Underground Empire
How America Weaponized the World Economy
by Henry Farrell & Abraham Newman
On sale now (Amazon, Bookshop.org), published by Henry Holt in the US and Allen Lane/Penguin in the UK. Awarded the Council of Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award Bronze Medal. Editors’ Pick, Foreign Affairs Best Books of 2024. See reviews in Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, National Review, Washington Monthly, Financial Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Irish Times, Pluralistic, Publisher’s Weekly, and Chatham House. Translated into Chinese, Finnish, French, Japanese, Korean, and (coming soon) Vietnamese.
Featured Work
EssayPublic Writing The Enshittification of American Power
Back in 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe a cycle that has played out again and again in the online economy. Entrepreneurs start off making high-minded promises to get new users to try their platforms. But once users, vendors, and advertisers have been locked in—by network effects, insurmountable collective action problems, high switching costs—the tactics change. The platform owners start squeezing their users for everything they can get, even as the platform fills with ever more low-quality slop. Then they start squeezing vendors and advertisers too. People don’t usually think of military hardware, the US dollar, and satellite constellations as platforms. But that’s what ...
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Academic Article Large AI models are cultural and social technologies
Large AI models are cultural and social technologies Implications draw on the history of transformative information systems from the past By Henry Farrell, Alison Gopnik, Cosma Shalizi, and James Evans As per Science’s rules, I hereby am making it clear that the below is the author’s version of the work. It is posted by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science on March 13, 2025, DOI:10.1126/science.adt9819. If you prefer to read the provisional version in PDF format, click here. Debates about artificial intelligence (AI) tend to revolve around whether large models are intelligent, autonomous agents. ...
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Essay Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions
In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message to its inhabitants than did Palo Alto. Cambridge’s message was, “You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you’ve been meaning to.” Silicon Valley respected smarts, Graham wrote, but its message was different: “You should be more powerful.” Read the full article in Bloomberg ...
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Essay This Is How Trump Will Smash the Machine of U.S. Economic Power
Economic security officials worked across administrations, gradually developing grand ambitions of a global order founded on financial sanctions, export controls and development of crucial technologies. Each new administration built up the economic weapons it inherited from the last and encouraged its successors to keep building the structures of American economic power. We are about to find out what happens when those structures are controlled by a disruptive administration — and what happens when that administration inherits the weapons without the accompanying sense of responsibility. Read the full article in the New York Times.
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Henry Farrell is the SNF Agora Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and the 2019 recipient of the Friedrich Schiedel Prize for Politics and Technology.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Council Member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, as well as an affiliated scholar at Stanford University Law School’s Center for the Internet and Society, and an international correspondent for Stato e Mercato.
Substack
Essays
Crypto is a threat to the US Financial System
With Dan Davies – for the New York Times This has been a good week for America’s crypto interests. The Genius Act, which legitimates a kind of cryptocurrency called stablecoins, advanced in the Senate, and on Thursday, President Trump held a gala dinner for the top 220 holders of his $Trump memecoin. That doesn’t mean ...
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The Abundance Debate We’re Not Having
The best way to read Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book is to take the authors at their word. Abundance is what is usually called a “policy book,” but Klein and Thompson don’t quite offer a traditional policy agenda. Instead, the authors begin and end with a question that is also a concentrating lens. “Can we ...
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Academic Articles
AI as Governance
Political scientists have had remarkably little to say about artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps because they are dissuaded by its technical complexity and by current debates about whether AI might emulate, outstrip, or replace individual human intelligence. They ought to consider AI in terms of its relationship with governance. Existing large-scale systems of governance such as ...
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Henry Farrell Talks to Kim Stanley Robinson
Henry Farrell and Kim Stanley Robinson (2024), “Henry Farrell Talks to Kim Stanley Robinson,” Vector, 299. Henry Farrell teaches democracy and international affairs at Johns Hopkins University. Kim Stanley Robinson is a science fiction writer whose most recent novel is The Ministry for the Future. Their conversation took place in March 2023 at Stanford’s Center ...
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Interviews
The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics: Podcast with Max Read and John Ganz
Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. ...
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Interview with Sean Carroll on “Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism”, Mindscape
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas, Episode 148 | Henry Farrell on Democracy as a Problem-Solving Mechanism Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of experts or for that matter arbitrarily-chosen hereditary dynasties. Nevertheless, ...
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Interview with Sophie Roell on “The Best Books on the Politics of Information”
“Our political systems evolved in an era when information was much harder to come by. What challenges does our current reality of information overload pose for democracy? How do we even start thinking about these questions? Political scientist Henry Farrell proposes key books for building a curriculum on ‘the politics of information,’ starting with a ...
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Reviews for "Underground Empire"
"a revelatory book"
― Paul Krugman
New York Times
"Farrell and Newman write fluidly and grippingly. . . . As the book jumps from nondescript Northern Virginia office parks housing America’s intelligence establishment, to the boardrooms of mid-20th-century New York banks, to sanctions-dodging tankers traversing the Indian Ocean, it’s not hard to detect the influence of techno-thriller writers such as Neal Stephenson."
The Washington Post
"The book you need to read if you want to understand where the world economy has been and where it may be headed"
― Dani Rodrik
Professor of International Political Economy, Harvard University
Books
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