​July 12, 2026

The Emerging Anocracy: AI, Tech Oligarchs, and the Future of Democracy
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Alexis Crews interviewed on New Books Network
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Hosted by Eli Karetny

About Alexis Crews

Alexis Camille Crews is a technology governance and democracy strategist who advises global technology companies, governments, and civil society on election integrity, surveillance, and the responsible use of AI. She has worked with organizations including Meta, Google, Accenture, and the Council on Foreign Relations, helping senior leaders design guardrails for technology in some of the world’s most politically sensitive and high-risk environments. Her work sits at the intersection of power, policy, and product strategy—focusing on how institutions can anticipate geopolitical risk, strengthen public trust, and protect democratic norms in an era of fragmented regulation.
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Excerpts from the Interview
Click here for entire transcript.

The Emerging Anocracy

I described anocracy during my TED talk as a system that sits in the gray zone between democracy and authoritarianism, and the technology companies kind of sit a little bit above that because they control a lot of how we communicate. They control what we see; they control what we hear. Then you add on AI as another tool, another lever, and now you have countries that are vying to have access to these tools, to have GPU access, to have chip access. And right now we’re seeing companies play an outsized part in US government and other government entities globally. You have leaders at the G7 right now talking about AI, and so I think the emergence of this new technology is disruptive and also is forcing change. But they also just have so much power, and more power than traditional nation-states, and it’s changing how our democracies work, and how people engage the democratic processes.

Billionnaire Tech Leaders with Traditional Authoritarian Value Systems

It is a small, select group of people who have made a lot of money and that have aligned themselves with an administration where their values are looking more and more like traditional authoritarian value systems. And we see that not just within technology, but in terms of how the current administration has aligned with world leaders that share those values, that believe in silencing dissenting voices, that believe in very harsh immigration stances, that believe in closed borders, that believe in certain values that just don’t align in the traditional way of how we think about liberalism.

AI is Creating a Completely Different Landscape
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We’re in a completely different landscape now with AI. We’re in a different landscape, and those companies are profitable, and they bring—when you think about how much money they bring into the US in terms of revenue, these companies are insanely profitable. But AI is just a completely different landscape. It’s a different type of market, it is a different type of use case, not just in terms of communications, but we’re also thinking warfare, for example. Like how can AI be used, how can these tools be used in every facet of the US government, every facet of our normal day-to-day lives, and then how are people using these tools to create content that is then being shared or disseminated using those traditional platforms? So AI, there’s a different business case.

Alexis Crews TedTalk
How Big Tech is Stifling Democracy
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An Image of China's Future:
AI-Guided Confucian Anocracy

created by AI with prompts from Jay McDaniel

As liberal democracies weaken and illiberal or postliberal forms of government gain influence, another question arises: What might happen in China?

One possibility is that China will evolve toward what political scientists call an anocracy: a system combining authoritarian government with limited forms of consultation, participation, and political accountability. More specifically, it might become an AI-guided Confucian anocracy, combining technological coordination and concentrated political authority with Confucian ideals of humaneness, responsible relationships, moral cultivation, and ecological harmony. This essay explores what such a future might look like—its promise, its dangers, and the moral standards by which it should be judged.

What Is Anocracy?

Anocracy, sometimes called semi-democracy or guided democracy, is a form of government that combines democratic and authoritarian features. Anocratic regimes permit some political participation, public consultation, and criticism, but they place firm boundaries around political competition. They may retain legislatures, courts, elections, advisory bodies, and local forms of participation while reserving ultimate authority for a ruling party or political elite.

Two forms of anocracy can be imagined. In a closed anocracy, meaningful political competition is largely confined to members of the ruling elite. In a more open anocracy, people outside the elite may also participate, propose policies, criticize officials, or compete for certain offices, although the government continues to establish the boundaries of acceptable political activity. Democracy does not disappear, but it is guided and managed.

