Star Wars and the dawning techno-empire

The final series of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, perhaps the most unduly neglected and perceptive sci-fi series of our times, takes us to Level 1313 of Coruscant, where we encounter Trace and Rafa Martez, two sisters who survive through repair work, laundry services and smuggling. This minor four-episode arc offers one of the saga’s most radical political insights, as it presents the galactic Republic from below, through the experiences of people who live beyond the immediate reach of its institutions and receive few of its benefits, and shows the most realistic and plausible glimpse of our approaching future.

Trace is a gifted mechanic; Rafa runs a laundry, but makes her real living from illicit jobs. Their parents are killed when the Jedi, hunting the escaped gangster Ziro the Hutt, divert a stricken transport away from a crowded landing platform and into the Martez family home. The sisters learn early that the Republic’s institutions, this vaunted hyper-tech galactic ‘civilisation’, are hollow. At sufficient depth, sunlight disappears, replaced by a permanent glow of everlasting solar-powered LEDs. At Level 1313, mechanics, laundries and smugglers co-exist because survival requires ordinary enterprise and relationships outside the official regulations. The Republic keeps a nominal presence, mostly to ensure surveillance and order, and residents therefore depend on personal relationships and informal patronage. The scale and size of the institution make democracy impossible.

When the Republic is transformed into the Empire, the city’s physical structure barely changes. The Jedi Temple is converted into an Imperial Palace. Imperial order does not require destroying the Republic’s technological civilisation, only capturing its technological infrastructure. The Empire runs less on soldiers and spectacle than on administrative routine, intelligence networks, surveillance and bureaucratic compliance.

There is, however, a serious argument that, within the scope of the series, the Empire ultimately solved problems the late Republic could not. The hypothesis here is that the Star Wars societies are not homogeneous because, at scale, homogeneity is impossible to achieve, and attempts to achieve it will create general disorder as the repeated collapse of the republican system demonstrated. The future of complex societies inevitably leads to techno-imperial centralisation. The central lesson of the Clone Wars is that a political system can grow more technologically capable while growing less democratic.

We are already seeing the parallels unfold. In the last 24 hours my AI assistant, on my phone, maintained my schedule, booked restaurants and tickets, sent me reminders every two hours, wrote a ten-page syllabus on AI regulations and compliance, translated a whole German booklet, summarised and produced infographics from the 123-page White House report Science: A New Golden Age, and edited four-generation Maitra family portraits: the entire world’s tireless competence and wisdom at my command. I practically have a non-mechanical droid.

Robotics illustrates the progress as we speak: self-driving vehicles, drone swarms, delivery robots, armed robot dogs and humanoid security guards. Humans converse with increasingly capable AI agents. Military robotics has an even more advanced trajectory. Drone swarms have heralded autonomous warfare. AI systems engage human pilots in simulated or controlled aerial combat, and collaborative combat aircraft are moving towards operational deployment alongside conventional fighters. These platforms already provide additional sensing, survivability and weapons capacity. Despite fear or confusion about AI, it is everywhere and not stopping. It now also analyses large software repositories, identifies vulnerabilities and develops fixes at speeds difficult for human teams to match. Cameras, communications networks, inexpensive sensors, storage systems and machine-learning tools make it increasingly possible to monitor and analyse physical environments continuously. These capabilities already support perimeter security, logistics, reconnaissance and military command without requiring general intelligence.

My phone, for example, has a conversation-mode speech-translation system that facilitates communication across scores of the world’s major languages with minimal delay, not far from a sci-fi ‘universal translator’, with AI even helping scholars read ancient texts long thought illegible. Telepresence technologies – Zoom, Teams, Google Meet – provide new ways to do remote jobs and increase efficiency through non-spatial forms of communication. There’s no need for a janky AT-AT when you have quadruped hounds with guns chasing and barrelling down after you from the top of the hill at maximum speed. Hand-held blasters will never be available, as physics cannot replicate something that small given the known limitations of energy density and mass, but larger directed-energy weapons are already available: ship-mounted lasers and ground-based high-energy systems have advanced towards limited operational use against drones and other targets.

