On wielding power well.
Galadriel, Cruella de Vil, & powerful women.
This essay is dedicated to the Bay Area tech scene. It is the first of many on the nature of power.
“If artificial general intelligence is a centralized & powerful technology, who would you trust to handle it responsibly?”
Sitting around a campfire in the Louisiana swampland, a group of machine learning researchers were telling spooky stories about the rise of artificial general intelligence. It was the week after NeurIPS 2022, and we had driven away from New Orleans to decompress.
The conversation had gone to the hypothetical scenario wherein artificial general intelligence is highly centralized, and only one human commands it. To ensure good outcomes for the rest of the world, who should that human be?
It was the same question from Lord of the Rings. Who do you trust to wield great power? Who has the right set of virtues to wield the One Ring, artificial general intelligence, the CEO title, or other positions of great leverage? Some AI researchers were named, with justifications.
My answer was Galadriel.
She is a fictional character, but an illustrative thought experiment. Galadriel passes the test of the ring. When Frodo freely offers her the One Ring, she envisions a seductive future in which she is a worshipful queen (“I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night!”), but she resists. In a climactic moment, she rejects the offer. “I pass the test.”
Galadriel stands out in the sea of media. She walks on the razor’s edge between darkness and light. While having the desire to rule (or in more positive terms: to lead), she becomes a paragon of virtue. She is ambitious and seeks power— but she does not abuse it. She is also obsessed with goodness, although the LOTR universe plays with the idea that the total enforcement of goodness might be an evil in itself.
Most interestingly, she is female. Positive depictions of women who wield power well are few and far between. In fact, they are routinely negative. Ambitious women, such as Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare, Cruella de Vil in the 1960s 101 Dalmatians, and Mrs. Coulter in The Golden Compass, are more often than not deemed “evil” and “crazy.”
This post is about women wielding power in fiction. As my peers start taking leadership positions in an accelerating tech industry, we need to be examining our cultural perceptions of people in power more deeply than ever.
The ideas in this post will not be new to anyone who has studied some feminist theory, but in the context of Bay Area tech, they have high memetic alpha.
Media frequently depicts powerful women as “evil,” “crazy,” and “unstable.”
Books, TV, and movies are training data. They depict the collective unconscious.
My mind thinks in media more in real-life memories. Perhaps the dataset of media has more variance than the dataset of my real life. Archetypes are also useful compressions. Thinking in media may be more data-efficient than thinking in noisy real memories.
Media sculpts our perceptions of ourselves and others. This can be incredibly dangerous: one tech dude once compared one of my brilliant female startup friends to Bellatrix Lestrange. In reality, this friend has a kind heart and could not be further from the unhinged torturer, but there are not many salient data points of women wielding power who are not also evil and unstable. In this tech dude’s sparse dataset of powerful female archetypes, Bellatrix Lestrange was the closest matching vector.
Beyond Bellatrix, media’s track record does not improve. Media is constrained by Hollywood and publishing houses, whose gatekeepers are usually men. Powerful women are, more often than not, crazy, cruel, and mentally ill. In Shakespeare, Lady Macbeth’s ambition gets conflated with her “direst cruelty” and her soliloquies allude to OCD and anorexia. King Lear’s Goneril and Reagan ruthlessly beguile their father for his inheritance, while the youngest daughter, Cordelia, is glorified for her traditionally feminine trait of compassion. The pattern repeats in A Tale of Two Cities with the cruel revolutionary Madame Defarge, and the useless but idealized Lucie Manette.
Disney is full of cold and unhinged witches and queens: Snow White’s Evil Queen, Alice in Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, Little Mermaid’s Ursula, and Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent. 101 Dalmatians’ Cruella de Vil represents the threat of an economically empowered single woman. She wants to kill puppies, a metaphor for killing babies and destroying the nuclear family, in order to fuel her personal ambition of making a fur coat— a symbol of luxury and self-sufficiency. Harley Quinn’s “crazy girlfriend” role to the Joker in Suicide Squad is a parallel to Bellatrix Lestrange and Voldemort.
Mrs. Coulter from His Dark Materials’ is portrayed as a conniving, promiscuous, and unmotherly socialite, whose fox-fur coat, like Cruella’s, is supposed to be evidence for vanity. We forget that Mrs. Coulter is also a world-class research scientist, entrepreneur, politician, and author. Meanwhile, Lord Asriel, her scientific colleague and past partner, takes a romantic Paradise Lost archetype, a genuine revolutionary with "cool dad" vibes, despite arguably even more sociopathic behavior.
Daenerys Targaryen was once a decent positive example of a woman wielding power, until her infamous TV ending, in which the previously prudent military strategist suddenly “goes crazy” and burns down King’s Landing. Her arc from slave to insane despot has the subtext that women cannot handle power responsibly. Elizabeth Holmes, as conceived by the media, also follows this Icarus arc— ultimately deemed “too delusional” to wield power.
The patterns are strong:
Ambition often gets conflated with cruelty. (Lady Macbeth, Goneril, Reagan, Madame Defarge).
