The Predators and Their Dikes

There is a scene in contemporary politics that repeats itself in a loop, across vastly different latitudes. A leader announces a dramatic decision. Institutions creak. Experts protest. And then, often, nothing happens — or almost nothing. The decision passes, modified, slowed down, sometimes blocked. The institutions hold, or they don’t. Giuliano da Empoli has decided to write a book about this.

The Hour of the Predators is not a manual of demonology. It is an attempt to understand a mode of power that has become dominant: governing through shock rather than deliberation, through speed rather than legitimacy, through visible performance rather than invisible institution. What da Empoli calls power through shock.

The Essentials

  • Da Empoli diagnoses a mode of governance founded on performance and permanent shock, amplified by platform algorithms, which short-circuits classical institutional temporalities.
  • The author refuses catastrophism: the book also describes the counterpowers that have held — judges, regulators, mayors — and the conditions that allowed them to resist.
  • The central tension of the book opposes two readings of legitimacy: the invisible and slow one that Pierre Rosanvallon describes in his work on institutions, and the instantaneous and spectacular one that predators manufacture in the algorithmic flow.
  • The prospective stakes are generational: the counterpowers that hold today are carried by generations formed before the attentional revolution. The question of their renewal remains open.

Who Is Giuliano da Empoli

Da Empoli is a singular figure in European political thought. A former advisor to Matteo Renzi in the Italian government, he founded the consulting firm Volta in Brussels after leaving the political sphere. His novel The Engineers of Chaos (2019) revealed him to a wider audience as an analyst of Populism 2.0, capable of explaining how strategists like Steve Bannon or Vladislav Surkov had transformed disorder into a political weapon. The Hour of the Predators is its natural sequel, less analytical than the novel, more philosophical: it is no longer simply about describing the engineers, but about examining what they have built — and what can still resist them.

The Thesis: Governing Through Shock

Da Empoli starts from an empirical observation. The leaders he studies — he has in mind profiles as different as Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, or certain Latin American leaders — do not have the same program but share the same technique. They govern through saturation. One decision chases another before the previous one can be absorbed by the deliberative body. Institutions, whose strength rests precisely on the long term, on procedures, on the patient repetition of controls, find themselves structurally falling behind.

The mechanism is not new. What has intensified it, according to da Empoli, is the conjunction with digital platforms. Social media algorithms do not distribute information: they distribute emotion. Shock, anger, fear, indignation — this is what circulates and amplifies. A leader who governs through shock is in perfect symbiosis with a technical infrastructure designed to maximize short-term emotional engagement.

This is where da Empoli converges, without always naming it, with a fundamental debate on democratic legitimacy. Pierre Rosanvallon, in his work on counter-democracy and invisible institutions, had shown that democracy does not live only in voting: it lives in intermediate bodies, regulators, constitutional courts, local authorities, all that patient institutional fabric that ensures the law applies even when the government changes. This fabric is slow by design. Its slowness is its strength — and its vulnerability.

The spectacular performance that da Empoli describes is precisely what short-circuits this slowness. When a presidential decision is announced live on a platform, it exists in public space before it exists in legal space. The time between announcement and judicial review is political time that the leader occupies alone. The institutions, meanwhile, have not yet spoken.

What Algorithms Do to Politics

There is a passage in the book one does not forget. Da Empoli describes a crisis room in a Western government, a few hours after a dramatic presidential announcement. Advisors wonder: should we counter-communicate? Should we explain? And while they deliberate, the subject has already changed on social networks. The leader has already launched the next salvo. Deliberation, in this space, is a luxury the institution can no longer afford.

This is not a metaphor. Work in political science, particularly that of the team at Stanford University around the Virality Project platform, has documented how the speed of diffusion of information — true or false — tends to precede the institutions’ capacity to verify it. It is not technology that created the predators, da Empoli notes carefully. But it has provided them with a multiplier that no previous generation possessed.

This observation resonates with a reading we did here of Acemoglu and Johnson, who show that technology redistributes its gains only if you force it to. Da Empoli arrives at a similar conclusion by another route: technology does not create new types of power, it amplifies those that exist. And predatory powers have existed for a long time.

The Dikes That Hold

This is where the book surprises, and where it escapes the genre of indictment. Da Empoli devotes a substantial part of his essay to counterpowers that have functioned. Not as consolation, but as data.

He cites specific examples. A federal American judge who suspends a presidential immigration decree within hours, on grounds of unconstitutionality, forcing a revision. A European regulator who refuses to endorse a technological merger despite political pressure. A major city mayor who refuses to implement a national directive, relying on local prerogatives to create a different legal space. These examples are not anecdotal according to da Empoli: they reveal an institutional architecture that, where it has been carefully built over several decades, still resists.

The distinction the book makes is important. The institutions that have held are those whose independence does not rest on the will of the government in place, but on texts, fixed mandates, appointment procedures that span alternations of power. The institutions that have ceded are, in most cases, those whose independence was conventional rather than structural — those that held because successive governments had chosen to respect them, not because they could not do otherwise.

