PERSON
C. Wright Mills
The sociologist who gave Americans the phrase “the sociological imagination” and the concept of the power elite—and whose 1956 analysis of concentrated institutional authority reads, seven decades later, like a precise description of the twelve organizations that now govern the frontier of artificial intelligence.
C. Wright Mills was the sociologist of the gap—the gap between what institutions claim to do and what they actually do, between the stories a society tells about itself and the structural arrangements those stories conceal, between the private anxieties of individuals and the public forces that produce them. His 1959 concept of the
sociological imagination—the quality of mind that connects personal troubles to structural causes—is the analytical instrument the cycle that began with
[YOU] on AI has most needed and most consistently approached without quite grasping. His 1956 analysis of
the power elite—the interlocking directorate of corporate, military, and political command posts that governed mid-century America—maps onto the AI landscape with a precision that makes his work feel less like historical analysis than prophecy: fewer than a dozen organizations control the frontier of
large language model development, and the decisions made in their conference rooms determine