It’s not like the printing press was distributed by mandate of the Printing Press Action Plan to supercharge the epistemic ecosystem of the Holy Roman Empire. It diffused in chaos, and in the absence of sufficiently powerful political structures to prevent it.

We will not be so lucky this time around: in the 2020s, hawks and statists have the means to prevent another deep disruption of the nature of power. Compared to past revolutions, states are now much more powerful. On the few occasions when modern states have failed to lock down technology—the Crypto Wars are perhaps the most obvious example—it was because the technology itself was so mercurial as to escape any grasp. But AI is heavy on centralised infrastructure, held up by volatile and vulnerable capital investments, and survives mostly by the good graces of the government.

— “Locked Down,” Threading the Needle