The Compulsory Imaginary: AGI and Corporate Authority
Source: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b9692be0c767a0c0db674ab7f1fe6aca4defc83 ↗
Full text: open-access via OpenAlex ↗
Barkett applies Jasanoff's framework of sociotechnical imaginaries to decode how OpenAI and Anthropic construct authority over technological futures through shared rhetorical strategies that transcend their apparent differences.
The analysis reveals four specific operations — self-exemption, teleological naturalization, qualified acknowledgment, and implicit indispensability — that allow these firms to position themselves as inevitable stewards of AGI development while disavowing the commercial and political nature of that claim.
The structural consistency of these strategies across competing firms suggests something deeper than marketing: a discursive mechanism through which private actors capture the authority to define technological futures.
The work connects technology criticism to organizational analysis, showing how corporate power operates through the production of seemingly neutral visions of progress.
For product leaders, it offers a rare analysis of how technological authority actually gets constructed and stabilized at the highest levels of the industry.
Central argument
Barkett argues that OpenAI and Anthropic construct 'sociotechnical imaginaries' of AGI through a structurally identical four-part rhetorical architecture—self-exemption, teleological naturalization, qualified acknowledgment, and implicit indispensability—detectable in Sam Altman's 'The Intelligence Age' and Dario Amodei's 'Machines of Loving Grace.' The central finding is not that each firm strategically chose this rhetoric, but that two organizations with genuinely different cultures, risk philosophies, and public personae converged on the same discursive mechanism despite competitive incentives to differentiate, suggesting this imaginary is an artifact of institutional position rather than deliberate messaging. This convergence, Barkett contends, functions to naturalize AGI's arrival as morally inevitable and to pre-emptively position each firm as indispensable to humanity's future while erasing their identity as commercial actors—raising the normative question of what institutional arrangements could make that authority contestable from the outside.
Critique
The paper's comparative method, while elegant, rests on only two texts from a single moment in late 2024, which makes the structural convergence finding harder to sustain than claimed. Two CEOs writing public essays within weeks of each other may be responding to the same immediate competitive and media environment rather than expressing a durable feature of their institutional position—a genuine confound the paper does not adequately rule out. Additionally, the framework's portability from nation-states to private firms is explicitly flagged as theoretically unresolved in the text itself, and Barkett defers the justification to a section that falls outside the provided excerpt, leaving the analogy's load-bearing assumptions unexamined at the point where the argument most needs them.
Why it matters for product
Product leaders at AI-native companies or those integrating AI capabilities are increasingly asked to align roadmaps with organizational narratives about what AI will make possible—and Barkett's framework reveals how those narratives can function as 'imaginaries' that foreclose alternative product directions and obscure the commercial interests shaping them. Concretely, the four rhetorical operations he identifies—especially implicit indispensability and teleological naturalization—are patterns that appear not just in CEO essays but in internal product vision documents, OKRs, and strategy decks, where they can pre-empt legitimate discovery work by treating a particular AI-powered future as already settled. For a CPO, this is a useful diagnostic: when a product narrative disavows its own assumptions while exercising them, or absorbs risk acknowledgment into an optimistic frame without changing the direction, those are signals that strategic foreclosure is happening rather than genuine strategic choice.