CONCEPT
The Political Economy of AI
Morozov's four-element analysis of the structure that produces AI and distributes its benefits: redefinition, production, dependency, governance asymmetry — the system that routes capability outward while keeping power concentrated.
Morozov's framework for the political economy of AI identifies four interlocking elements that reinforce each other with mechanical reliability: the ideological redefinition of experiences as problems, the production of solutions by a small number of infrastructure-owning corporations, the creation of structural dependencies between users and infrastructure, and the governance asymmetry that gives users no formal voice in the institutions that shape their productive lives. The four elements constitute a system that produces a specific distribution of power: productive capability flows outward to users; governance power flows inward to corporations.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The redefinition element operates at the level of culture and expectation. A population must internalize the assumption that difficulty is always a deficiency, that friction is always a cost, that the appropriate response to any dissatisfaction is a technical intervention rather than a political demand. This cultural precondition did not arise spontaneously; it was cultivated over decades by institutions whose revenue depends on