Munch is screaming!

There is something almost ridiculous about our old image of liberation: the barricade, the occupied factory, the forbidden newspaper secretly passed from hand to hand. Power was somewhere. You could point at it. The factory owner owned the machines, the state controlled the border, the broadcaster owned the antenna. To resist power meant, in some sense, getting your hands on the thing through which power operated. Our situation today is stranger because the machine through which power operates is increasingly offered to us voluntarily, pleasantly, even helpfully. We subscribe to it.

AI is perhaps the purest version of this contradiction. We are told that it democratizes expertise, and to a large extent this is true. A programmer, researcher or teenager sitting alone can suddenly command capacities that twenty years ago belonged to organizations. But exactly here we should become suspicious. What AI distributes most efficiently may not be knowledge but the feeling of knowledge. The executive who once admitted that he did not understand software had at least encountered the limit of his competence; today he can ask a model five questions, receive five immaculate answers and walk into the meeting convinced that the limit has disappeared. It has not disappeared. It has merely become invisible. And perhaps this is the real danger: AI allows stupidity to become articulate.

So we may get the strange spectacle of corporations becoming technologically more intelligent and institutionally more stupid at exactly the same time, firing people whose knowledge cannot easily be written into a prompt, automating processes nobody bothered to understand, making increasingly large bets on increasingly polished explanations. The machine does not need to be wrong very often. It only needs to give the decision-maker enough confidence to stop asking the person who might know better.

But the joke turns again, because this very machine is also unusually difficult to reserve entirely for elites. Certainly the important infrastructure: chips, compute, data centers, energy, proprietary models, is concentrated in very few hands. Yet the capability leaks downward. One person can write software, analyze data, learn a field, translate documents, investigate institutions, organize people or start a company with tools previously available only to those with money and employees. For perhaps the first time, one of the central instruments of the new ruling order is also sitting on the desks of those living underneath it.

This is why I suspect the next serious struggle for freedom will look embarrassingly technical. It will concern who controls the models, who owns the data, whether software can be inspected, whether people can move between platforms, whether knowledge remains open, whether a person can operate outside the systems on which everyone else has become dependent. Not because APIs and semiconductor supply chains are somehow more romantic than streets and barricades, but because power always hides itself inside whatever society has decided is merely infrastructure.

And the decisive divide may therefore not be between people who use AI and people who refuse it. That would be far too simple. It may be between those who use the machine while remaining capable of questioning it, and those who gradually surrender enough of their judgment that the machine becomes not a tool but an environment. The old struggle was to prevent another person from owning your labor. The coming one may be to prevent a system from quietly owning the conditions under which you are able to think and act at all.