Chapter 4: Entanglement and Empire
Chapter 4, “Entanglement and Empire,” asserts that human-technology entanglement has been profoundly shaped by the historical drive of empires for continuous economic and political power acquisition. From antiquity through the Middle Ages, Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, and up to the modern Information and AI Revolutions, technology development has often served to expand control, extract resources, and maintain the dominance of ruling classes, rather than promoting human flourishing.
Modernity’s dominant position toward technology has been one of control: we design systems, deploy tools, solve problems, we set targets, we achieve power. But in an entangled world, control is often illusory. Technologies have emergent effects. They shape the conditions under which humans think, act, and relate. Much of the public debate about technology focuses on making systems more transparent. However, even with transparency, many AI infrastructures or platform systems are opaque and too complex for humans to fully understand, and in many cases, they are simply blackboxed to humans. This calls for technological literacy in an interpretive capacity and the ability to ask critical questions, understand the trade-offs and identify the consequences.
The chapter highlights how innovations like navigation, gunpowder, the printing press, and tools for imperial management (e.g., communication, surveillance) were integral to conquest and maintaining power. This historical pattern continues today, with modern Big Tech platforms acting as “neo-imperial actors” through digital labor organization, surveillance, and data extraction, privatizing profits while externalizing costs. Each new technological wave is absorbed into this “logic of empire,” intensifying its reach and capturing human cognition and planetary resources. To understand and navigate this, the chapter introduces critical posthumanism as a vital lens. This approach challenges assumptions of human exceptionalism and the “liberal human subject,” recognizing the interdependence of humans, technologies, and environments. It emphasizes the agency of nonhuman actors, calls for ethical and political responsibility, and critiques techno-utopianism, stressing that the future is not inevitable but contested, and that we have agency and choices. The key message is to “See the Big Picture” and understand that “History is Important” as it continually repeats itself.
Entanglement-AI 