We are living through a second flood. The first, chronicled by Walter Benjamin, was a rising tide of mechanical reproduction that stripped the artwork of its unique presence in time and space, its ritual weight. What we face now is a deluge of a different order, not the copying of an original, but the generation of the ostensibly original itself. This synthetic reproducibility, instant and infinite, does not so much wash away the aura of the artwork as dissolve the very ground from which aura once grew. For the artist, this marks a profound reordering, a passage through a great filter that demands a reckoning with why creation matters in a world saturated with the facsimile of creation.
The crisis is, at its heart, an economic one, born from the final victory of exhibition value over all else. Benjamin saw how reproduction prised art from the domain of ritual, making it a political, exhibitable object. AI hyper-production perfects this shift, creating a universe of content whose sole purpose is to be displayed, circulated, and consumed, utterly detached from any ritual of human making. When ten thousand competent images can be summoned to fill a website’s empty corners, the market value of such functional work collapses. The commercial artist is stranded, their skill rendered not scarce but superfluous in a marketplace where the exhibitable object has been liberated from the cost of its production.
This leads to the deafening, companion problem: the drowning-out effect. If everything can be exhibited, then nothing is seen. The channels of distribution become clogged with a spectral, ceaseless tide, a ‘slop’ of algorithmic potential. Discovery becomes a lottery. In this storm of accessibility, the scarce resource is no longer the means of production, but attention. And attention, in such a climate, refuses to be captured on the mass scale that the logic of exhibition value demands; it must be cultivated in the intimate, shadowed spaces the floodlight cannot reach.
Consequently, the artist’s identity fractures and reassembles. The role shifts from creator to curator, editor, and context-engineer. If the machine handles the ‘how,’ the human value retreats into the realms of conception, discernment, and judgement. The artistic self becomes a more ghostly thing, defined less by the manual trace and more by the authority of selection and the narrative woven around the chosen fragment. For some, this is a liberation from tradition’s heavy hand; for others, it feels like the final severance of that unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be, that once clung to the hand-wrought object.
This forced evolution makes brutally clear a distinction that has long been blurred: the split between ‘content’ and ‘art.’ ‘Content’ is the pure, polished exhibit. It is information, filler, ornament, the fulfilment of a demand. For this, the synthetic process is peerless. ‘Art,’ however, must now be defined by what it stubbornly retains or reclaims. It must be an act where the process and the human context are the irreducible core, where the value cannot be extracted from the texture of its making. Its purpose shifts from exhibition back towards a new kind of ritual, not of cult, but of verifiable human connection. The artist must now choose which master they serve.
The only viable path, therefore, is a strategic retreat to the domains presence in time and space still governs. Since the object alone is forever suspect, value must be painstakingly rebuilt around radical context and provenance. The aura must be consciously, authentically reconstructed. This becomes the artist’s new, urgent work.
The story of the object’s making is now its last line of defence. The narrative, the intention, the struggle, the trace of the human journey, ceases to be a mere accompaniment and becomes the primary text. Proof of origin becomes a sacred credential. As a latter-day witness to this crisis noted, the only territory where authenticity can now be assured is “in the room with the person who made the thing.” The live performance, the studio visit, the act of co-creation: these are no longer secondary events but the central, unassailable offering. Here, art reclaims its here and now, its witnessable authenticity in a shared moment that no algorithm can simulate or inhabit.
The Unmaking of the Unique
Thus, hyper-production functions as a great filter. It mercilessly commoditises the exhibit, washing away the economic model of the last century. In doing so, it forces a terrible, clarifying question upon every practitioner: what can you anchor your work to that is beyond the reach of synthetic reproduction?
The emerging responses are maps of this new terrain. Some become context engineers, building immersive narratives where the work is a relic of a true human story. Others become synthesist collaborators, directing the machine with a voice of defiantly human taste. A faction turns resolutely physical, seeking refuge in the stubborn, three-dimensional ‘thingness’ that defies flawless digital transference. Yet others become architects of experience, crafting frameworks for interaction where the art is the fleeting, collective moment itself. And many will retreat to cultivate a deep niche, a dedicated community for whom the human trace is the only currency that holds value.
The flood will not cease. The exhibition value of the world will be met, and exceeded, by synthetic means. But this crisis, by shattering the professionalised model, may ironically clear the way for a return to art’s first principles: not as a commodity for distribution, but as a medium for human connection, a testament of presence, and a ritual of shared meaning. The future of art lies not in battling the currents of reproduction, but in learning to build arks, vessels of witnessed, authentic experience that can navigate the vast and glittering, but ultimately hollow, sea of the endlessly exhibitable.
