Panem et Circenses - AI, Imperialism, and Our Future

I struggled to know what to write given the weight of this week. The militarization of our own cities, from police in LA to troops in Washington, D.C., turned against citizens under the guise of manufactured crises. The legalized assaults and rollback of rights on marginalized groups. The engineered scarcity of jobs, housing, and basic resources, while corporations post record profits and lay off workers in the name of AI efficiency. Wars and genocide funded with our tax dollars, as we watch our institutions and social nets cut in the name of government efficiency, whatever that means.

It may be helpful to know that I think a lot about imperialism and colonialism and Greek & Roman mythology. The Greeks imagined the Fates, the Moirai, sisters spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of every human life. I can't help but think about them when I consider our current moment. Threads spun centuries ago are woven into our present. I think about how my life, our life, is affected by the tendrils of choices made thousands of years ago. 1,000 years is nothing in the scope of human history. The Byzantine Empire. The Holy Roman Empire. The Battle of Hastings. Their legacy ripples forward into the present. The language I’m writing, that you are processing, is a product of empire.

Fast forward to the founding of the United States. The first American colonies were extractions of resources. Resources funneled into global markets, extracted from the land of Indigenous nations, through the labor of enslaved Africans. As Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction, the very foundation of American democracy was tied to the idea of freedom for some, financed by the exploitation of others.

That pattern never disappeared; it evolved, taking on different names.

In the 19th century, American imperialism stretched westward under Manifest Destiny, seizing territory while declaring it liberty. In the early 20th century, it pushed outward into the Philippines, the Caribbean, and Central America, expanding military and corporate power under the banner of progress. At every stage, imperialism promised democracy while it delivered domination. And now, in the 21st century, we are watching and experiencing the empire turn inward.

The colony is us.

Social media has become a borderless empire. Sarah Wynn-Williams’s recent book, Careless People, shows how a handful of executives made decisions that shaped global politics, fueled genocide, and warped civic life, without consent, law, or oversight. These were not democratic choices, rather corporate decisions, cheered on by shareholders and elected officials.

Where social media colonizes attention, AI colonizes critical thought, creativity, the essence of what makes us human, and not machines. AI extracts our labor, our data, our art, our voices, our stories. It drains water supplies and devours electricity. It replaces human expertise with algorithmic control.

And all the while, we’re offered spectacle as distraction. Panem et Circenses - bread and circuses. We have built an economy of spectacle. Dollar menus and drive-thrus; aisles of cheap food and household items; fast fashion and overnight delivery. Reality television turned private life itself into entertainment, while 24-hour news cycles have converted politics into sport.

And today, the circus is everywhere, but the bread is running out. Wages stagnate while food and housing costs skyrocket. And the circuses don’t entertain like they used to. Reality feels manufactured, hollow, and unable to hide the collapse of trust, stability, and meaning.

Du Bois warned us of this, too; the way capitalism and imperialism manufacture illusions to pacify the masses while power consolidates above.

Democracy is not the antidote to empire when our democracy itself was designed within an imperial frame. The American experiment has always been two things at once: freedom and domination. Liberty and subjugation.

The struggle we face now, which may feel new and overwhelming - the rise of AI, the influence of technocrats, the hollowing of democracy from within - is not new at all. It is the same imperial story, executive orders instead of muskets, algorithms instead of annexations.

I suppose we are complicit. Every post, every scroll, every upload is a kind of consent. Consumption has always been the empire’s fuel. Cotton, sugar, oil…now data, content, and imagination. What feels new is the intimacy of it: our very selves becoming the raw material. If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.

Every empire cracks under its weight. People resist. They find ways to carve out space, to refuse subjugation.

Empire is not inevitable. The story is not finished; we are merely mid-chapter. And we are not just characters, we are the authors who collectively determine what happens next.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in Black Reconstruction:

“One reads the truer, deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment."

The thread is not yet cut. The dawn is still possible.

What do you think?

As always, the views and perspectives shared here are my own and should not be considered the views of any employer, client, or partner I have a relationship with unless expressly stated. *hug*