“When you’re going to change the world, don’t ask for permission.” This is one of the first lines Viktor says to the man who will be his future intellectual partner, Jayce Talis, in the second episode of the 2021 animated series Arcane, set in the world of the video game League of Legends. In the scene, the two men are standing figuratively and literally on a precipice. Viktor has just startled Jayce back from his decision to jump, and is presently trying to convince him to jump into a new shared mission: developing a new technology, Hextech, for the good of the city. They’re softly lit by the lights of the city sprawling before them; there’s hopeful music playing in the background. We’re meant to cheer when Jayce accepts Viktor’s proposal: Here are two underdogs who are finally taking their fates, and the fate of the city, into their own hands.

“When you’re going to change the world, don’t ask for permission.” Viktor encourages Jayce to develop Hextech (Arcane 1x02).

And yet Viktor’s words are so evocative of “move fast and break things,” Mark Zuckerberg’s old adage, that it’s hard to hear them hopefully from the vantage point of 2026, when this adage has become a defining principle of our times. Don’t ask permission rubs us especially the wrong way against the current backdrop of AI development. Don’t ask permission before feeding authors’ works to the LLMs that encroach on their livelihoods; don’t ask (or ignore the lack of) permission when you build data centers right beside communities; don’t ask permission from the people whose lives are entangled in social systems before disrupting those systems in the name of progress—in the name of changing the world. Western storytelling loves active characters with a lot of agency—characters who balk against established structures, who reach out and grasp for their destinies, aware of and willing to accept the consequences. Perhaps we’re seeing the natural results of our oligarchs casting themselves as the protagonists.

If you asked Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley venture capitalist and current advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, well: “The myth of Prometheus—in various updated forms like Frankenstein, Oppenheimer, and Terminator—haunts our nightmares” is listed in the “Lies” section of his controversial “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” It’s unsurprising that Andreessen, and techno-optimist oligarchs like him, would refuse the cautionary tale these Prometheus figures espouse. The ideology of techno-optimism depends on the promise that the Great Problems of society will be solved by technology.

But Viktor’s story doesn’t end well. If his name isn’t a direct allusion to Victor Frankenstein, it certainly evokes the seminal mad scientist. He’s only one in a long tradition of inventors whose creations spiral out of their control, often turning against them. Our media has examples in abundance.

Why, then, are we so drawn to these techno-optimist Prometheus figures in narratives? What do they reflect and illuminate about the techno-optimists shaping our landscape today? And, by envisioning where that techno-optimism might come up short, how might we be better equipped to envision alternatives?

I’d argue that the most interesting Prometheus to put Viktor in conversation with isn’t actually Victor Frankenstein himself. It’s Domin from Karel Čapek’s 1920 science fiction play Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.). R.U.R. is about the invention of robot workers and their subsequent uprising, which culminates in the end of the human race. Čapek is credited for coining the word “robot” from the Czech robota, meaning forced laborer. Over a hundred years later, R.U.R. remains as relevant as it’s ever been in its incisive depiction of technological progress and the people who drive it. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the throes of the first Industrial Revolution; Čapek wrote R.U.R. after mass production had become commonplace and corporations had risen to take advantage. It might be fruitful, then, to juxtapose it with Arcane, a show that was released after many of Čapek’s technological speculations have been realized.

Viktor and Domin share some heavy-handed nominative determinism (victor for Viktor, dominate for Domin). They also share a belief in the power of technology to shape society—they’re both techno-optimists. While Domin isn’t the robots’ inventor, he is the general manager of the factory and the figure of authority throughout the play. When confronted with the possible drawbacks of manufacturing their robots, Domin counters with, “But we can’t exactly compensate for everything that’s lost when we recreate the world from Adam” (Čapek 19). They’re disruptors, Viktor and Domin. Certainly, there will be things lost in the course of changing the world, but the end state will be so much better for their intervention.