We are living in the parenthesis between epochs. Writing from a Fascist prison cell, Antonio Gramsci described this liminal space with chilling foresight: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Nearly a century later, his observation feels unnervingly prescient. The world is suspended in what can be understood as a global interregnum—an extended, unsettled transition in which familiar structures of governance, economics and social order are crumbling, while coherent replacements remain only partially formed, visible more as glimpses than blueprints.
The Morbid Symptoms of Our Time
Look around. The symptoms emerge not as isolated crises, but as overlapping polycrises—a chorus of systemic failures. The neoliberal order that defined the late 20th century stutters and stalls, its promise of endless growth colliding with planetary limits and deepening inequality. In its weakening, we witness the rise of what Gramsci might have called our era’s “monsters”: authoritarianism in democratic clothing, xenophobic populism feeding on economic anxiety, and technological shifts that pledge liberation while threatening new forms of control.
Geopolitically, the world operates with multiplying centres of gravity. The post-war liberal international order—once the sun around which global politics revolved—now loses its pull. We see this in the fraying of long-standing alliances, the return of great-power tensions many thought were historical relics, and conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza that expose the limits of existing diplomatic mechanisms. The world is not yet multipolar, but it is increasingly nonpolar—a dangerous limbo where old rules no longer hold and new ones remain unwritten.
New Powers and the Vacuum They Fill
Into this vacuum step unlikely actors. Technology titans—today’s equivalent of mercenary captains—wield influence comparable to nation-states, shaping policy and public discourse with little accountability. Their platforms become our public squares; their algorithms, the invisible hands guiding economies and elections. This shift in power echoes historical interregnums, where economic forces redraw political maps long before new structures take shape.
At the same time, the environmental foundations of our civilisation show alarming fractures. Climate change embodies the ultimate polycrisis—ecological, economic, political and existential all at once. It acts as both consequence and accelerator of our interregnum, revealing how the old growth model now feeds on its own collapse.
The Spectrum of Possible Futures
Where does this lead? Several paths branch from our present uncertainty:
The Authoritarian Resolution: Democratic norms erode further, replaced by digital surveillance states and corporate-backed strongmen offering stability in exchange for freedom.
The Progressive Transformation: A deliberate, difficult turn toward regenerative economics, participatory democracy and global cooperation centred on sustainability and equity.
The Chaotic Fragmentation: Current trends deepen into systemic failure—more collapsed states, global trade splintered into hostile blocs, climate displacement triggering unprecedented crises.
The Techno-Oligarchic Horizon: Power consolidates not in nations but in corporate entities controlling essential technologies, from AI to bioengineering, creating a digital feudalism.
Navigating the In-Between
What the idea of interregnum emphasises is agency. This is not just something happening to us; it is a space we inhabit and can shape. The “morbid symptoms” are warnings, not inevitabilities.
Meaningful response means acting on multiple levels at once:
Politically, we must reinvent multilateralism for a fragmented world—creating spaces for dialogue that recognise new power realities without abandoning human rights.
Economically, we need to build resilience—localising essential supplies while sustaining global cooperation, testing post-growth models that do not equate progress with extraction.
Technologically, we must set ethical boundaries before capability outruns governance, especially with artificial general intelligence approaching as either a vital tool or an existential risk.
Ecologically, the task is a just transition—moving rapidly beyond fossil fuels while supporting communities disrupted by both climate impacts and economic change.
Labour Pains of What Comes Next
Perhaps the hardest part of living through an interregnum is psychological. We are conditioned to expect linear progress or cyclical return, not this prolonged disorientation. The temptation is to retreat into nostalgia for a simpler past or to surrender to despair.
And yet history suggests these between-times, however painful, are also spaces of remarkable creativity. The Renaissance emerged from medieval crisis. The modern international system was born from world war’s ashes. The old must decay enough to make room for the new.
Our task, then, is not to wish the interregnum away, but to move through it with clear sight and steady will. To help birth the “new” waiting to emerge—systems centred on ecological renewal rather than extraction, on fair distribution rather than accumulation, on shared governance rather than concentrated power.
The parenthesis will close. What follows depends profoundly on what we choose to nurture in this uncertain, fertile and dangerous in-between. The interregnum is not our destination, but our crucible. What emerges from it will be shaped by what we value, whom we stand with and the courage we find in this twilight of an old world.
We were all raised on stories of obvious tyranny. We were taught to look for the book burnings and the public shamings. We were told to listen for the sound of the cage door slamming shut. But what happens when the cage has no bars? What happens when the prison isn’t a place, but a state of mind, meticulously constructed to feel like freedom?
