Not possessing prophetic visions, it will be difficult to predict what forms Anarchism will take in the 21st century, as this depends on the geographical, cultural, political, social, and temporal context. Undoubtedly, struggles for the expansion of spaces of freedom, equality in differences, and solidarity—individual and collective—(including and especially among strangers) will always constitute the axes around which the specifically appropriate forms and modes of conflict will revolve, depending on the context of anarchism, or rather anarchisms.

I will briefly focus on three global scenarios, not alternatives, but rather intersecting yet not hierarchically descending, within which twenty-first-century anarchists will strive to identify the best forms of action. There is clearly a fourth, linked to gender issues, but other contributions will provide us with general and specific features and contextual objectives of struggle. Of course, these scenarios do not exclude or downplay the more common, more everyday, and perhaps more local spheres of struggle, whose importance is crucial to our rooting in the territories where we live. However, in my opinion, global scenarios will also “over-determine” local or traditional conflicts, changing their forms and modalities and imparting, in my view, significant twists.

The first is climate change, which alters the planet’s living conditions, jeopardising the survival of its ecosystems, with the risk of demographic conflicts, migratory movements, and the violent exploitation of resources (fertile land, water), etc. The nomadism typical (and even original) of the human species cannot be stopped by state or “natural” borders, such will be the pressure of migration in search of better living conditions. If the pace of exploitation of humanity’s resources (land and water, first and foremost) is not reversed, increasingly bloody conflicts will erupt, considering that half the world’s population is of working age, and a quarter of them live in rural areas, where 80% of global poverty exists. This is without considering the informal, obscure, and invisible work that escapes ILO or World Bank statistics. In these conditions, which it would be unworthy to call “emergency”—so endemic and reiterated are they by the dynamics of power and inequality on a global scale—the approach to problems can only hinge on bottom-up self-organisation, to mitigate the destructive effects of current climate policies pursued by unscrupulous state and business elites. It is from this practice of solidarity and self-organisation that an anarchist ethos is forged: a training ground for creativity in horizontal problem-solving that will gradually extend to the complete reorganisation of social life according to libertarian practices and attitudes. It is therefore time for the livability of and on our planet to enter the political agenda of social anarchism with determination, since we cannot count on being among the elite who will migrate to the Moon or Mars following Elon Musk & Co.

The second global scenario is the recourse to war as a challenge to global hegemony in the 21st century, with the risks of nuclear annihilation and mass extermination. Already at the close of the last millennium, many American scholars were questioning which would be the hegemonic power in the second half of the 21st century, seeing China and its allies (including Russia) as the most likely competitor against which to pursue policies of containment and aggressive counterbalancing. It’s not difficult to imagine the same in China, only that analyses and studies are not easily accessible, let alone legible. After all, history has never seen smooth and peaceful successions of global hegemony—quite the opposite. It is no coincidence, then, and not just today, that we are witnessing a growing militarisation of societies, which already directly results in the disintegration of hard-won “rights,” even without losing the pretence of (pseudo)democratic representation, with the reduction of constitutional states to electoral-parliamentary autocracies. Freedom of action, speech, expression, the ability to shape one’s life as one sees fit, and the ability to adopt non-conformist customs and traditions are all practices wrested with difficulty from previous generations and, in some cases, from the living. Whether they are constitutionalised or translated into legal norms is of little importance: positive law grants and takes away based on more or less strengthened parliamentary majorities. The path will make the difference.

By militarisation, we must not and cannot merely evoke the visible presence of signs of armed power (army, police forces, armaments, war industries, etc.). We must address the internalisation of a warmongering and bellicose culture, which arms consciences from a very young age, pressuring them with violent models for solving everyday problems and overcoming the obstacles that life throws at us at every step. Cultural models in which violence is exalted because it is simulated—game over, and we begin again—life as a video game in which you kill and are killed, but then you rise again in a limitless and infinite fight. It is no coincidence that entertainment video games fuel and are in turn fueled by military simulations, by autonomous and automatic weaponry that transform war in its forms, anaesthetising its wounds and physical traumas and transferring them to a psychic sphere. This is at least for those who attack from a position of technological supremacy, not for those who suffer its effects, as every victim of war knows.