The robots (right) and managers of Rossum’s Universal Robots

Their motivations are certainly sympathetic. They’re responding to the direness of the worlds around them: Domin makes the grand claim that “within the next ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much wheat, so much cloth, so much everything that things will no longer have any value. Everyone will be able to take as much as he needs. There’ll be no more poverty” (Čapek 19). Viktor’s motives are similar: He wants Hextech to improve the lives of the people of the Undercity, who live beneath the boot of Piltover, breathing their pollution and subject to their police raids. The status quo is untenable; people in the worlds of Arcane and R.U.R.—our own world, in the latter’s case—are suffering under poverty, scarcity, and oppressive systems. The mechanism of change, for Domin and for Viktor, is technology.

In his 2019 essay “Machine Politics,” new media scholar Fred Turner writes about our new wave of tech oligarchs: “Engineers like Zuckerberg or, for that matter, [Norbert] Wiener [inventor of cybernetics], have little interest in party politics: if you want to change the world, you don’t lobby or vote; you build new technologies.” Politics is slow, sometimes by necessity and sometimes because of its entrenched institutions. It’s made of debate, and compromises, and backsliding. Often, it is actively hostile to reform attempts. Technology, by contrast, is couched in logics of efficiency and optimization (one of the benefits to the robots in R.U.R. is that they don’t have to go through childhood, which the factory managers view as “pure nonsense” from a “technical standpoint” [Čapek 17]). When Jayce joins the Council, Piltover’s ruling political body, and begins to root out corruption, Viktor calls it a “poor use of [their] time.” To Viktor, technology and politics are separable, and he’s dismissive of the potential of the latter to do good. This separation is the basis for one major objection to regulations on technology, because it imposes inefficient politics upon efficient technology; indeed, Viktor balks at the suggestion that they should take time to ensure the Hextech technology is safe. Freedom to innovate, freedom from regulation.

Technology, then, presents an attractive alternative to politics. Voting and lobbying are drawn out and reliant on distributed agency. Technology, on the other hand …. As Andreessen writes: “We had a problem of starvation, so we invented the Green Revolution. (…) We had a problem of isolation, so we invented the Internet. (…) We have a problem of poverty, so we invent technology to create abundance.” At its inception, it was believed that the Internet, like the radio before it, might provide the solution to totalitarianism. Generative AI, too, is often couched in terms of its potential to combat inequality: to make skills and information available to those who had no access to them before. Starvation, isolation, poverty, totalitarianism, inequality—political systems have iterated on solutions to these for centuries without coming to a consensus. It’s a relieving idea, then, that technology can. We had a problem of poverty, so we invented robots; we had a problem of scarcity, so we invented Hextech.

In real life, the processes that enable our technology are intentionally obfuscated from us—the low-wage and free labor of data colonialism that underpins Big Tech, for instance.¹ Fiction, though, lets us pick our vantage points so that we can peel back these obfuscations. Arcane pays lip service to this capacity: the fail-safes for the Hexgates are later revealed to have been installed in the Undercity, where they poison the utility ducts that bring water and air, undermining Viktor’s mission to use Hextech to improve those lives. R.U.R.’s main conflict, on the other hand, is directly centered around the robots whose labor undergirds the promise of a world without poverty. As they’re developing the robots, the factory managers have a disturbingly clinical debate, weighing whether they should program the robots to feel suffering so that the robots will be less likely to hurt themselves and waste the resources it took to make them. They decide in favor. Far from solving any structural inequality, they’ve only exacerbated it by creating a new underclass of dehumanized laborers. As becomes clear, technology can’t be an alternative to politics; any technology is only possible through specific political arrangements, extractive or not, and is inextricable from those arrangements.

This is no clearer than in the place where the two narratives converge—political violence. Season one of Arcane ends with a rejection of technology-as-alternative. Not by Viktor, but by Jinx, the fed-up loose cannon who takes his tech, builds a rocket launcher, and points it at the Council. Both Hextech and the robots are eventually repurposed for war by those in power—in the case of Hextech, against the very people it was designed to serve, in retaliation for Jinx’s stunt. Ironically, war is the most political possible use for these technologies. Still, one of Domin’s managers bemoans, “Boys, it was criminal of old Europe to teach the Robots to fight! For God’s sake, couldn’t they have left us out of their politics?” (Čapek 53). To the end, he labors under the misconception that politics is introduced to technology, rather than intrinsic to it.