This is the world of informational autocracy. It’s a far slicker, more sophisticated beast than the clumsy dictatorships of the last century. It doesn’t need to rule by fear when it can rule by manufactured consent. This new model of power doesn’t abolish elections; it mimics them, ensuring the outcome is a foregone conclusion while maintaining a veneer of legitimacy. It doesn’t ban the free press; it buys it, starves it of advertising, or floods the zone with so much state-sponsored noise that the truth is simply drowned out. Look at Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, or Erdoğan’s Turkey. The playbook is the same: project an image of competence and stability, paint all opposition as chaotic or treacherous, and ensure the majority of the public never gets a clear enough signal to know the difference. The primary goal is not to terrorise the population, but to convince them. And the engine room of this entire operation is the device in your pocket.
Enter the social media platform: the greatest accelerator of informational autocracy ever invented. These systems are not neutral tools; they are battlegrounds designed for a very specific kind of warfare. Their algorithms, built not for truth but for traffic, are perfectly tuned to reward the divisive, the sensational, and the outrageous. It’s no accident that, on platforms like X, false political stories are proven to spread 70% faster than the truth. Outrage is profitable. Division drives engagement. In this environment, an autocrat’s propaganda isn’t just another post—it’s premium fuel for a machine designed to run on it. We are not just the audience; we are the unwitting foot soldiers, sharing and amplifying narratives that fracture our own societies. But this battle isn’t just for the hearts and minds of the masses. There’s a more specific, more strategic target in its sights.
Every society has an “informed elite”—that small but crucial group of journalists, academics, professionals, and artists who have the access and the training to see through the noise. In the old world, an autocrat had to arrest or exile them. In the new world, the strategy is far more subtle. Social media allows the regime to monitor them, identifying dissenters for a quiet campaign of shadow-banning, legal threats, or professional exclusion. Even more effectively, it allows them to be co-opted. A slice of the elite is turned into well-paid influencers, their credibility used to launder regime propaganda. The very tool that could expand the ranks of the informed by democratizing information also shatters their authority, turning public discourse into a chaotic free-for-all where a verified expert has the same algorithmic weight as a state-funded troll farm.
It leaves us in the crossfire of a silent, borderless war. The tactics perfected in Moscow and Beijing are now exported globally, seeping into the bedrock of democracies. This is the slow poison: the erosion of public trust, the exhaustion of civic life, and the creeping sense that objective truth no longer exists. This is the ultimate goal. The aim isn’t just to win an argument; it’s to create an environment where the very idea of a shared reality seems naive. It is to foster a deep, weary cynicism that leads to democratic fatigue, where we disengage not because we are forced to, but because we are too tired to continue.
So, what is the way out? It is not to find a mythical, uncompromised platform or to wait for a single heroic leader. The resistance begins with a conscious and deliberate act of what can only be called informational hygiene. It starts with us. We must become fierce curators of our own information, deliberately seeking out and paying for quality, independent journalism. We must take our conversations offline and into the real world, rebuilding the connective tissue of society in our own communities. And above all, we must build our own resilience as if it were armour. They are counting on our burnout. An exhausted, cynical public is their ideal political landscape.
This is the work. It is not glamorous. It is not easy. But it is real. The most radical act in an age of quiet persuasion is a loud and curious mind. Keep yours sharp. Keep it open. And never, ever let them convince you to close it.
The Fourth World is Coming. It’s Just Not What You Think.
What if the biggest migration in human history isn’t human at all? There’s a theory doing the rounds that frames the AI revolution as just that: an “unlimited, high-IQ mass migration from the fourth world.” It argues we’re witnessing the arrival of a perfect labour force—smarter than average, infinitely scalable, and working for pennies, with none of the messy human needs for housing or cultural integration. It’s a powerful idea that cuts through the jargon, but this perfect story has a fatal flaw.
The biggest lie the theory tells is one of simple replacement. It wants you to believe AI is an immigrant coming only to take your job, but this ignores the more powerful reality of AI as a collaborator. Think of a doctor using an AI to diagnose scans with a level of accuracy no human could achieve alone; the AI isn’t replacing the doctor, it’s making them better. The data shows that while millions of jobs will vanish, even more will be created, meaning the future isn’t about simple replacement, but something far more complex.
