There’s a growing sense that the whole capitalist project is running on fumes. For decades, it’s been a system built on one simple rule: endless growth. But what happens when it runs out of road? It has already consumed new lands, markets, and even the quiet personal spaces of our attention. Think of it like a shark that must constantly swim forward to breathe, and it has finally hit the wall of the aquarium. The frantic, desperate thrashing we’re seeing in our politics and society? That’s the crisis.
For the last forty-odd years, the dominant philosophy steering our world has been Neoliberalism. Stripped to its bare bones, it’s a simple creed: privatise anything that isn’t nailed down, deregulate in the name of ‘freedom’, and chase economic growth as if it were the only god worth worshipping. What has become chillingly clear is that the current lurch towards authoritarianism isn’t a strange detour or a bug in the system; it’s the next logical feature. Technofascism isn’t some bizarre alternative to neoliberalism; it is its terrifying, inevitable endgame. It is emerging as a ‘last-ditch effort’ to rescue a system in terminal crisis, and the price of that rescue is democracy itself.
Before you can build such a machine, you need a blueprint. The blueprint for this new form of control is a set of extreme ideas that’d be laughable if their proponents weren’t sitting on mountains of cash and power. At the heart of a gloomy-sounding gentlemen’s club of philosophies, which includes Neo-Reactionism (or NRx), the Dark Enlightenment, and Accelerationism, is a deep, abiding, and utterly sincere contempt for the very idea of liberal democracy. They see it as a messy, sentimental, and ‘incredibly inefficient’ relic, a ‘failed experiment’ that just gets in the way of what they consider real progress.
This isn’t just a passing grumble about politicians. It’s a root-and-branch rejection of the last few centuries of political thought. Their utopia is a society restructured as a hyper-efficient tech start-up, helmed by a god-like ‘CEO-autocrat’. This genius-leader, naturally drawn from their own ranks, would be free to enact his grand vision without being bothered by tedious things like elections or civil liberties. It’s an idea born of staggering arrogance, a belief that a handful of men from Silicon Valley are so uniquely brilliant that they alone should be calling the shots.
This thinking didn’t spring from nowhere. Its strange prophets include figures like Curtis Yarvin, a blogger who spins academic-sounding blather that tells billionaires their immense power is not just deserved but necessary. It’s a philosophy that offers a convenient, pseudo-intellectual justification for greed and bigotry, framing them as signs that one is ‘red-pilled’, an enlightened soul who can see through the progressive charade. This worldview leads directly to a crucial pillar of technofascism: the active rejection of history and expertise. This mindset is captured in the terrifying nonchalance of a Google executive who declared, ‘I don’t even know why we study history… what already happened doesn’t really matter.’ This isn’t just ignorance; it’s a strategic necessity. To build their imagined future, they must demolish the guardrails of historical lessons that warn us about fascism and teach us the value of human rights. They declare war on the ‘ivory tower’ and the ‘credentialed expert’ because a population that respects knowledge will see their project for the dangerous fantasy it is.
But an ideology, no matter how extreme, remains hot air until it is forged into something tangible. The next chapter of this story is about how that strange, anti-democratic philosophy was hammered into actual, working tools of control. A prime case study is the company Palantir. It is the perfect, chilling expression of its founder Peter Thiel’s desire to ‘unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people.’ This company did not accidentally fall into government work; it was built from its inception to serve the state. Its primary revenue streams are not ordinary consumers, but the most powerful and secretive parts of government: the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. It embodies the new ‘public-private partnership’, where the lines between a corporation and the state’s security apparatus are erased entirely.
The product of this unholy union is a global software of oppression. At home, Palantir was awarded a contract to create a tool for ICE to ‘surveil, track, profile and ultimately deport undocumented migrants,’ turning high-minded talk of ‘inefficiency’ into the ugly reality of families being torn apart. This same machinery of control is then exported abroad, where the company becomes a key player in the new defence industrial base. Its systems are deployed by militaries around the globe, and nowhere is this more terrifyingly apparent than in conflicts like the one in Gaza. There, occupied territories have become a digital laboratory where AI-powered targeting systems, enabled by companies within this ecosystem, are battle-tested with brutal efficiency. The line between a software company and an arms dealer is not just blurred; it is erased. This is the ultimate expression of the public-private partnership: the privatisation of war itself, waged through algorithms and data streams, where conflict zones become the ultimate testing ground.
This architecture of control, however, is not just aimed outward at state-defined enemies; it is turned inward, against the foundational power of an organised populace: the rights of workers. Technofascism, like its historical predecessors, understands that to dominate a society, you must first break its collective spirit. There’s a chilling historical echo here; the very first groups targeted by the Nazis were communists, socialists, and trade unionists. They were targeted first because organised labour is a centre of collective power that stands in opposition to total authority. Today, this assault is cloaked in the language of ‘disruption’. The gig economy, championed by Silicon Valley, has systematically shattered stable employment in entire industries, replacing it with a precarious workforce of atomised individuals who are cheaper, more disposable, and crucially, harder to organise. This attack on present-day labour is just a prelude to their ultimate goal: the stated desire to ‘liberate capital from labor for good.’ The ‘mad rush’ to develop AI is, at its core, a rush to create a future where the vast majority of humanity is rendered economically irrelevant and therefore politically powerless.