Such a system differs from outright dictatorship because it retains meaningful elements of participation and accountability. It differs from liberal democracy because individual rights, independent institutions, and electoral processes remain subordinate to a more concentrated political authority.

China would not arrive at anocracy by following the same path as a declining liberal democracy. It would begin from its own political history and institutions. The relevant question is whether China might develop more substantial forms of consultation, responsiveness, local participation, and accountability without adopting Western-style multiparty liberal democracy.

The Appeal of Guided Government

The attraction of anocracy should not be underestimated. Liberal democracies can become paralyzed by partisan conflict, short electoral cycles, powerful economic interests, and an inability to respond decisively to long-term problems. Climate change, ecological degradation, economic inequality, aging populations, pandemics, and disruptive technologies require sustained coordination that elected governments often find difficult to achieve.

A guided political system may be able to act more quickly, pursue long-range goals, and provide continuity amid social disruption. It may undertake large infrastructure projects, coordinate energy transitions, support scientific research, and respond to public emergencies without having every initiative overturned by the next election.
There may also be deeper benefits. A government with long-term authority might create conditions for meaningful work, supportive relationships, strong communities, accessible education, ecological restoration, and care for children and older people. It might protect public goods, restrain destructive consumption, and challenge the assumption that economic growth is the sole measure of national well-being.

This is where Confucianism enters the picture.

What Confucianism Might Offer

Confucianism is not reducible to obedience, hierarchy, or conformity. At its best, it is a tradition of ethical and spiritual cultivation centered on the quality of relationships. It asks how people can become more humane and how societies can create conditions for responsible, harmonious, and meaningful lives.

The Confucian ideal of rén, often translated as humaneness or benevolence, emphasizes sympathetic concern for others. Yì, or moral rightness, points toward conduct guided by justice rather than selfish advantage. Lǐ, sometimes translated as ritual propriety, includes the habits and practices through which people express respect, sustain community, and learn to live well with others.

Confucianism also emphasizes education, moral self-cultivation, family and community relationships, respect for elders, public responsibility, and government through ethical example. Political authority cannot be justified by power alone. Rulers bear obligations to the people and lose moral legitimacy when they govern cruelly, selfishly, or incompetently.

Confucianism can also contribute to ecological thinking. Its vision of harmony among heaven, Earth, and humanity challenges the image of human beings as isolated individuals standing above nature. Human flourishing is relational. It depends on healthy families, communities, institutions, ecosystems, and relations with the larger world of life.

A Confucian political vision would therefore judge a society not only by its economic production or protection of individual liberties, important as these may be, but also by the quality of its relationships. Does it cultivate compassion? Does it care for vulnerable people? Does it support meaningful work? Does it encourage learning, creativity, friendship, and service? Does it promote harmony between human beings and the more-than-human world?

These are important questions for China—and for liberal democracies as well.

AI as an Instrument of Confucian Governance

Artificial intelligence could become the coordinating medium of a Confucian anocracy. It might help governments manage transportation, healthcare, education, food systems, energy use, disaster response, and environmental protection. AI could identify emerging social needs, evaluate the effects of public policies, coordinate long-term ecological projects, and help allocate resources more fairly.

AI might also support new forms of participation. Citizens could communicate concerns through digital platforms, take part in large-scale consultations, propose local projects, and offer continuous feedback. AI systems could organize millions of responses, identify patterns, and bring neglected concerns to public attention. Guided democracy need not mean the absence of a public voice. It could mean that participation occurs through channels other than competitive national elections.

Under the right conditions, AI might also help China look beyond gross domestic product as the primary measure of success. Public policy could take into account physical health, psychological well-being, social trust, educational opportunity, ecological sustainability, meaningful employment, and access to beauty and recreation. Technology might then serve human and ecological relationships rather than replace or weaken them.
In such a system, democracy would not entirely disappear, but it would be guided.