If the first mistake is economic, the second is pure Hollywood fantasy. To keep you distracted, they sell you a story about a robot apocalypse, warning that AI will “enslave and kill us all” by 2045. Frankly, this sort of talk doesn’t help. Instead of panicking, we should be focused on the very real and serious work of AI alignment right now, preventing advanced systems from developing dangerous behaviours. The focus on a fantasy villain is distracting us from the real monster already in the machine.
That monster has a name: bias. The theory celebrates AI’s “cultural neutrality,” but this is perhaps its most dangerous lie. An AI is not neutral; it is trained on the vast, messy, and deeply prejudiced dataset of human history, and without careful oversight, it will simply amplify those flaws. We already see this in AI-driven hiring and lending algorithms that perpetuate discrimination. A world run by biased AI doesn’t just automate jobs; it automates injustice.
This automated injustice isn’t a bug; it’s a feature of the system’s core philosophy. The Silicon Valley credo of ‘move fast and break things’ has always been sold as a mark of disruptive genius, but we must be clear about what they actually intend to ‘break’: labour laws, social cohesion, and ethical standards are all just friction to be optimised away. This isn’t theoretical; these same tech giants are now demanding further deregulation here in the UK, arguing that our rules are what’s slowing down their ‘progress’. They see our laws not as protections for the public, but as bugs to be patched out of the system, and they have found a government that seems dangerously willing to listen.
But while our own government seems willing to listen to this reckless philosophy, the rest of the world is building a defence. This isn’t a problem without a solution; it’s a problem with a solution they hope you’ll ignore. UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence is the world’s first global standard on the subject—a human-centric rulebook built on core values like fairness, inclusivity, transparency, and the non-negotiable principle that a human must always be in control. It proves that a different path is possible, which means the tech giants have made one last, classic mistake.
They have assumed AI is migrating into a world without rules. It’s not. It’s migrating into a world of laws, unions, and public opinion, where international bodies and national governments are already waking up. This isn’t an unstoppable force of nature that we are powerless to resist; it is a technology that can, and must, be shaped by democratic governance. This means we still have a say in how this story ends.
So, where does this leave us? The “fourth world migration” is a brilliant, provocative warning, but it’s a poor map for the road ahead. Our job isn’t to build walls to halt this migration, but to set the terms of its arrival. We have to steer it with ethical frameworks, ground it with sensible regulation, and harness it for human collaboration, not just corporate profit. The question is no longer if it’s coming, but who will write the terms of its arrival.
Core Idea: A Polycrisis is an event where multiple, distinct crises interact in a way that the overall impact is far greater than the mere sum of each crisis’s individual effects. The crises are interconnected and exacerbate one another, creating a cascading failure across systems.
Key Characteristics:
Multiple, Separate Crises: It begins with several identifiable crises (e.g., an energy crisis, a food crisis, a geopolitical crisis).
Synergistic Interaction: These crises are not happening in isolation. They are interconnected, so that one crisis worsens another.
Cascading Effects: A shock in one system (like finance) triggers failures in another (like supply chains), which then impacts a third (like political stability).
Systemic Nature: The problem is not the individual crises themselves, but the dysfunctional connections between the systems they inhabit.
Manageable (in theory): The individual component crises can, in principle, be addressed with existing tools and frameworks, though the interaction makes it extremely difficult.
Classic Example: The 1970s Oil Shock
Geopolitical Crisis: The OPEC oil embargo.
Energy Crisis: A sharp rise in oil prices, causing fuel shortages.
Economic Crisis: Stagflation (high inflation + high unemployment + slow growth). These three crises fed into each other, creating a global polycrisis that was more severe than any one of them alone.
Recent Example: The COVID-19 Polycrisis The pandemic interacted with and amplified pre-existing crises:
Health Crisis: The virus itself.
Supply Chain Crisis: Lockdowns disrupted global logistics.
Economic Crisis: Massive stimulus, leading to inflation.
Geopolitical Crisis: Increased tensions between major powers. The interaction of these elements created a global situation far more complex and damaging than the pandemic alone.
Analogy: An orchestra where several sections (strings, brass, woodwinds) all start playing the wrong notes at the same time. The result is a cacophony that is much worse than a single musician being out of tune. The problem is the combination of failures.
2. Metacrisis
Core Idea: The Metacrisis (or The Meta-Crisis) is a broader, deeper concept. It refers not to a set of interacting crises, but to the underlying, shared root system that generates these polycrises and individual crises in the first place. It’s the “crisis of crises.”
Key Characteristics:
A Single, Meta-Problem: The Metacrisis is itself a singular, overarching phenomenon—a failure at the level of our operating system for civilization.
