At the China Development Forum on March, the Director of the Chinese National Data Administration, disclosed that China’s daily AI token consumption had surpassed 140 trillion tokens in March 2026, up from just 100 billion tokens per day at the beginning of 2024. That is a more than a 1,000-fold increase in two years. China’s weekly large-model usage has now surpassed. that of the United States. China is on an AI juggernaut. The Chinese administration is drafting policy documents for a national integrated data market and plans to accelerate the establishment of a unified national data property rights registration system. Are they better at AI than we are? No, they are actually playing catch-up and doing it quite effectively…and may well surpass us in terms of capacity and capability for one big reason. They are the ultimate authoritarian state. That is something important to think about.
One of the most robust patterns in political history is the connection between technological change (especially the sort that people have a hard time adjusting to) and the rise and dominance of authoritarianism. Rapid technological disruption produces several conditions that historically feed authoritarian movements. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost is economic dislocation. People whose skills, status, and livelihoods are destroyed faster than they can adapt are very vulnerable. This creates what sociologists call status anxiety, when people who feel that their place in the social order is threatened. This disruption causes existing authorities and institutions to lose credibility and that creates social vacuums. This leads to social atomization, wherein traditional communities dissolve faster than new ones form and information overload causes people to become unable to distinguish truth from manipulation. Sound familiar?
Authoritarians offer a psychologically compelling package in response to all of these concerns simultaneously. They give the people a clear enemy to blame, a simple narrative to cling to, strong leadership to follow blindly, and a promise to restore a lost order. The more disoriented people are, the more attractive that package becomes. This pattern is hardly new, its been observed many times before and the historical correlations are quite noteworthy. The printing press directly enabled both the Reformation and the religious wars that followed, with their decades of brutal authoritarian violence. Existing power structures fought to contain the disruption with things like the Index of Forbidden Books, the Inquisition’s intensification, the burning of heretics, all of which peaked in the century after Gutenberg. The first Industrial Revolution produced the conditions for the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. The French Revolution’s Reign of Terror was an early example of how rapid social disruption can generate authoritarian violence even under nominally democratic banners. Napoleon himself was essentially the first modern authoritarian, using new mass mobilization techniques enabled by print culture and industrial organization. The second Industrial Revolution produced the conditions directly responsible for fascism and communism, both textbook examples of raw authoritarianism. This is the clearest and most catastrophic example of this connection. The people who voted for Hitler, joined the Bolsheviks, and embraced Mussolini were substantially the casualties of industrialization. Artisans were displaced, peasants were urbanized, middle classes became threatened, veterans were disoriented. Both fascism and communism were explicitly reactions to the chaos of industrial capitalism, offering total ideological systems that promised to master and direct technological change rather than be victimized by it. Weimar Germany is the classic case with hyperinflation, rapid modernization, sexual and cultural revolution, mass unemployment… all creating a population so disoriented and humiliated that a significant portion embraced a movement promising radical restoration of order and identity.
It’s not just that disruption correlates with authoritarianism broadly, it correlates with very specific types of authoritarianism that mirror the disruption. Industrial disruption produces class-based authoritarianism. Both fascism and communism organized around economic grievances…top of the authoritarian menu. Cultural disruption produces identity-based authoritarianism, where movements organize around ethnicity, religion, or nationality. This sounds a lot like Iran. Information disruption produces epistemic authoritarianism… movements that attack truth itself, replacing shared reality with loyalty to a leader’s narrative. The current moment we are in combines all three simultaneously, which is why contemporary authoritarianism is proving to have an unusually complex character.
There’s substantial social psychology behind all of this. Uncertainty and threat reliably increase what researchers call the need for cognitive closure, the desire for clear, simple answers and strong authority. Terror Management Theory suggests that awareness of mortality and social dissolution drives people toward worldviews and leaders that offer certainty and belonging. Social Identity Theory shows that threatened group identity intensifies tribalistic dynamics. And all of these mechanisms are activated simultaneously by rapid technological disruption. But an important nuance is that while the correlation between tech change and authoritarianism is real, it is not directionally deterministic. The same disruption that produced fascism in Germany produced the New Deal in America and social democracy in Scandinavia. The difference in outcomes involved prevailing institutions, political culture, economic policy choices, and, perhaps the most important element, the quality of leadership. Disruption may create conditions for authoritarianism, but it doesn’t make it inevitable.
Countries with stronger democratic institutions, more robust social safety nets, and better mechanisms for managing displacement tend to channel disruption into reform rather than disturbing reaction. The Scandinavian countries navigated industrialization relatively well partly because strong labor movements and cooperative traditions gave people a means to cope with the disruption rather than leaving them helpless in the face of it.
The AI revolution is producing the same structural conditions as previous disruptive eras, but with features that make the authoritarian temptation particularly acute. Social media, one of my greatest concerns for our society, has destroyed shared reality in a way that has no real precedent. Even with more information available to more people than ever before in history, people no longer inhabit the same information environment, making democratic deliberation extremely difficult. AI threatens white-collar and cognitive work, the classes that historically served as democratic bulwarks are now themselves threatened. Just look at the attacks on “elite liberal universities”. The disruption is global and simultaneous. There’s no unaffected periphery to absorb displaced populations. And the speed of change leaves institutions with almost no time to adapt. The Orbán story fits perfectly into this framework. His rise to power was fueled by the disruption of post-communist transition, globalization’s uneven effects on Hungary, and the 2008 financial crisis. His rhetoric about protecting Hungarian identity from chaos was a classic authoritarian response to genuine disruption and loss. The deeper historical lesson is sobering: we have never successfully navigated a technological disruption of this magnitude without significant authoritarian episodes somewhere in the system. The question isn’t whether disruption creates authoritarian pressure… it clearly does. The question is whether democratic institutions are strong enough after the early stages of intentional autocratic destruction and adaptive enough now to channel that pressure into reform rather than reaction, even if a regime change can be orchestrated in the near term.
What’s different from the disruption of the Agricultural Revolution (10,000-5,000 BCE), the collapse of Greece and Rome (500 BCE – 200 CE), the Printing Press Era (1450-1550), the Scientific Revolution (1550-1700), the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), the Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914), the Mid-20th Century (1940-1970), and the early Digital Revolution (1990-present)? The current AI era is unprecedented in one specific way… the rate of acceleration is itself accelerating. Previous industrial revolutions transformed daily life over 50-80 years. The internet transformed communication within 15 years. Smartphones transformed social life within 10 years. AI is transforming knowledge work within 5 years. The gap between technological capability and human institutional/psychological adaptation has never been wider. We are almost certainly in the most acutely disorienting technological moment in human history, not because the absolute changes are largest (the agricultural revolution was arguably more fundamental) but because the pace is fastest, the global simultaneity is total, and the changes strike at cognition itself rather than just physical labor or social organization. Previous revolutions replaced muscle. This one is replacing mind, which is a categorically different kind of disruption with no real historical precedent to draw on.
China may well be able to force adoption and adaptation to AI easier and faster than we liberal democracies will be able to do the same. I don’t worry about Iran or even Russia, because they tend to prefer to avoid anything this disruptive or handle it centrally. Not sure where India is on this scale, but the Chinese are really good at force feeding their 1.4 billion people what they want them to eat and digest. If you are American, you wonder how AI can help you and not hurt you. If you are Chinese, you just do what you are told or else Big Brother will know. Forget about the Manchurian Candidate…and focus on the Authoritarian Imperative.