Fashion, especially fur coats, are signs of vanity and evil. (Cruella, Mrs. Coulter)
The woman is powerful, but too unhinged to be anything except a lieutenant to a powerful man, who gives her power more “order.” (Bellatrix Lestrange, Harley Quinn)
The woman achieves the pinnacle of power and then majorly fucks up. (Daenerys, Elizabeth Holmes)
Society does not seem to trust women with power. In this substack about Daenerys, the author gives this damning take:
“But here is what I know about women and power: Men fear powerful women, because they know that women have always had cause to fear powerful men. Men fear that women’s power will be violent, because they use their power to rape, assault, and beat us. Men fear that women’s power will be temperamental and despotic — that they will be forced to fear our every mood swing and obey our every irrational whim — because men have been raised to believe that their women should tend to them, cater to their whims, hang on the thread of their good graces. Men don’t fear “female power,” in the abstract. They fear being treated like women; they’re afraid that, when we win, they die. That when get the power, we’ll do the shoving, and it will hurt.”
We are thankfully seeing a slow cultural shift away from “evil” and “crazy” powerful women. In the 2014 revisionist Maleficent, Maleficent goes from evil witch cursing babies to a trauma survivor seeking accountability. The 1960s “devilish spinster” Cruella is light-years away from the 2022 Emma Stone Cruella, who is a cool 1970s London punk-rock revolutionary challenging the out-of-touch 1950s incumbents. (This video on Cruella’s evolution galaxy-brained me.) The latest His Dark Materials (2022) points out Lord Asriel’s abusive behavior, and gives Mrs. Coulter a redemption arc. Like Galadriel, Mrs. Coulter weaponizes her understanding of the dark side to benefit the light, and ultimately she rejects Metatron’s offer of infinite power, passing her own “test of the ring.”
Still, I argue that revisionist arcs for “evil” and “crazy” female characters don’t go far enough. Cruella, Maleficent, and Mrs. Coulter remain morally borderline characters, constantly battling their own “intrinsically evil” natures. I think their “innate cruelty” is a projection, reflecting society’s continued discomfort over women holding positions of power and leading others.
We see more radical takes bubbling up culture. Miley Cyrus subverts the meaning of “evil” in her song “Mother’s Daughter”: “Don't fuck with my freedom/ I came up to get me some / I'm nasty, I'm evil/ Must be something in the water/ Or that I'm my mother's daughter.” The graphic novel Monstress (2015) depicts a society with no men, opening the space for women have a greater range of emotions and roles, from violent despots to sage rulers.
I would love to see an even more radicalized wave of media, in which women comfortably wield positions of power in a variety of expressions. Lady Macbeth and Mrs. Coulter are the most due for bold reworkings. In an alternate universe, Lady Macbeth is a grand strategist who upends a weak king and unites a broken Scotland against England, while grieving the loss of her child.
Mrs. Coulter is especially dear to my heart; His Dark Materials was a childhood favorite and tour-de-force dealing with themes of science, faith, and religion. A new version of her story would highlight details from canon that were previously glanced over. She would be at the forefront of the plot as a visionary scientist and author who writes her breakout work, The Bronze Clocks of Benin, at age nineteen. She trains as a theoretical physicist (in Pullman’s world, theologian), investigating the Rusakov field, and develops a theory around the nature of reality. To conduct experiments that prove the Rusakov field, she partners with the Magisterium and fundraises for her research company, whose DeepMind-style thesis is metaphysical transcendence. The rewriting explores the complexities of being female in STEM in an empowering way, like The Queen’s Gambit. This is the story I want to watch on TV— not some creepy monkey demonization nonsense.
We can only wield power well without media distortions
“If artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a centralized and powerful technology, who would you trust to handle it responsibly?”
Circling back to Galadriel, we see that she is actually an imperfect answer. The Lord of the Rings suggests that her call to lead is the unnatural desire to dominate others, when in reality, she may indeed simply be the wisest person to lead Middle Earth. Gandalf, in contrast, also leads hobbits and men, but he is not portrayed as “power-hungry.”
Galadriel is still a borderline character. From an ethics and philosophy perspective, her dance between dark and light is wonderfully complex; from a feminist perspective, she could be radicalized even further.
What would Galadriel do with AGI? Would she turn into the “beautiful and terrible” queen? Maybe not. Maybe she is the right person.
In the context of my own life, my peers are taking technical leadership positions in the Bay Area. While tech Bay Area is the land of material (and often spiritual) ambition, moral and ethical ambition are given disproportionally little focus. This troubles me— our technical leaders must prioritize moral virtue in both their personal and professional lives, given their positions of leverage. I don’t think we can ever examine the nature of power deeply enough. I am preparing a world in which women can become AI leaders without risk of being called “evil” or “crazy” due to societal biases— and coming up short with cultural role models.
Wielding power well means leaving behind the warped mirror of media. Yes, its distortions are shaped by gender— but there may also be something more general play. Villainizing powerful women in media may simply be a subset of villainizing anyone who challenges the status quo, not just women. This explains the evil genius archetype (e.g. Light Yagami, Syndrome, Thanos). After all, media is optimized for the average joe American; anyone who disrupts the status quo is to be feared. The status quo happens to suck more for women than it does to men, with a narrower set of acceptable roles. If challenging the system is bad, then any woman who does not subscribe to the status quo is automatically “crazy” and “evil.”
The question remains of how to wield power well at all— such as the hard work of “cultivating virtue,” the real-life sins from Dante’s Inferno, and ethical systems across cultures— but that is the content of a future post.