Citizens might deliberate, criticize, vote in certain settings, and help shape local decisions, while national political life remained coordinated by party officials, administrators, scholars, technological experts, and political leaders. The system would present itself as an alternative to both chaotic individualism and oppressive dictatorship: participatory but coordinated, technologically advanced but morally grounded, efficient but humane.

This is the promise.

When Harmony Becomes Control

The dangers are equally clear. Who defines harmony? Who decides what constitutes a meaningful life? Who programs the algorithms, selects their goals, and evaluates their results?

A government that seeks to cultivate virtue may become paternalistic. It may treat citizens as children who must be guided by wiser authorities. A government that values harmony may regard disagreement as disorder. A government that emphasizes social responsibility may suppress individuals and communities whose lives depart from approved norms.

AI intensifies these dangers because it can transform broad ethical ideals into measurable standards of behavior. Humaneness may become a score. Social responsibility may become an algorithmic profile. Moral cultivation may become ideological conformity. Harmonious citizenship may come to mean predictable and compliant citizenship.

The same technologies used to improve healthcare and transportation can support pervasive surveillance, predictive policing, censorship, and social control. Governments can use AI to identify dissenters, manipulate public opinion, restrict opportunities, and manage participation while preserving an outward appearance of public involvement.
AI can also strengthen military power through autonomous weapons, algorithmic targeting, cyberwarfare, automated command systems, and technologically enhanced border enforcement. When these systems operate with limited transparency, they increase the coercive power of the state while distancing leaders and citizens from the human consequences of violence.

Confucian language could then become a moral covering for technological authoritarianism. “Harmony” could justify silencing critics. “Responsibility” could justify surveillance. “Respect” could require obedience. “Benevolent government” could become government by elites who assume that they know what is best for everyone else.

Confucianism as a Restraint upon Power

The central question is whether Confucianism would merely legitimize concentrated power or place genuine moral limits upon it.
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A humane Confucian politics would need to recognize criticism as a form of loyalty rather than a threat to harmony. The Confucian tradition of remonstrance—the responsibility to correct leaders when they act wrongly—could be expanded into meaningful protections for dissent, investigative journalism, independent scholarship, artistic experimentation, and public protest. Harmony would need to include creative tension, not merely agreement.

Such a system would also require transparent institutions through which citizens could question decisions, challenge algorithmic judgments, correct inaccurate information, and hold officials accountable. AI systems would need to remain open to public scrutiny. No person should be reduced to a data profile, and no consequential political decision should be removed entirely from human judgment.

Most importantly, humaneness must extend beyond the benevolence of rulers. It must include the agency of citizens. People need more than protection, stability, and material well-being. They need opportunities to help shape the communities in which they live.
A government cannot manufacture meaningful lives through administrative command. It can only help create conditions within which people, in their differences, may seek meaning for themselves and with one another.

A Possibility, Not a Prediction

An AI-guided Confucian anocracy is a possibility, not a prediction. Nor is AI-mediated anocracy a possibility for China alone. Western societies may also move toward it, although they may justify it through different ideals: national security, economic efficiency, technological progress, religious identity, or even the protection of freedom itself.

Confucianism nevertheless adds a distinctive possibility. It offers a relational vision of the good society and a moral vocabulary richer than efficiency, competition, consumption, and individual success. It reminds us that political life should be concerned with character, community, responsibility, education, and harmony with the Earth.

But no moral vocabulary is immune to corruption. Confucian ideals can humanize political power, or they can beautify domination. Artificial intelligence can support wise coordination, or it can create unprecedented systems of control. Anocracy can provide stability, participation, and long-term direction, or it can preserve the appearance of public agency while depriving people of meaningful power.

The decisive question is therefore not whether a government calls itself Confucian, democratic, socialist, or technologically advanced. The question is whether it helps people become freer, more compassionate, more creative, and more capable of living in respectful relationship with one another and the Earth. Any political system worthy of the future—including China’s—must be judged by that measure.