The new tech landscape leaves us on the cusp of an epoch-defining new world, wherein there are two modes of tech ushering in that order. The first includes capabilities already in use or approaching practical deployment: from AI assistants that book tickets, write contracts and translate books, to drones and self-operating machines, droids from food delivery to crowd control and high-attrition warfare, cyber operations and surveillance, natural-language interfaces and directed-energy systems. The second includes technologies grounded in established scientific principles but constrained by still-unresolved engineering problems: your general-purpose domestic robots, your R2-D2s and C-3POs, or more extensive planetary colonisation and commercially viable clean power. This first category, however, is alone sufficient to produce substantial changes in military organisation, economic activity, political authority and everyday life. Advanced robots, sensor networks, data centres, autonomous aircraft and large-scale industrial automation all require dependable power and supporting infrastructure. Our daily life would collapse without the interconnected systems we already enjoy, from Roombas to ATMs.

Once we accept that history has returned, and that liberal democracy is not the end state of human affairs, the logical question is: what system of governance comes next?

Any advanced technology concentrates power among those who control its infrastructure. Roads and communications historically strengthened administration; industrial machinery favoured entities with capital. Modern semiconductors, cloud computing and frontier AI will do the same. On Coruscant, those who control the upper levels hold disproportionate access to authority, information and opportunity. The first globalisation was not democratic, but ran through imperial states, commercial monopolies, military power and extremely unequal access to industrial infrastructure. There is a reason most of our current elites on both sides of the Atlantic instinctively understand why the rise of regressive ethno-nationalism will hinder any true civilisational or even galactic progress. Executives, engineers, financiers and officials already increasingly share professional networks, technical standards and communication through live machine translation. They already enjoy a transnational elite solidarity whose institutional ties outweigh connections to the populations they govern. Again, as on Coruscant, the upper strata integrate before the societies beneath them, through shared infrastructure and interests rather than shared philosophy.

But the most important economic development will result from the hollowing out of the lower middle class. Automation will not threaten the elite. It will threaten the clerical and the routine. It will disrupt professional occupations that have given large populations economic independence: jobs that sustain associations and the organisational capacity to challenge arbitrary power. If AI absorbs routine cognitive work, from contract law to human resources and secretaryship, society will bifurcate between those who own and direct automated systems and those who service the people and institutions controlling them. Coruscant, likewise, divides into four social strata: the martial elite, the cognoscenti, the imperial bureaucrats who manage distant systems and businesses, and the working class, although social mobility is possible between them. And it has a monopoly of organised violence through a mix of automation and AI. What it doesn’t have are HR managers or Chief Operating Officers.

Usually, jobless middle-class surplus elites result in revolutionary scenarios, but what if our current tech overlords already instinctively understand the way to avoid that, by eradicating entire categories of professions, promoting exploration and settlements, creating new job categories, and maintaining a complete monopoly on finances and violence? In no era of human history has the gap between elite tech and the masses been so large, and it will only grow. Technology helps authority. A population, in this case the lower middle class, whose repetitive and unoriginal labour the state no longer needs, may keep formal rights while losing the practical influence to defend them. The Martez sisters’ laundry on Coruscant was largely irrelevant to the decisions made far above it; the sisters were presumably content with society as it was. But this does not mean such a society will be immune to revolution, because hierarchical societies continuously produce ambitious individuals whose aspirations exceed available positions, and frustrated aspirants are a classic source of instability.

A sufficiently technologically advanced civilisation might not become a formal empire, at least not in the 19th-century way we visualise it, but it will most certainly not be democratic, or homogeneous, or small. Complex societies simply cannot regress. No number of jokes about the Star Wars brand on social media should let us avoid the conclusion that our future, at scale, is Coruscant. Yes, there will be pockets of esoteric resistance or temporary regression, but the debate should prompt serious historians to question whether a republican form of democracy is in itself unnatural and can only be a product of a very particular time and culture and can only be maintained at small scale and through enforced homogeneity, both conditions under stress from structural and material forces, and from competition.

What can be inferred from the Star Wars literature, but is never made explicit, is that repeated attempts to form a representative republic failed and will perhaps continue to fail. They failed because the Republic’s civilisation outlived its constitutions: ships keep travelling, machines keep operating, administrative systems keep functioning, while the political order governing them changes fundamentally. The machines are not taking over, but the human elite will simply discover they no longer need to bargain with society as extensively as they once did.

Progress, when seen at scale, is inevitably too galactic to be democratic. Coruscant is the model for that, both under the nominally representative Republic and then the inevitable and explicitly hierarchical Empire, with automated production and autonomous security systems, AI-assisted administration and surveillance maintaining order with fewer visible instruments of coercion.