In truth, they were inseparable from the start: It’s the Council’s funding that made the development of Hextech possible in the first place, much like how the establishment of Rossum’s Universal Robots was likely dependent on the colonial structures of the time. Likewise, the systems that provided the foundations for modern computers—think ENIAC, SAGE, ARPANET—were funded by the American military; modern AI is similarly heavily funded through government subsidies. Once again, fiction lets us peel back these obfuscations: Technology was never going to undermine or provide alternatives to the structures that created them, only support them.

One of the most prominent of those structures is gender. It’s impossible, of course, to talk about techno-optimism without addressing the gender-shaped specter in the corner. The loudest voices in tech right now are male; despite the contributions of women like Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, and despite the majority of those actually running the early computers being women, science and technology are largely regarded as men’s domains, historically and today. Men are the discoverers, the makers, the subjects; women are the objects to be discovered, the objects to be made—it’s why nature is gendered as female, and why our voice assistants have female voices.

Gender plays a massive role in R.U.R. The opening scene between Domin, his managers, and Helena, the daughter of a president and also the president of the Humanity League, is incredibly uncomfortable in a way that will be familiar to women today. Domin constantly cuts Helena off; his managers mockingly tell her that they also care for the welfare of the robots—they wouldn’t want their workers damaged!—and condescendingly offer to join the League. The shadow of gendered violence hangs over the interaction: Early on, Domin remarks that Helena is quite young and goes out of his way to confirm her age. He then suggests moving the subject off of robots before reminding her of the dynamics at the factory: “We are only a handful of people here amidst a hundred thousand Robots, and there are no women” (Čapek 14). This all culminates with Domin demanding that Helena marry one of the managers. “A man should be a bit of a brute,” he says, when she protests (Čapek 23). But the men don’t afford her any more autonomy than they afford their robots. Eventually, she acquiesces.

Technology facilitates access to women’s bodies in more ways than one. The factory produces both male and female robots. When asked why, Domin explains, “There’s a certain demand, you see? Waitresses, shop-girls, secretaries—it’s what people are used to” (Čapek 22). The robots aren’t capable of sexual reproduction; gender, for them, is reified through physical presentation, and, more importantly, through labor. A robot’s gender depends on whether the robot is designed for (traditionally) women’s work or for (traditionally) men’s work. Both male and female robots are forced into positions of servitude, but it’s the female ones who must take on these people-facing roles, who have to perform their servitude to such a degree. For all that Domin and his ilk speak of eradicating need and inequality, they’re perfectly happy to propagate the structure of gender.

And when Helena protests the marriage to Domin—well, why doesn’t he just marry one of his female robots, she says—he tells her “[a] female Robot is not a woman” (Čapek 23). It runs amusingly counter to the modern phenomenon surrounding AI romantic partners, perhaps because R.U.R. uses robots as a metaphor for the dehumanized underclass, and we’ve since developed models that can pass the Turing test. For us, robots are no longer a metaphor, but a reality. In any case, we’ve now accepted that technology can substitute for human companionship, that possessing something is a good enough approximation of being loved by it. This feels techno-optimist too. We had a problem of loneliness, so we invented girlfriends.

And what about a hundred years later, with Arcane? Arcane has received praise for its portrayal of its female characters. Its emotional core is the complicated sister relationship of Vi and Jinx, with characters like Caitlyn and Mel occupying positions of power. In many ways, they do represent a step forward from Helena. They are not simply romantic objects to be acted upon but are interesting contradictions of loyalties and ethical commitments. Yet, as Caitlyn and Vi sling their guns and gauntlets, the inner workings of their weapons remain opaque to them; when Mel joins the battlefield, her power derives from magic—something innate, intuitive. It’s only Jinx who fully understands the weapons she wields.

Victor, too, eventually invents the robot.

