The Rise of the Sophocrats. Political, Economic, and Epistemic Power in Algorithmic Governance

This article argues that contemporary transformations in digital capitalism and artificial intelligence are producing not merely a new economic phase, but an emergent regime of rule grounded in the control of epistemic infrastructures. It introduces the concept of sophocracy to describe a configuration in which legitimacy derives from privileged access to computational knowledge and the capacity to organize the conditions of cognition itself. Moving beyond accounts of democratic crisis cantered on populism or neoliberalism, the article identifies a structural convergence of epistemic authority, economic power, and political control. Situating sophocracy – as a neologism - within a genealogy of elites - from aristocracy to technocracy - it emphasizes the privatization of the means of cognition and the public sphere. Focusing in particular on Peter Thiel, sophocracy is interpreted as both an infrastructural and symbolic order. What is at stake is the capacity to sustain shared horizons of meaning and collective action within increasingly pre-structured environments, and to transform rather than escape them.