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The Power Elite (Book)
Mills's 1956 landmark analyzing the interlocking directorate of corporate, military, and political command posts governing American society — the founding text of modern structural analysis of institutional power and the framework this volume applies to the AI transition.
The Power Elite synthesized biographical data on several thousand individuals occupying the command positions of American institutional life to argue that decisions of genuinely national consequence were made not through democratic processes but through a concentrated directorate whose members shared background, interests, and institutional positions. The book was received by the American establishment as an act of aggression and dismissed by reviewers as conspiracy-minded; subsequent scholarship has largely vindicated its structural analysis while refining specific claims. Its application to the AI age is structurally direct: the power elite of 2026 is smaller, more concentrated, and more consequential than the one Mills analyzed, and its command posts are the frontier AI laboratories and the capital allocators who fund them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's method combined biographical data, institutional analysis, and historical reconstruction. Mills traced the circulation of individuals among corporate boards, military commands, and political appointments; documented the shared