Tocqueville’s Soft Despotism Has Found Its Algorithm
Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America nearly two centuries ago, described a peculiar danger that would eventually threaten the American experiment — not the tyranny of the sword or the chains of a despot, but something far more insidious: a soft, administrative despotism that would “cover the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate.
