). Psicopolitica. Neoliberalismo y nuevas técnicas de poder. Herder.

Helbing, D., Frey, B. S., Gigerenzer, G., Hafen, E., Hagner, M., Hofstetter, Y., Van Den Hoven, J., Zicari, R. V., & Zwitter, A. (2018). Will democracy survive big data and artificial intelligence? In Towards Digital Enlightenment. Essays on the Dark and Light Sides of the Digital Revolution (pp. 73–98). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90869-4_7

Innerarity, D. (2019, 11 de marzo). Lo digital es lo político. La Vanguardia. Recuperado de https://www.lavanguardia.com/opinion/20190311/46959863101/lo-digital-es-lo-politico.html. Consultado en abril 2024.

Innerarity, D. (2020a). El impacto de la inteligencia artificial en la democracia. Revista De Las Cortes Generales, 87–103. https://doi.org/10.33426/rcg/2020/109/1526

Innerarity, D. (2020b). Una teoría de la democracia compleja: gobernar en el siglo XXI, Barcelona : Galaxia Gutenberg.

Jungherr, A. (2023). Artificial Intelligence and Democracy: A Conceptual framework. Social Media + Society, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231186353

Kai, D. (2023, December 13). La pregunta crucial sobre la IA que no nos estamos haciendo. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/es/2023/12/12/espanol/opinion/inteligencia-artificial-riesgos.html 

Kreps, S. E., & Kriner, D. L. (2023). How AI threatens democracy. Journal of Democracy, 34(4), 122–131. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2023.a907693

Kreps, S. E., McCain, R. M., & Brundage, M. (2020). All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text as a Tool of Media Misinformation. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 9(1), 104–117. https://doi.org/10.1017/xps.2020.37

Latinobarometer (2023, July 21). Latinobarometer. Retrieved from https://www.latinobarometro.org/lat.jsp

O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of Math Destruction, How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York, NY: Broadway Books.

Pew Research Center (2024, febrero 28). Satisfaction with Democracy and Ratings for Political Leaders/Parties. Retrieved from https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/02/28/satisfaction-with-democracy-and-ratings-for-political-leaders-parties/

Sadin, É. (2020). La inteligencia artificial o el desafío del siglo: anatomía de un antihumanismo radical. Caja Negra.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. https://cds.cern.ch/record/2655106

Zuboff, S. (2022). Surveillance capitalism or democracy? the death match of institutional orders and the politics of knowledge in our information civilization. Organization Theory, 3(3), 263178772211292. https://doi.org/10.1177/26317877221129290

Sismondo, S. (2010). An introduction to science and technology studies (2nd ed.). Chichester: WileyBlackwell.