Human Power

Books for the summer

As summer is well underway I wanted to suggest five books I have read with a lot of enjoyment so far this year.

What binds them together is human power, how it is gained, how it is used. That feels like a very 2026 theme.

There are lessons in here for leaders and execs in many organisations, about where power resides, how it is used, and why openness matters.

So…on to the books.

Empire of AI – Karen Hao

This is a forensic examination of the way Open AI developed up to late 2024. It suffers a bit from the bewilderingly rapid changes in the AI industry since then, which dates it – but is nonetheless incredibly insightful. It’s not a happy read if you are a Sam Altman fanboy. Actually, few people at the top of Open AI come out of it well. More importantly, Hao talks about the way the frontier model companies are developing power along three axes; – knowledge, resources and influence. Their control of these is so strong that the risk is we are entering a new imperial age. She is very good on the way Open AI has colonised extractive work in poorer countries to improve the models, and then withdrawn leaving very little if any value on the ground.

Hao calls for the redistribution of power along each axis. Ultimately it is hard to see how this happens without significant government intervention which is now the topic du jour in many markets. Hao’s book is the intellectual handbook for the growing techlash – most people won’t read it but the ideas are seeping out into the mainstream.

And those three axes – knowledge, resources and influence - are worth auditing in your organisation. Where do those lines lead, and who sits at either end? What if they were not straight lines?

Lone Wolf - Adam Weymouth

The author literally walks the entire route that a GPS tagged wolf took in 2011 from Slovenia to northern Italy via the Alps. It was over 1000km. It’s fascinating about wolves, and our relationship with them: – the book is also a meditation on the reality of human movement across Europe.

Wolves are in resurgence across the Alps and not everyone likes it. My personal instinct is to champion a rebalancing of nature towards the wild but Weymouth (who I think also favours the wolf) makes you stop in your tracks, and understand the point of view of, for example, farmers in remote Austrian farms. What's striking is how closely the politics of wolf migration mirror the politics of human migration: – both turn on perceived threats, and who gets to decide what belongs where, and both are ultimately arguments about power dressed up as arguments about what’s natural. Weymouth never quite says this, but you finish the book unable to unsee it. The axes of power here are messy, less easy to draw out. That in itself fuels the debate. 

Dark Renaissance – Stephen Greenblatt

A biography of Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan playwright contemporary of Shakespeare. He is best known for the plays Tamburlaine the Great and Dr Faustus. The book is a great read - Marlowe was probably a spy and died age 29 in a knife fight in a Deptford pub - but what really caught my attention was the analysis of Faustus, one of the greatest plays ever written in English. I’d studied it at school, but it took this book to make me realise the timeless story of over reaching ambition is so right for our AI age.

In brief, Dr Faustus is a clever German academic who is restless and unfulfilled – and who makes a pact with devil. He sells his soul for eternity (which the devil can collect in 25 years from the contract date) in return for unlimited power and total knowledge. This is the famous Faustian pact. He can ask any question he likes and get answers. But these are often evasive or unsatisfying. He can experience anything, but it turns out that even carnal knowledge of Helen of Troy is a simulacra, or shadow, because the real Helen is of course long dead. At the end, the devil comes to collect his soul and Faustus despairs of the deal he has done as he disappears to hell, forever.

Of course I don’t think that the AI champions are going to hell (though I can think of some candidates). Yet in that human yearning for the ultimate key to knowledge, the ability to create infinite virtual realities – Marlowe had something important to say about the spiritual price we might pay. The power struggle here is within one man’s soul. That feels eternally relevant to all of us, never more so than now.

Peak Human - What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages – Johan Norberg

Johan Norberg examines seven of humanity's greatest civilizations to understand the conditions that trigger immense human flourishing, and what ultimately causes them to decline.

The golden ages covered in the book are –

Ancient Athens: The birthplace of democracy, an incredibly liberal trading economy, and an openness to foreign outsiders and radical new ideas.

The Roman Republic: A unified system of laws, and a massive infrastructure network.

Abbasid Baghdad: The Islamic Golden Age, which became a global intellectual melting pot. It preserved and built upon classic Greek philosophy while pioneering breakthroughs in algebra, medicine, and science.

Song Dynasty China: A period of massive innovation that introduced paper money, advanced irrigation, and industrial coal-smelting.

Renaissance Italy: A hyper-competitive network of city-states where intense social mobility and decentralized wealth allowed individuals to experiment with radical concepts in maths, engineering, architecture, and art.

The Dutch Republic: The 17th-century golden age that became a safe haven for European refugees, thinkers (like Locke and Descartes), and dissenters. It thrived on free trade and a highly unregulated publishing industry.

The Anglosphere / The Modern Era: The post-1800 global wealth explosion that began with the Industrial Revolution in England and has lead to our current, modern global golden age.

His core theme is that the secret ingredient to every single golden age is openness - to trade, strangers, and uncomfortable new concepts. Civilisations typically collapse when they turn inward, build barriers, or when a society chooses to exercise power to silence its most rational, innovative voices. Where does that leave that last golden age right now?

Careless People – Sarah Wynn-Williams

This is a rip snorter of a book about working at Meta.  Even if 50% of what she says is exaggerated (and I suspect she likes to tell a good story rather too much) Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and some others come out of it very poorly. What makes it more than gossip, though, is the arc she traces: – people who acquire staggering power faster than any institution in history, are visibly unprepared for it, then retreat into denial, then turn fiercely protective of it once the world starts asking questions. Most of all the meaning of this book is in its effect. It is hard to see that it has changed anything – as yet - even though it was widely and positively reviewed at launch last year.

Wynn-Williams is under injunction not to speak publicly about it and famously appeared on stage at the Hay Festival in the UK and stayed silent. Indeed she wasn't just silent, she was legally barred from so much as nodding. Meta have some pretty heavyweight lawyers and has used them to effect. Given the power of social media, and that Meta is at the heart of it globally, one might hope for greater and persistent public scrutiny. Indeed as of June 2026 she's now suing Meta in the Northern District of California over exactly this, arguing the gag is an unconstitutional prior restraint. To me at least, Meta emerge looking like a bully (some might say that’s in line with the culture the current US administration has role modelled). But administrations change and public opinion about tech is on the move.

No CEO would want a book like this published about their organisation or style of leadership. There are lessons here for execs – about what daily good behaviour looks like, and how important the signals you send are in the long term.

 It was only when I started to plan this piece that I realised these books are all about power. Norberg tries – and succeeds in my view – to put a finger on how power creates great civilisations and cultures and how this can be easily dissipated. Lone Wolf looks at how humans exercise power over nature and who exactly does so. Hao and Wynn-Williams take a clear eyed look at modern technology corporation power, amassed and concentrated at incredible speed. Best of all, Dark Renaissance reminds us that the pursuit of power can come freighted with long term moral debt, and that the seductive dream of ultimate knowledge has been with us for a very long time.

PS

I’ve had to restrain myself from writing a piece on the World Cup and what it might mean culturally as there is still two weeks to go and there is more in store to reflect on. I will revert on this in late July, but projection of power is a very central theme here too.