The human cost of this vision is already being paid. A new global caste system is emerging, starkly illustrated by OpenAI. While AI researchers in California enjoy ‘million-dollar compensation packages,’ Kenyan data workers are paid a ‘few bucks an hour’ to be ‘deeply psychologically traumatised’ by the hateful content they must filter. This is not an oversight; it is a calculated feature of what can only be called the ‘logic of Empire’, a modern colonialism where the human cost is outsourced and rendered invisible. This calculated contempt for human dignity is mirrored in their treatment of the planet itself. The environmental price tag for the AI boom is staggering: data centres with the energy footprint of entire states, propped up by coal plants and methane turbines. A single Google facility in water-scarce Chile planned to use a thousand times more fresh water than the local community. This isn’t an unfortunate side effect; it’s the logical outcome of an ideology that sees the natural world as an obstacle to be conquered or a flawed planet to be escaped. The fantasy of colonising Mars is the ultimate expression of this: a lifeboat for billionaires, built on the premise that they have the right to destroy our only home in the name of their own ‘progress’.
Having built this formidable corporate engine, the final, crucial act is to seize the levers of political power itself. While it is tempting to see this as the work of one particular political tribe, embodied by a figure like Donald Trump acting as a ‘figurehead’ who normalises the unthinkable, the reality is now far more insidious. The ideology has become so pervasive that it has captured the entire political establishment.
Consider this: after years of opposing Tory-led Freeports, Keir Starmer’s Labour government announces the creation of ‘AI Growth Zones’—digital versions of the same deregulated havens, designed explicitly for Big Tech. The project has become bipartisan. The state’s role is no longer to regulate these powerful entities, but to actively carve out legal exceptions for them. This move is mirrored on the global stage, where both the UK and US refuse to sign an EU-led AI safety treaty. The reasoning offered is a masterclass in technofascist rhetoric. US Vice President JD Vance, a direct protégé of Peter Thiel, warns that regulation could “kill a transformative industry,” echoing the Silicon Valley line that democracy is a drag on innovation. Meanwhile, the UK spokesperson deflects, citing concerns over “national security,” the classic justification for bypassing democratic oversight to protect the interests of the state and its corporate security partners.
This quiet, administrative capture of the state is, in many ways, more dangerous than a loud revolution. It doesn’t require a strongman; it can be implemented by polished, ‘sensible’ leaders who present it as pragmatic and inevitable. The strategy for taking power is no longer just about a chaotic ‘flood the zone with shit’ campaign; it’s also about policy papers, bipartisan agreements, and the slow, methodical erosion of regulatory power.
This is where the abstract horror becomes horrifyingly, tangibly real. The tools built by Palantir are actively used to facilitate the ‘cruel deportations’ of real people, a process that is only set to accelerate now that governments are creating bespoke legal zones for such technology. The AI systems built on the backs of traumatised workers are poised to eliminate the jobs of artists and writers. The political chaos deliberately sown online spills out into real-world violence and division. This is the strategy in action, where the combination of extremist ideology, corporate power, and a captured political class results in devastating human consequences.
When you line it all up, the narrative is stark and clear. First, you have the strange, elitist philosophy, born of ego and a deep-seated contempt for ordinary people. This ideology then builds the corporate weapons to enforce its vision. And finally, these weapons are handed to a political class, across the spectrum, to dismantle democracy from the inside. This entire project is fuelled by a desperate attempt to keep the wheels on a capitalist system that has run out of options and is now cannibalising its own host society to survive.
And here’s the kicker, the final, bitter irony that we must sit with. An ideology that built its brand by screaming from the rooftops about ‘freedom’, individualism, and the power of the ‘free market’ has, in the end, produced the most sophisticated and all-encompassing tools of control and oppression humanity has ever seen.
It’s a grim picture, but there are no two ways about it. But this is precisely where our own values of resilience, empathy, and grounded and courageous optimism must come into play. The first, most crucial act of resistance is simply to see this process clearly, to understand it for what it is. to engage in what the ancient Greeks called an apocalypse, not an end-of-the-world event but a lifting of the veil, a revelation.
Seeing the game is the first step to refusing to play it, especially now that all the major political teams are on the same side. It’s the moment we can say, ‘No, thank you.’ It’s the moment we choose to slow down, to log off from their manufactured chaos, and to reconnect with the real, tangible world around us. It’s the choice to value the very things their ideology seeks to crush: kindness, community, creativity, and the simple, profound magic of human connection. Facing this reality takes courage, but doesn’t have to lead to despair. It can be the catalyst that reminds us what is truly worth fighting for. And that, in itself, in a world of bipartisan consensus, is the most powerful and hopeful place to start.
Quentin Budworth 