also, quite literally from @greatdismal.bsky.social Gernsback Continuum. A 1933 LA Times illustration reprinted in Hugo Gernsback's magazine, Technocracy Review, Vol.1, no.1.
Henry Farrell
@himself.bsky.social
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Professor of democracy and international affairs. www.henryfarrell.net and newsletter at www.programmablemutter.com. Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Holt, Penguin). www.publishersweekly.com/9781250840….
![As the primary drafter of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan argued shortly before he took up his White House position (Ball, 2025):
Today, when the CEO of a company wants to make some change to a business process, they relay that command through chains of leadership, and each time it loses some fidelity …[Now] CEOs and managers will be able to say “jump,” and in unison, tens, hundreds, thousands, or millions, of agents will say “how high?” I note, with interest, the fact that this technology is being built at the very time that the Republican Party, and Donald Trump in particular, seek to advance theories of a “unitary executive”—the notion that the President exercises the powers granted to him by the Constitution and by Congress absolutely. By the end of President Trump’s term, that may be more possible than anyone ever imagined.
While Ball’s politics are more complex than this might suggest (Klein, 2026), he reportedly (Bronzini-Vender, 2026) continues to argue that AI:
might replace the Supreme Court, then the United States government itself. AI, [Ball] said, was “this giant acid vat” dissolving society’s mediating institutions. “Future institutions will be machinic,” he said. “It will not be AI in government. It’s going to be AI as governments.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:a3h6mkohqeiu6xl4fnrwuk4t/bafkreiavbys5ugtewrffo6mkax4rkp5hdzrlzuvx4sbtasy3dsiuqnoo34)
![Most importantly, he believes that knowing one’s men, as individuals and as a group, is crucial to proper command. Some people who read O’Brian reasonably complain about the detailed description of ship’s rigging and equipment. Far fewer note the nearly equally omnipresent philosophical discussions and asides, which frequently counterpose both Aubrey and Maturin’s lively attention to the individual to Whiggish abstractions. The abominable banker Mr. Ellis is naturally a friend of Jeremy Bentham, whom he lauds as “the gentleman that wrote the Defense of Usury (it deserved to be printed in gold) [and] had invented a whipping machine.”
Bentham’s whipping machine would certainly be more efficient than the cat’o’ninetails but efficiency is not the summum bonum. When Jack has his men punished in an earlier scene, he reproves a midshipman for not being properly dressed for the occasion: “these wretched men were going to be flogged and it was their right to have it done with due ceremony - all hands gravely present, the officers with their gold-laced hats and swords, the drummer there to beat a roll.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:a3h6mkohqeiu6xl4fnrwuk4t/bafkreicwi2ozhmetafwypnyn6z7covlaxjl3lexenz6nu2f6gkckvp3ax4)
