CONCEPT
AIgemony
The concept — introduced by scholars building on Laclau-Mouffe — naming the structural dynamic by which AI development concentrates power while presenting that concentration as neutral technical progress.
AIgemony extends Gramsci and Mouffe's concept of hegemony into the specific domain of AI governance. It names the process by which AI's development and deployment concentrate decision-making authority, infrastructure control, and economic returns in a small number of corporations and geographies, while the concentration itself is presented as the natural outcome of market competition and technical innovation rather than as a contestable political arrangement. The power is real; its presentation as neutral is the hegemonic operation. 'Inadequate public awareness, combined with regulatory and legal framework lags, and the exploitation of such vulnerability by influential actors, could intensify inequalities to unprecedented levels' — a formulation that echoes Mouffe's analysis of how hegemonic operations succeed precisely because they are not recognized as political.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept illuminates specific structural features of the contemporary AI landscape that the stewardship framework obscures. The concentration of frontier model training in a handful of American corporations. The concentration of compute infrastructure in a small number of hyperscale