Arcane has a fair number of inventors and scientists; the gender ratio is five men to one woman. There’s also a lab assistant, Sky, whose narrative role is to get vaporized by the Hextech that Viktor is struggling to control. She later acts as his companion in the astral plane. Once again, it’s the woman taking on the role of the object, of embodying the mysterious unknown. It’s interesting, then, that the robots Viktor eventually creates don’t exhibit any strong sexual dimorphism; in fact, even though they’re designed as soldiers first, their design is vaguely feminine, with slight curves and an overall dainty, elegant design language. Is it progress to finally have female(-coded) robot soldiers? It might not matter—in truth, Viktor’s robots are only a means to an end for another character, Singed, to finally resurrect his daughter (again, female!) through one of the robot bodies. While R.U.R. is more preoccupied with whether robots (laborers) can and should have souls, Arcane, written in an age of deepfakes, raises a different question: if that robot could approximate someone you loved, would it be enough? Can technology solve the problem of grief? For Singed, the answer is yes; for us, living during the rise of AI-powered grief aids, the answer remains to be seen.

I attended a university that was unambiguously a Tech University for undergrad—lots of tech and consulting clubs, the most prestigious of which provided their members fully funded trips to Hawai‘i, semesterly yacht parties, and trips to Napa. The students who will be the next generation of Silicon Valley, in short.

I was in a tech club. I remember one conversation I had with another member of the leadership board, let’s call him Guy. We were halfway into a week of parsing new member applications—these clubs can get over a thousand applications a semester. Guy and I were both exhausted. We’d all spent two hours arguing about the same four applicants. There were members of the leadership board who were clearly favoring their friends—or worse, an applicant who they’d had a single friendly interaction with—and refusing to admit it.

Guy suggested to me that in the future, we could train an LLM to parse the resumes instead. I, in turn, was vehemently against this. His argument was that we could get the LLM to be more objective than we were—an LLM, after all, can’t favor its friends, or reopen already closed discussions with a last, “But why not my favorite?” My research was in AI fairness. Didn’t he know that classifiers had been found to discriminate on race, and that models could already infer race even when the attribute wasn’t explicitly given, and that LLMs had been found to show racial bias in a dozen different ways?

To be fair, these algorithms are already being used by companies to parse the volume of their job applications. There are even some that market themselves as inclusive. Let’s take Tengai, an AI hiring service which claims to, “guarantee a screening interview free from bias as Tengai is programmed with diversity and inclusion software and never takes appearance or background into consideration.” From “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”: “Technology doesn’t care about your ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, sexuality, political views, height, weight, hair or lack thereof. Technology is built by a virtual United Nations of talent from all over the world. Anyone with a positive attitude and a cheap laptop can contribute. Technology is the ultimate open society.” We had a problem of racism, so we invented de-biasing AI.

This is the fallacy that haunts Silicon Valley, the one that stories like R.U.R. and Arcane have been deconstructing for longer than the last one hundred years. The urge to use technology to solve political problems is tempting and also doomed. Algorithms aren’t going to make us less racist. LLM-based therapy is not going to make us less lonely. No technology is going to solve poverty, because none of these are issues of insufficient technology—they’re issues of resource allocation, crumbling social networks, historical inequalities. The Great Problems of our time are not going to be solved by throwing VC money and neural nets at them. The hour I spent going back and forth, frustratingly and sometimes circularly, with Guy went farther toward a better collective understanding of fairness than any technology ever could attempt to optimize for us.

To be honest, I think the biggest irony of all these years of tech-as-alternative-to-politics is that the oligarchs have realized that they simply do not need to do all that. Right-wing populism has already shifted into this mindset, and it’s happy to accommodate. Former senior counselor and chief strategist to Trump, Steve Bannon, called the president a “hammer.” Again, that move fast and break things rhetoric: If you don’t like how long-standing institutions are operating, smash them. Musk’s short-lived Department of Governmental Efficiency applied an engineer’s logics of optimization and profit to processes that operated on anything but. Musk, Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) were all on prominent display at Trump’s inauguration. If their technologies were ever anti-establishment emblems, if they ever thought of themselves as the protagonists of these disruptor stories, they aren’t any longer.