Root Cause Focus: It points to the deep, often invisible, assumptions, values, and structures that make our systems prone to crisis. These include:
Short-termism in economics and politics.
Hyper-extractive relationship with the planet.
Reductionist worldview that ignores complexity and interconnectedness.
Outdated narratives about progress, growth, and human nature.
Generative: The Metacrisis doesn’t just describe current problems; it explains why we keep creating new ones. It’s the “crisis-generating system.”
Paradigm-Level: Solving the Metacrisis requires a fundamental shift in our consciousness, values, and paradigms—not just technical fixes or policy reforms.
Example: The Limits to Growth & Value Systems The Metacrisis can be seen in the collision between our infinite-growth economic model and the finite boundaries of the planet (climate change, biodiversity loss). The polycrises that result are food shortages, extreme weather events, and migration crises. The Metacrisis is the underlying flaw: an economic and cultural system that is fundamentally misaligned with the biophysical reality of the Earth.
Analogy: If a computer keeps crashing due to different software errors (polycrises), the Metacrisis is the deeply flawed and outdated operating system that is the common source of all these errors. Fixing one software bug (solving one crisis) won’t help for long; the entire operating system needs an upgrade.
Comparison Table: Polycrisis vs. Metacrisis
Feature
Polycrisis
Metacrisis
Nature
An event or situation of interacting crises.
The underlying context or root system that generates crises.
Scope
Multiple, separate crises interacting.
A single, overarching meta-problem.
Focus
The symptoms and their synergistic effects.
The root causes and the “source code” of our systems.
Temporal View
Primarily looks at the present convergence of crises.
Looks at the long-term patterns that lead to recurring crises.
Solution Approach
System management: Better coordination, resilience, and managing interconnections.
System transformation: A fundamental shift in paradigms, values, and goals.
Analogy
Multiple organ failures in a patient, each making the others worse.
The underlying chronic disease or unhealthy lifestyle that made the patient vulnerable.
In short: A Polycrisis is the terrifying storm you are trying to navigate. The Metacrisis is the broken navigation system, the faulty weather models, and the reason you built a ship unfit for the ocean in the first place. You need to manage the storm (polycrisis) to survive, but you must fix the underlying flaws (metacrisis) to avoid the next one.
In the US, online political clashes are often better understood as a battle of internet subcultures. Two major groups on the far-right, while frequently lumped together, are worlds apart: the traditional Christian nationalists and the nihilistic ‘black-pilled’ wing of the ‘groyper’ scene.
The simplest way to frame it is as the ‘builders’ versus the ‘burners’.
The builders—the Christian nationalists—are still trying to construct something. They have a vision for an explicitly Christian nation, founded on order, hierarchy, and a return to what they see as ‘proper’ social roles. Their strategy is institutional: win elections, pass laws, stack the courts, and capture the school boards. Their language centres on ‘restoration’ and ‘revival’. Even when their rhetoric gets apocalyptic, the end goal is to use state power to enforce a particular moral order.
The burners, however, are orbiting a completely different sun. This is a much younger, more terminally online crowd, full of streamers and internet personalities. Their worldview is steeped in the cynicism of incel forums, gamer culture, and a deeply ironic, ‘edgelord’ sense of humour.
The crucial distinction is their profound loss of faith in reform. The black pilled wing is utterly convinced that our institutions, our culture, and even people themselves are beyond saving. The ‘black pill’ is a metaphor for accepting a brutal ‘truth’: that decline is irreversible, making despair the only rational response. If nothing can be redeemed, the only creative act left is to tear it all down. This accelerationism operates less like a political programme and more like a social physics, deliberately pressing on every social fault line—from race to gender—just to see what breaks. It is, essentially, the worship of things falling apart.
The bizarre, cryptic memes are central because, for them, the style is the substance. The meme factory serves several functions at once.
It’s a fiercely effective recruitment tool. A darkly funny, high-contrast image travels much faster and wider than a dense policy document. It’s also wrapped in the Kevlar vest of irony, which offers plausible deniability; if you’re offended, they were ‘just joking’. Finally, it works to desensitise its audience. Shock is used like a muscle. The first time you see something awful, you flinch. By the hundredth time, an idea that was once unthinkable feels perfectly normal within the group. This is why their aesthetic is such a chaotic mash-up of cartoon frogs and nihilistic jokes. The underlying message is that nothing matters.
You can start to see the appeal for those who feel exiled from the traditional games of status—dating, university, a good career. It offers a cheap and easy form of belonging where attention is the only currency.
This helps explain why real-world incidents are often followed by posts loaded with strange symbols. The act itself is a performance for an online audience, where the primary aim is gaining in-group status by turning reality into a toxic, private joke.
