The Gilded Age epitomized the immense concentration of corporate power, when industrial giants like Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed so much power they could literally control time itself: Nov. 18, 1883, became known as “the Day of Two Noons” after railroad companies in the U.S. and Canada created four distinct time zones across North America to replace chaotic time zones across the continent, causing many clocks to strike noon twice.
Today, a new kind of concentration is emerging in the AI era, and even some of its architects—including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—say they are deeply uneasy about how quickly and accidentally that power has concentrated.
