Are we governed by AI yet? - Unskilled

Are we governed by AI yet?

Posted on Jul 5, 2026

Sometime in the last year, my job quietly changed, and maybe yours did too.

We run an AI loop at work. Agents create issues, plan, implement PRs, fixes merge conflicts, run QA analysis, review each other. My actual day increasingly looks like this: scoping permissions, reviewing outputs, checking audit trails, sanctioning drift. Sandboxes, human-in-the-loop, kill switches. None of this was in my job description. None of it is in yours either.

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. This exact set of concepts (partitioned space, hierarchical surveillance, permanent examination, dossiers on every subject) was described in detail in 1975, in a book about prisons1. I’ve become a warden, and the inmates are processes.

I’ve quoted philosophers on this blog before (Rosa on acceleration, Deleuze on the actual and the virtual), so bear with me one more time. Because two French philosophers who never saw a computer do anything interesting, Foucault and Deleuze, turn out to have the sharpest tools available for understanding what we’re building right now. Tools for the question nobody in the LinkedIn shitpost economy is asking: what does this stuff do to power?

Fair warning: this is a longer, weirder post than usual. Grab a coffee.

AI is not a panopticon (stop saying that)

You’ve seen the take: “AI is the ultimate panopticon”. It’s wrong, and it’s wrong in an interesting way.

The panopticon (Bentham’s prison design, Foucault’s favorite object) is a ring of cells around a central tower. The guard can see every prisoner but no prisoner can tell if they’re being watched. The trick is that it doesn’t matter whether anyone is in the tower, as the prisoner, unable to know, internalizes the surveillance and disciplines himself.

Notice the most important component: the prisoner’s consciousness. The whole system routes through your awareness of being watched, it needs you to think about it. That’s what made it cheap (power that runs itself) and that’s also its dependency: you have to internalize surveillance.

Now look at the systems we actually build. The recommendation engine doesn’t need you to feel watched. The scoring model doesn’t need you to internalize anything. It doesn’t even need you to know it exists. It reads your traces and modulates your environment (e.g. the feed, the price, the ranking) upstream of any decision you experience as yours. Two Belgian researchers, Rouvroy and Berns, named this a decade ago: algorithmic governmentality2. Government by correlation, bypassing the reflexive subject entirely.

So the panopticon made you the guard of your own tower; the algorithm makes the tower unnecessary.

So where did the power go? Try this thought experiment: killing the career resume. Replace it with a total public graph of everyone’s contributions, i.e. every commit, every doc, every decision, timestamped, forever. Sounds fairer, right? No more embellished resumes, no more charisma bonus in interviews. Pure data-driven decisions.

Except the asymmetry doesn’t disappear. It migrates from who writes their own story to who writes the queries : what metrics, what weight for each one, the scoring functions. Perfect equality of data, perfect asymmetry of interpretation.

Actually, forget the thought experiment, it’s shipping already. Right now, managers are plugging GitHub, Slack, Jira, and Confluence into Claude or ChatGPT and “grounding” performance reviews in the result. Same pitch: objective, evidence-based, no more recency bias or charisma bonus. And the same migration: your review is no longer your manager’s reading of your year, which you could argue with, human to human, it’s a model’s reading of your traces, laundered through your manager’s voice. The prompt and reasoning chain is the new performance criteria, and you will never see it. Your self-assessment used to be the one document where you got to narrate your own year. It now competes with a synthesis of everything you never wrote for evaluation: half-finished PRs, Slack messages typed at 6 p.m., tickets that dragged. The data speaks through whoever wrote the query.

Generative AI is that reading function gone universal. It’s not the watcher in the tower, it’s the thing that decides what everyone’s traces mean. Bentham’s tower was a blind spot at the center of a visible ring; the model is an opaque interpretation at the center of a public database. Same diagram, new substrate.

The inverted confession

Second thing, and this one is stranger.

Foucault called Western man “a confessing animal”: from the confession booth to the therapist’s couch, centuries of being incited to put ourselves into words before someone holding the interpretation keys3. The...