This doesn’t make it harmless, not for a second. A politics that only wants to break things can still inspire catastrophe, because its only measure of success is destruction.
The antidote requires us to refuse the seductive pull of nihilism and call the black pill what it is: a permission slip for cruelty hiding behind a mask of sophistication. After that, it’s about doing the quiet, unglamorous work of building real meaning and belonging in our lives—in places where empty spectacle can’t compete.
When you get right down to it, Christian nationalism is a plan to rule; black pilled accelerationism is a plan to ruin. Once you grasp that polarity, the memes stop looking like mysterious runes and start looking like what they are: billboards for a politics of nothing.
The AI on your phone isn’t just a helper. It’s a tool for corporate and state control that puts our democracy at risk.
I was surprised when my Android phone suddenly updated itself, and Gemini AI appeared on the front screen, inviting me to join the AI revolution happening worldwide.
Google, Apple, and Meta are locked in a high-stakes race to put a powerful AI assistant in your pocket. The promise is a life of seamless convenience. The price, however, may be the keys to your entire digital life, and the fallout threatens to stretch far beyond your personal data.
This isn’t merely my middle-aged luddite paranoia; widespread public anxiety has cast a sharp light on the trade-offs we are being asked to accept. This investigation will demonstrate how the fundamental design of modern AI, with its reliance on vast datasets and susceptibility to manipulation, creates a perfect storm. It not only exposes individuals to new forms of hacking and surveillance but also provides the tools for unprecedented corporate and government control, undermining the foundations of democratic society while empowering authoritarian regimes.
A Hacker’s New Playground
Let’s be clear about the immediate technical risk. Many sophisticated AI tasks are too complex for a phone to handle alone and require data to be sent to corporate cloud servers. This process can bypass the end-to-end encryption we have come to rely on, exposing our supposedly private data.
Worse still is the documented vulnerability known as “prompt injection.” This is a new and alarmingly simple form of hacking where malicious commands are hidden in webpages or even video subtitles. These prompts can trick an AI assistant into carrying out harmful actions, such as sending your passwords to a scammer. This technique effectively democratises hacking, and there is no foolproof solution.
The Foundations of Democracy Under Threat
This combination of data exposure and vulnerability creates a perfect storm for democratic systems. A healthy democracy relies on an informed public and trust in its institutions, both of which are directly threatened.
When AI can generate floods of convincing but entirely fake news or deepfake videos, it pollutes the information ecosystem. A 2023 article in the Journal of Democracy warned that this erosion of social trust weakens democratic accountability. The threat is real, with a 2024 Carnegie Endowment report detailing how AI enables malicious actors to disrupt elections with sophisticated, tailored propaganda.
At the same time, the dominance of a few tech giants creates a new form of unaccountable power. As these corporations become the gatekeepers of AI-driven information, they risk becoming a “hyper-technocracy,” shaping public opinion without any democratic oversight.
A Toolkit for the Modern Authoritarian
If AI presents a challenge to democracies, it is a powerful asset for authoritarian regimes. The tools that cause concern in open societies are ideal for surveillance and control. A 2023 Freedom House report noted that AI dramatically amplifies digital repression, making censorship faster and cheaper.
Regimes in China and Russia are already leveraging AI to produce sophisticated propaganda and control their populations. From automated censorship that suppresses dissent to the creation of fake online personas that push state-sponsored narratives, AI provides the ultimate toolkit for modern authoritarianism.
How to Take Back Control
A slide into this future is not inevitable. Practical solutions are available for those willing to make a conscious choice to protect their digital autonomy.
For private communication, established apps like Signal offer robust encryption and have resisted AI integration. For email services, Tuta Mail provides an AI-free alternative. For those wanting to use AI on their own terms, open-source tools like Jan.ai allow you to run models locally on your own computer.
Perhaps the most powerful step is to reconsider your operating system. On a PC, Linux Mint is a privacy-respecting alternative. For smartphones, GrapheneOS, a hardened version of Android, provides a significant shield against corporate data gathering.
The code has been written, and the devices are in our hands. The next battle will be fought not in the cloud, but in parliaments and regulatory bodies, where the rules for this new era have yet to be decided. The time for us, and our government, to act is now.
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.
THE Broligachy OWN YOUR MIND: Welcome to Technofeudalism
Alright, you! Yes, YOU! Snap out of it! You think capitalism was the bloody bogeyman? Ha! That was just the warm-up act, the polite dinner guest before the real monster kicked down the door. We are now neck-deep, drowning in something far more insidious, a digital dark age they’re calling TECHNOFEUDALISM, and it’s rotting us from the inside out. While we mindlessly scroll and feed on clickbait like zombies.