Scenes from a robot uprising in R.U.R.

Perhaps that’s the appeal of these tales, then. We get to watch the hubris of these men play out to its logical end, we get to see where their techno-optimism falters. In the case of Arcane, we get to project feelings of regret onto those who fetishize disruption and progress without thinking enough about what they’re disrupting or what they’re progressing toward. In the case of R.U.R., we also get to point and laugh at the heightened yet perfectly accurate way these people talk and behave—one of Domin’s managers literally dies with half a billion of cash on his chest after unsuccessfully trying to negotiate with the robots at their gates. Reading R.U.R., for me, was a frustrating and also comforting experience. I felt that I had heard these people before, delivering speeches and telling me about what the future is going to hold and how we’re going to get there. It was comforting, if exasperating, to recognize the rhetoric that we’ve come to associate with the oligarchs of the digital age in Čapek’s vision, to see the treatment of women today mirrored in the treatment of women then. Art’s ability to remind us of the universality of experience prevails again.

The last point I want to touch on is that of escape. As Turner asserts in “Machine Politics,” Silicon Valley has its roots in the New Communalism movement, whose adherents sought to detach from mainstream America and build their own communities. Steve Jobs spent a stint on All One Farm; many other communalists would go on to join the grassroots tech companies. The early Internet was constructed along these principles as well—as a place where people could find information and community, a liberatory space free of totalitarian power structures. This urge to escape has evolved since, but not so much; in his essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel muses, “The critical question then becomes one of means, of how to escape not via politics but beyond it (…) and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.” If the world is untenable, we can seek change by disrupting it—or, perhaps, we can build ways of life so that it does not affect us at all. (Thiel suggests seasteading, the Internet, and outer space.)

Viktor and Domin’s trajectories are intertwined in different ways with escape, while also demonstrating its futility. Domin’s factory is located on an island. They’re isolated from the rest of the world, sheltered from those whose lives they’re trying to improve. When the robots rebel, this isolation affords them enough protection that they’re the last ones standing, sheltered from the conflict for which they are responsible. On the other hand, when Viktor is disillusioned with what Hextech has become, he leaves society—and the weapons developed from his inventions—and sets up his own commune of people he’s “fixed” into becoming docile and rather conflict-avoidant. But the people and politics he’s escaping eventually find him, as well.

But what can escape mean for those at the bottom? Out of all Arcane’s inventors, it’s perhaps Ekko who best threads together that utopian, communal vision for technology with an awareness of the political realities that make such a vision necessary. Ekko is the leader of the Firelights, a group of freedom fighters and refugees in the Undercity. He uses his acumen to maintain the tree that provides for his community; he’s also developed hoverboards, which he and his Firelights use in his campaign against the Undercity’s exploitative kingpin. Technology improves their lives because it empowers the Firelights’ challenge to existing hierarchies, rather than serving as an alternative to them. Ekko is not seeking the optimized frictionlessness of Viktor’s commune, and he’s not looking to accumulate capital. Certainly, he is a disruptor, but his mechanism of change is not technology. It’s instead the slow process of community building, of resistance. Of fighting the good fight, slow and frustrating—yet utterly worth it—as it may be.

¹ See Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias’s article in Television and New Media, “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject.”

Works Cited

Andreessen, Marc. The Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Andreessen Horowitz, 16 October 2023, https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/.

Čapek, Karel. R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Translated by Claudia Novack, Penguin Classics, 2004.

Couldry, Nick and Ulises A. Mejias. “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject.” Television and New Media, Vol. 20, Issue 4, 2019, 336–349.

Linke, Christian and Alex Yee, creators. Arcane. Fortiche and Riot Games, 2021–2024.

Thiel, Peter. “The Education of a Libertarian.” Cato Unbound, 30 Apr. 2014, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/.

Turner, Fred. “Machine Politics.” Harper’s, January 2019, https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/machine-politics-facebook-political-polarization/.