This is a distinction that Rosanvallon would formulate thus: procedural legitimacy is fragile when it rests only on tradition. It holds when it rests on institutionalization. Da Empoli, in his own way, confirms this reading through examples.

The Blind Spot: Who Trains Tomorrow’s Guardians?

The book has a blind spot, and da Empoli is honest enough not to entirely conceal it. The judges who resisted, the regulators who held — they were trained in another world. Their institutional reflexes, their attachment to procedures, their ability to ignore immediate political pressure: all of this was built in decades prior to the attentional revolution.

The question da Empoli poses without quite answering it is one of transmission. The young legal professionals and civil servants entering institutions today do so after twenty years of platforms, spectacular politics, normalization of shock. Have they internalized the same reflexes? Is institutional culture transmitted by osmosis, or do deliberate mechanisms of training and professional socialization need to be put in place?

Available data on the attractiveness of public service in Western democracies are not reassuring. In France, the Directorate General for Administration and Civil Service documents not a decline in the absolute number of candidates for category A civil service exams, but a marked drop in their selectivity: from 8.9 candidates per admitted candidate in 2010 to 4.3 in 2023, a sign that these exams attract proportionally fewer applicants relative to open positions. The underlying trend is confirmed by an overall decline of approximately 54% in candidates taking all external civil service exams between 2007 and 2021, across all divisions. In the United States, several reports signal recruitment difficulties in a growing number of regulatory agencies, at the precise moment when their independence is being contested. It is no coincidence that predators, when they want to weaken an institution, begin by discouraging vocations to it.

This is the generational dimension that The Hour of the Predators opens without closing. The dikes hold today, but they hold in part because some of their guardians have an institutional ethos forged before the age of predators. The real prospective question is not whether institutions resist the next shock. It is whether they will have managed to reproduce themselves, to recruit, to train guardians who will hold the next one.

What da Empoli Does Not Settle — and Why That Is Right

There is an intellectual tension in the book between two possible readings of the present moment. The first, pessimistic, is that the mode of power through shock is winning structurally — that predators learn faster than institutions, that they capitalize on each victory to weaken surviving counterpowers. The second, more open, is that institutionalized democracies have already survived ordeals at least as severe, and that their resilience rests precisely on the fact that it is not spontaneous but inscribed in law.

Da Empoli does not settle the matter. This is, in my view, his most courageous choice. To settle it would be either catastrophism or unwarranted optimism. The empirical reality is that we observe both dynamics simultaneously: institutions yielding here, counterpowers holding there. The geographic distribution is not random — it corresponds quite well to the solidity of legal foundations and the age of institutional cultures.

This refusal to conclude reminds us of a useful reading to juxtapose: the concentration of American media that we have documented here — a phenomenon that follows the same logic that da Empoli describes, shock and speed progressively replacing deliberation, but in the media field rather than the political one. The two processes feed each other mutually, and neither appears inevitable.

Why Read This Book

The Hour of the Predators is useful for two precise reasons. First, it offers a coherent conceptual framework for understanding phenomena that current events often present as disparate — Trump, Modi, Milei, Orbán — by showing what unites them beyond their respective programs: the same technique of power, the same exploitation of temporality. Second, and this is less expected, it is empirically honest about resistances. Da Empoli does not seek to terrify his reader. He seeks to give him the instruments to identify what holds and why.

For a reader already familiar with Rosanvallon on legitimacy, or with Acemoglu and Johnson on technological capture of power, this book is a bridge between two literatures that rarely speak to each other. It synthesizes institutional reflection and analysis of digital dynamics without reducing one to the other.

For a less familiar reader, it is an accessible entry into an essential debate: how democracies defend themselves concretely when power decides to play against the rules of the game. Da Empoli’s answer is not reassuring. It is not despairing either. It says: some dikes hold, others do not, and the difference is not a matter of chance.

This may be the most accurate definition of lucid optimism applied to institutions.

Title: The Hour of the Predators

Author: Giuliano da Empoli

Publisher: Gallimard

Date of Publication: April 2025

Original Title: L’Heure des prédateurs

Sources

  1. Presentation of L’Heure des prédateurs, Actu Littéraire
  2. Directorate General for Administration and Civil Service — data on category A civil service exams (2010-2023)
  3. Office of Personnel Management — reports on recruitment in American federal agencies
  4. Rosanvallon, Pierre — Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, Seuil, 2006
  5. Da Empoli, Giuliano — The Engineers of Chaos, JC Lattès, 2019
  6. Wikipedia EN – Giuliano da Empoli (biography)
  7. Wikipedia FR – Les Ingénieurs du chaos (date and nature of the work)
  8. Le Devoir – review of L’Heure des prédateurs (publication date 2025)
  9. Wikipedia FR – La Contre-démocratie (Rosanvallon, Seuil, 2006)
  10. Stanford Cyber Policy Center – Virality Project
  11. Acteurs Publics – DGAFP Report 2025 (category A exams)
  12. Amazon / ToutEconomie – Acemoglu & Johnson, Power and Progress