Technology and Power - Christopher Butler

essay<br>Technology and Power

Summary<br>Every technological cycle is a cycle of power. The promise of empowerment is part of how the cycle works.

Published on June 25, 2026 by Christopher Butler

Every technological cycle is really a cycle of power. This is not a controversial observation when said about the ones we consider historical — the creation of the printing press and the resulting power of distributed narratives; the creation of the railroad and the resulting power of transportation; the creation of the mechanical loom and the power of production. But, it becomes harder to perceive the connection between technology and power when we’re in the midst of a cycle. Nevertheless, the question to ask is on whom the power is being conferred.

We are inside one now, and it’s a larger cycle than I think most realize. The digital revolution — if we take it to begin with the establishment of the consumer internet in the early 1990s and run it through to whatever AI turns out to be — is now roughly thirty years old. Long enough to look at from a distance; long enough, too, to be looking at clearly.

From the inside, the arc has felt like a series of fluctuations — like several short cycles in a row. The web of the mid-1990s arrived with the promise of democratized publishing; within a decade it had concentrated into a handful of search engines and portals. Blogs and forums followed with the promise of independent voices, then collapsed into the social networks. By the time smartphones arrived in the late 2000s carrying the promise of universal access, the concentration was already happening visibly — into a small set of app stores presided over by a smaller set of companies. Each wave seemed to put corporations and governments on their heels, at least for a moment, before the next consolidation. From the inside, it has felt like a back-and-forth.

From a distance, though, the pattern looks different. It looks like a slow, consistent transfer of power upward — toward governments, toward corporations, toward whoever has the resources to build the next platform on which the next wave of “empowerment” will be served. The apparent back-and-forth is what cover looks like. The phase where everyone gets their own megaphone is always followed by the phase where someone owns the megaphone factory. The promise of empowerment, far from being incidental to the cycle, is part of its structure — a story the cycle has to tell about itself in order to keep moving.

Why would AI be any other way?

This is the right question to put to the present technological moment, and it is worth putting plainly. The promise of AI — that everyone, regardless of background or training, will now have cheap access to capabilities that were previously the preserve of small elites — is structurally identical to the promise of the web in 1996, the promise of social media in 2007, the promise of mobile in 2011. The promise has been made before, and we have seen what comes after it.

This time, though, the asymmetries are already quite visible. The cost of training the largest models is rising into ranges that only a handful of organizations can afford. Compute and energy are being negotiated between governments and a small number of corporations. The data the models depend on is being aggregated, exclusively licensed, or scraped without compensation from the same individuals who are being told they are about to be empowered. The infrastructure on which all of this runs is owned by a smaller club still. The cost of meaningful use exceeds “basic” accounts. The new capabilities are exponentially token hungry. None of this is subtle.

What is subtle — and worth attending to — is the role the empowerment story plays. It isn’t exactly a lie. AI does in fact give individuals access to capabilities they did not have before. The story is partly true. It has to be, or it wouldn’t work. The point is that it functions, regardless of its truth, as the cover under which the actual concentration proceeds. And sure, it’s easy to attribute malice to market mechanics, but if this sort of progression wasn’t by design, the billionaires wouldn’t invest. But they do.

To be clear, this is not an argument against AI, or against the digital revolution. My entire career has no place outside of it. Most of my interests, skills, and way of life depend upon this cycle’s output. But, this is an argument for keeping the right question in view while the cycle runs its course. The question is not whether the technology will reshape what humans can do. It will.

The question is on whom the power is being conferred. The answer, this time as every time, will not be found in the marketing or in the founders’ interviews about their commitment to humanity. It will be found later — in the shape of the institutions that survive the cycle, and in the shape of the ones that do not; in the liberties that are retained and those that are lost; in the...