PERSON
Antonio Gramsci
The Italian Marxist theorist who, writing from Mussolini’s prison, gave political thought its most durable account of how a ruling class rules without constant force—and whose concept of hegemony has become the indispensable lens for understanding how the common sense of the AI age is being produced and by whom.
Antonio Gramsci wrote some of the twentieth century’s most consequential political theory in prison notebooks composed under fascist surveillance, in fragmented passages that had to be smuggled out in installments, in a language guarded enough to pass the censor without losing its edge. The central question that organizes the
Prison Notebooks is one the AI transition has made newly urgent: how does a ruling class maintain power without constantly resorting to force? His answer—
hegemony—describes not a conspiracy but something far more durable and far more difficult to resist: the process by which one class’s particular way of seeing the world becomes the universal common sense of an entire society, accepted not as ideology but as the way things simply are. The most effective form of power, Gramsci argued, is the kind that does not register as power at all. Applied to the AI transition,