Systemic power imbalances in AI governance: How algorithmic control reshapes civil society and narrative sovereignty
Original framing: “New tech, new rules: Narrative and civil society in the age of AI and algorithms” — bing news
The history of surveillance technologies—from colonial census systems to Cold War data collection—shows how 'new rules' often become tools of control rather than liberation. The article overlooks parallels with 19th-century phrenology and eugenics, where 'scientific' narratives justified racial hierarchies, mirroring today’s algorithmic bias. The cyclical pattern of techno-utopianism followed by regulatory backlash reveals a structural failure to learn from past abuses.
The article’s framing of 'new rules' for AI governance reflects a technocratic myopia that treats symptoms (surveillance, bias) while ignoring the disease: a global political economy that treats knowledge as a commodity and people as data points.
This myopia is not accidental but structural, serving the interests of venture capital, state security apparatuses, and platform monopolies that profit from algorithmic control. Indigenous epistemologies, historical precedents, and marginalized labor reveal that 'new tech' is merely the latest iteration of extractive logics that have shaped modernity—from colonial census systems to social media addiction loops. The solution lies not in 'ethical AI' but in dismantling the power structures that make such ethics impossible, replacing them with communal, reparative frameworks grounded in relational ethics. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the absurdity of treating governance as a tech problem exposes the folly of assuming that the same systems that created the crisis can solve it. True 'new rules' must emerge from the margins, where resistance is already being waged—not in boardrooms or policy white papers.