The Empire’s Lost Archives
21st September 2025
Among both the right and the left and the right, there is a common (semi-) conspiratorial narrative. As lamented in works such as Joel Kotkin’s The Coming of Neo Feudalism, Yanis Varoufakis’s Techno Feudalism, and Shoshanna Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the world is entering into a period in which all artificial intelligence will manage a mass of deracinated, heavily medicated slaves whose entire lives will be tracked and recorded. Such an idea, once the work of science fiction, now appears to be an increasing reality. At the same time, opponents of this view argue that contemporary bureaucracy is so inefficient and incompetent, and technology seems to increasingly function worse and worse. Artificial Intelligence, moreover, is simultaneously near magically powerful as well as incompetent, and, quite frankly, dumb.
However, the growth of the state, which, oddly, used to be critiqued but is now celebrated by the Left, has been increasing for some time. Moreover, the archiving of information, which, again, was once documented and critiqued by left-wing figures such as Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamden, is something that has been a perennial part of human government, long before AI, but especially began to increase in the Early Modern era. In his recent work, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World, University of Massachusetts historian Asheesh Kapur Siddique presents a chronicle of the formation of the early British Empire, paying special attention to how the British utilized archival bureaucracy to manage populations.