Once upon a time, even that festering wound of capitalism left you a few miserable hours to yourself. A few moments to pretend you were an individual, that your home was your castle, a tiny patch fenced off from the market, the boss, even that you had time to raise your family. That flimsy fence/defence? IT’S GONE! Pulverised! There’s no escape, no private corner where their greasy, data-sucking tentacles can’t reach, right into and manipulate your unguarded mind!
Look at the people around you in social spaces swiping up and down, left and right. Browsing social media. Their faces etched with a gnawing anxiety, not about who they are, but about what carefully constructed, “authentic” version of themselves they need to perform for the algorithms, for the faceless Big Tech overlords who’ll decide their future. “Be yourself,” these hypocrites coo, while they hold the puppet strings, demanding a 24/7 audition for a life that’s already been scripted for their profit. Every TikTok, every post, every sodding photo is another brick in the portfolio of their “curated self,” a digital show pony prancing for a job, for approval, for a scrap from the master’s table. It’s a science fiction dystopia, and guess what? IT’S ALREADY HERE!
Worried about Big Brother watching? Cute. That’s kindergarten stuff. What keeps me up at night, what should be giving YOU cold sweats, isn’t just what they know about you; believe me, they know more than your mother’s maiden name. It’s what they OWN. They own the digital railroads, the town squares, your very identity! And more terrifying still, they own the magnificent machines, the AI, the software with the chilling capacity to MODIFY YOUR THINKING, TO REWIRE YOUR BRAIN, to infect your soul with desires and beliefs that serve THEM and their customers, not you! This isn’t just surveillance; it’s psychological warfare, a constant, subtle waterboarding of your free will!
And we’re complicit, unwitting but willing stooges, aren’t we? With every click, every swipe, and every mindless scroll, you’re training their rotten AI to train you better and to burrow deeper into your psyche. It’s a sick, twisted dance macabre where we’re teaching the digital executioner how to sharpen the axe and infect our minds with urges functional to the interests of the “Cloud,” the shadowy owners of this new form of capital. For the first time in history, we’re in a dialectical relationship with the puppet masters colonising our minds.
Your attention? That’s their gold, their oil, their vampiric lifeblood! They suck it up, package your anxieties and desires, and then sell your commodified consciousness to “vassal capitalists” – pathetic businesses, big and small, forced to pay outrageous “cloud rent,” a digital tithe, just for the privilege of existing on their digital turf. Jeff Bezos doesn’t run a marketplace; he runs a monopolistic digital fiefdom! The moment you enter Amazon.com, you exit the market, you exit capitalism, and you enter a domain belonging to one man and his algorithm, which charges those vassal capitalists a sickening 40% of what you pay. You can’t talk to other buyers or haggle with sellers. It’s a walled garden designed to bleed everyone dry to enrich the technofeudal lord.
And how did this happen? Remember the Internet? The dream of a free, open digital world for all? They privatised it, strangled it, and turned it into their personal playground! You don’t own your identity online anymore! You have to beg Google, or some bank, to vouch for who you are, like a digital peasant pleading for papers. It’s an outrage!
Steve Jobs, the “visionary”? Visionary in building the first fully-fledged cloud fiefdom with his App Store! “Come,” he beckoned to developers, “build your apps on my land!” Then he slapped a 30-40% tax on every dollar they made. Free labour for Apple, and a mountain of cloud rent. The blueprint for every digital overlord since! Elon Musk buying Twitter? Don’t be naive. He wasn’t after a “public square”; he was buying an interface, a direct pipeline into your brain for his data-slurping, behaviour-modifying empire!
And when did these leeches get so powerful, so fast? Cast your mind back to 2008! When the states, those supposed guardians of the public good, unleashed socialism for the bankers and brutal austerity for the rest of us! Trillions of dollars, printed out of thin air, didn’t go to you and me, did it? Hell no! It fuelled the exponential growth of Cloud Capital. The Jeff Bezoses, the Googles, the Apples – they gorged on that free money, building their digital empires while society crumbled. They accuse us of wanting a “money tree”? These bastards invented the money tree, and they’ve been shaking it for themselves ever since, making damn sure you don’t get a sniff of the fruit!
