There might be nothing more l’air du temps than a “vibe coded” Authoritarian Consolidation Index. Created and published by John Ganz on his popular Unpopular Front Substack this January, the political commentator named the tool “Polybius” after the ancient Greek historian. Plug in your country of choice and the index will spit out a score representing how close said country is to a consolidated autocracy, as opposed to a liberal democracy, at any moment.
Polybius generates a score by aggregating public information and evaluating it according to “democratic vital signs,” such as “judicial independence” or “corporate compliance.” A Polybius section called “social signals” tracks support for the “regime” from elite political figures, media sources, and markets. Polybius also takes information from Claude API’s real-time web search tool and runs it through theoretical models ranging from “Marxian Class Analysis” to “Tocquevillean Civil Society.” A Polybius score of 100 represents a country in the full grips of consolidated autocracy. When Polybius was hatched twelve days ago, the United States’ overall score hovered at 29. By Friday, the score had ticked up to 33.4. The most notable difference seems to be the “federalism/regional” democratic vital sign, which went from a “stable” 25 to a “worsening” 35 over the course of the week.
Polybius reminds me of a (slightly) more improvised version of the Doomsday Clock, housed at our very own UChicago Harris School of Public Policy and run by Manhattan Project descendants. This year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the clock five seconds closer to “midnight,” inching ever closer to catastrophe. The Bulletin partially explained the move by pointing to AI’s acceleration of “existing chaos and dysfunction in the world’s information ecosystem.” Indeed, infrastructural or technological AI developments could signal democratic decay and lower any number of Polybius’ vital signs.
Ironically, Ganz built Polybius without typing a single line of code—he asked a large language model, Claude, to build it for him. We’re calling this “vibe coding” now, and all your friends are doing it. Slovakian AI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term last year, writing in an X post that rather than programming himself, “I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.” Polybius uses artificial intelligence, a supposed contributor to socio-political strife, to quantify that strife. Vibe coding an authorization consolidation index might be an ingenious way to co-opt a threatening technology, but it succumbs to its logic. Such abstractions further incentivize us to view the world through blurrier numerical meanings, instead of using human language to capture its reality.
Polybianly,
Elena Eisenstadt
Image: Ernst Josephson, David and Saul, oil on canvas, 1878 (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm).