Henry Farrell on AI as a Social Technology

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen Collins speaks with Henry Farrell about AI, democracy, and political economy. Farrell argues that large language models are best understood not as emerging individual intelligences, but as “social technologies” that process and reorganize vast stores of human cultural information, much like markets, bureaucracies, and democracies process knowledge. The conversation explores deliberative democracy, civil society, Silicon Valley, AI regulation, and the risks of treating politics as an optimization problem. Farrell emphasizes the messiness of democratic life as essential to resisting authoritarianism and building a better future.

Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author of various books, including Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy (Henry Holt and Co., 2023) and Of Privacy and Power: The Transatlantic Fight over Freedom and Security (Princeton University Press, 2019), both coauthored with Abraham Newman, as well as The Political Economy of Trust: Institutions, Interests, and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

**This episode was recorded on January 7, 2026**

Show Notes:

• Virtual Sentiments | State Capture and the Meaning of Democracy with Samuel Bagg
• Henry Farrell’s Substack, Programmable Mutter
• Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, The Enshittification of American Power (Wired, 2025)
• Henry Farrell and Hahrie Han, AI and Democratic Publics (Knight First Amendment Institute, 2025)
• Farrell, Gopnik, Shalizi, and Evans, Large AI models are cultural and social technologies (Science, 2025)
• Farrell, Mercier, and Schwartzberg, Analytical Democratic Theory: A Microfoundational Approach (APSR, 2022)
• Farrell, Where Trump is Vulnerable and How to Act on It (New York Times, 2025)
• Farrell, The Same Old Fantasies Behind AI and New Technology (Lawfare, 2025)
• Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial (The MIT Press, 1970)
• F.A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society (Liberty Fund, 2013)
• Cosma Shalizi, The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone (Three-Toed Sloth, 2010)
• Andrew Lentini, Reimagining Democracy in the Age of AI (SNF Agora, 2024)
• Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory (BBS, 2011)
• North, Wallis, and Weingast, Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
• Cory Doctorow, The Bezzle: A Martin Hench Novel (Tor Books, 2025)