Don’t let them fool you by calling this “algorithmic capitalism” or “hyper-capitalism.” This isn’t just capitalism in new clothes; it’s a mutant, far more toxic species. Capitalism, for all its myriad sins, had markets and profit extracted from entrepreneurial activity. This new beast, Technofeudalism, has replaced markets with these digital fiefdoms, and entrepreneurial profit with parasitic cloud rent. These aren’t innovators; they’re digital landlords, extracting wealth just because they own the platform you’re trapped on! It’s the revenge of the rentier, dressed up in shiny tech!
Your precious “liberal individual”? Dead and buried under an avalanche of data points. Social democracy? A quaint, forgotten dream when industrial capital itself is now a pathetic vassal to these cloud lords. How the hell do you bargain with an algorithm designed to exploit you 24/7? “Liberal democracy”? What a bloody joke! It was always an autocracy of capital with a thin veneer of elections to keep us quiet. Now, even that flimsy illusion is shattering. We’re living under a system of perfect, voluntary surveillance, where Big Brother isn’t the state, but the new ruling class of cloudalists controlling the means of behavioural modification.
And the sickest part? We need these tools! We love these apps! I get it. I use them too! But that’s how they get their hooks in! The question isn’t if we use them, but who the HELL OWNS THEM and what that concentrated ownership is doing to us, to our societies, to the bleeding planet! This is the new Cold War between the US and China? Don’t buy the propaganda. It’s a turf war between two colossal technofeudal empires, two giant cloud fiefdoms, battling for global dominance, and we’re just the bloody collateral damage! While these technoführers fight over the digital spoils, the planet is burning, and we’re doing sod all, mesmerised by their automated propaganda machines that would make Goebbels blush!
It’s hard to even see this system, isn’t it? We’re like fish, swimming in their toxic, algorithmically-curated water, thinking it’s normal. But it’s NOT. This is a creation of human beings, and it can be DIFFERENT!
SO, WHAT THE HELL ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? Feudalism didn’t end because the lords had a change of heart. It ended because of a GRAND ALLIANCE of peasants, workers, and proto-capitalists. That’s our only bloody chance now!
BUILD DIGITAL SOLIDARITY, DAMN IT! A global alliance of “cloud serfs” – that’s YOU, me, the warehouse workers, the coders, even the small-time “vassal capitalists” getting squeezed dry by that 40% cloud rent! Organise online, offline! Share tactics, expose their manipulative bullshit, and amplify our collective roar! This is a digital labour movement for the cloud age!
SOCIALISE CLOUD CAPITAL! These algorithms, these apps, this AI – WE ALL HELP CREATE IT with our data, our labour, our damn attention! Demand collective ownership! Turn these platforms into public utilities or worker-owned cooperatives. We’re not Luddites trying to smash the machines; we’re fighting to make them serve humanity, not a handful of sociopathic billionaires!
REJECT VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE! STARVE THE BEAST! Minimise your engagement with their exploitative brain-rotting platforms like Amazon, Google, or X wherever you can. Support decentralised, open-source alternatives that prioritise your control, not their profit. Every click is a choice – OPT OUT OF THEIR SURVEILLANCE TRAP!
EMPOWER INDEPENDENT MEDIA! Ditch the mainstream mouthpieces owned by the cloudalists! Fund, share, and amplify the independent, progressive voices brave enough to tell the goddamn truth! Truth is our weapon – use it to wake up everyone around you!
FIGHT FOR TECHNO-DEMOCRACY! Advocate for policies that smash Big Tech monopolies, enforce data sovereignty (YOU own your digital identity, not them!), and fund public tech infrastructure. This needs an INTERNATIONAL PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT because these companies operate beyond borders!
RESIST SURVEILLANCE AND BEHAVIOURAL CONTROL! Use privacy tools – VPNS, encrypted messaging, ad-blockers! Educate yourself and others on how these algorithms are designed to manipulate you! Awareness is the first goddamn step to breaking free!
ORGANISE LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY! Start community tech collectives, teach digital literacy, develop local alternatives, and link these efforts to the global fights for climate justice and economic equality because technofeudalism is pouring gasoline on all those fires!
The alternative isn’t to go back to some mythical past. It’s TECHNO-DEMOCRACY! We can’t disinvent this tech, nor should we want to! These tools could liberate humanity, if we rip the property rights from their greedy claws and distribute power to those who produce the value – US!
It sounds utopian? Is it more utopian than sleepwalking into a future where we are only batteries for their machines, serfs on their digital plantations? This isn’t a game! This is a fight for our minds, our dignity, our future, and the very soul of humanity! The clock is ticking! So, will you be a docile data set in their machine, or will you get angry and FIGHT BACK?!
Quentin Budworth 