Modern authoritarianism has evolved. No longer solely reliant on the brute force of the 20th century, a new model of control has emerged: informational autocracy. This contemporary form of rule prioritises the sophisticated management of information flows over overt repression, manufacturing legitimacy by curating a reality where the regime is competent and opposition is illegitimate. While these autocrats maintain the façade of democracy through managed elections and hollowed-out institutions, their true power lies in dominating the narrative. In this digital age, social media platforms have become the principal arena and accelerator for this strategy, fundamentally transforming the complex relationship between the state, a knowledgeable “informed elite,” and the general populace. Social media acts as both a tool of co-optation and a vector for chaos, enabling autocrats to silence dissent while exporting tactics that actively erode democratic foundations worldwide.
At the heart of informational autocracy lies the strategic management of the “informed elite”—a segment of society comprising intellectuals, journalists, and professionals who possess the critical capacity to recognise and expose the regime’s flaws. Traditionally, this group poses the greatest threat to authoritarian stability, and social media presents a dual-edged sword for their neutralisation. On one edge, platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and WeChat serve as tools for surveillance and control, allowing regimes to monitor the elite’s online activities, identify dissenters for targeted repression, and deploy subtle censorship through algorithmic demotion or shadow-banning. On the other, these same platforms are used for co-optation, recruiting influential figures to amplify state-approved narratives and lending a veneer of credibility to propaganda. In Turkey and Hungary, for instance, allied influencers and troll farms are leveraged to dominate online discourse, effectively turning a portion of the informed elite into digital mouthpieces for the state.
This capacity for control, however, is not absolute. The democratising nature of social media simultaneously threatens to disrupt the informational asymmetry that autocrats depend on. By allowing information to bypass state-controlled media, these platforms can potentially expand the informed elite, making it too large to co-opt or silence entirely. This forces regimes to intensify their grip on the broader information ecosystem, often through outright media monopolisation. This tension reveals the core paradox for modern authoritarians: the very platforms that offer unprecedented control also carry the seeds of their potential undoing. They fracture the elite’s traditional role as gatekeepers of information while simultaneously empowering grassroots dissent.
The very architecture of social media is uniquely suited to advancing the goals of informational autocracy. Platforms’ business models, predicated on maximising engagement, inadvertently favour the sensational, divisive, and emotionally charged content on which autocrats thrive. Algorithms designed for virality rather than veracity create echo chambers that reinforce regime propaganda and shield citizens from dissenting views. This allows rulers to “flood the zone” with disinformation, blurring the lines between fact and fiction until the public becomes cynical and disengaged. False political narratives, as studies have shown, spread significantly faster than truth, creating a “post-truth” environment where objective reality is secondary to partisan identity. This systematic degradation of trust in institutions—from the media to the electoral process—is not merely a byproduct of social media; it is a central objective of informational autocracy, and platforms provide the most efficient means to achieve it.
Perhaps most insidiously, the tactics of informational autocracy are no longer confined to authoritarian states. Social media has created a borderless information environment where these strategies are exported globally, seeping into and poisoning democratic societies. Autocrats have learned to weaponise the very freedoms that define democracies, using the openness of platforms to interfere in elections, amplify social divisions, and discredit liberal values as chaotic and weak. State-backed actors from Russia and China have perfected the art of cross-border disinformation, creating what can be seen as a “disinfo axis” that coordinates to undermine democratic solidarity on the world stage. In response, threatened democracies may find themselves adopting autocratic tools—such as increased censorship or surveillance—to combat these hybrid threats, risking an erosion of the very principles they seek to protect. This global spillover normalises autocratic practices and accelerates a worldwide trend of democratic backsliding.
In conclusion, informational autocracy represents a pernicious and adaptable evolution of authoritarian rule, and social media serves as its central nervous system. These platforms have revolutionised the autocrat’s toolkit, enabling a subtle yet pervasive form of control built on narrative dominance rather than physical coercion. By transforming the role of the informed elite into a dynamic contest of control and resistance, and by leveraging algorithms that prioritise engagement over truth, social media directly fuels the erosion of public trust and institutional legitimacy. This model is no longer a distant threat but a clear and present danger to established democracies, which now face an onslaught of digitally-native autocratic tactics designed to turn their own open systems against them. The struggle for the future of democracy is therefore inextricably linked to the battle for the digital public square, demanding a new focus on platform accountability, digital literacy, and the cultivation of an “info hygiene” resilient enough to withstand this slow-acting poison.
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 