We must not underestimate or minimise the hybrid militarisation that insinuates itself from cyberspace into our pockets via digital devices. These devices are not only the source of capitalist surveillance for commercial marketing purposes, but also, and above all, the control exerted by governments and private companies, which now possess an infinite amount of knowledge related to our tastes, our actions, our physical and virtual experiences, which are transformed into numerical data easily processed by algorithms, resulting in a unique mass profiling —and this may not sound contradictory—that is useful for predicting and even guiding our future behaviour.

Which brings us to the third global scenario: the advent of digital technologies, and AI specifically, which is literally revolutionising the way of life in our societies, not only in the areas of living labour, which can be replaced by robots and various machines, nor only in the ways in which “political” opinions are channelled during elections. The split between the corporeal, “real” sphere and the “virtual” dimension, whose effects are just as real, intertwine, delineating the formation of a subjectivity very different from the one we have become accustomed to on the material terrain of social classes and the balance of power. In an era of extreme individualism, advocated and encouraged by the neoliberal policies of recent decades, the collective sphere has shattered to be “resurrected” in the relationship between the self and the screen of my digital device; Physical sociality has in some ways evaporated in favour of a virtual “sociality,” managed by proprietary platforms, within which a fiction of communication and dialogue is enacted with just as many other selves, each connected via their own screen. The fiction of having a following of followers, of having tons of friends: in effect, we are unknowingly immersed in a bubble, within which my opinions resonate, becoming convictions as soon as I see them confirmed by others who think exactly like me. The end of the pluralism of ideas, excluded from echo chambers, the end of the emergence of dissent, the end of dialectical confrontation between different people. And when these virtual expulsions resurface in the space-time of corporeal existence, being unaccustomed of relating to different others turns into gratuitous, senseless, unexpected violence, except as a “defensive” form of a psychology devoid of real sociality, precisely because it is imbued with “social” surrogates.

Neoliberal individualism, further translocated into the digital universe, produces conformist individuals, diversified replicas of a machine matrix whose limits and technological advances we have likely become prostheses, experimentally testing. We think we are the ones using the devices, but perhaps it’s precisely the opposite. Outside of any community of reference, disoriented and tossed from one platform to another, what kind of subjectivity will ultimately consolidate? What community could give rise to the communism of goods and services? What critical and diverse subject could emerge in the increasingly pressing relationship between the human and the machine?

The new ways in which we feel we are subjects of ourselves, aware and critical of reality, push us to deepen and diversify our analytical tools, to seize new opportunities for “social(i)” connections from which we can reconstitute a strong destituent community capable of imagining and therefore experimenting with collective utopias organized around the pivot of the absence of power.

Written by Salvo Vaccaro for Umanità Nova (Italy)

Machine Translation in English- edited by Blade Runner. 

Summary of a presentation at the Carrara Conference (11-12 October 2025) on occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Italian Anarchist Federation.

SOURCE: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2025/12/17/21st-century-anarchism/

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Since the release of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022 and the extraordinary AI hype that has followed in the last two years, we have witnessed a repositioning of Big Tech companies. Notably, Microsoft (the owner and controller of OpenAI), Meta (with its Llama model), Amazon (through its Amazon Web Services infrastructure), and Google (with its Gemini project, which aims to revolutionize search engines and cloud services) have all made strategic moves.

However, the practical utility of generative AI remains somewhat unclear. Companies are investing billions in substantial computing power, chips, and new, energy-intensive data centers without a clear business plan or a projected future revenue stream. The recent development of Deepseek r1 shows that such high levels of investment, energy and infrastructure were not really needed. This raises questions about the tangible value that AI is actually delivering. Political economist Nick Srnicek has asked, “[w]hat value is AI producing?” Countless media articles have been published to claim that AI will solve cancer, will increase productivity in nearly all sectors of the economy, while probably destroying millions of jobs along the way. Click here to find out if your job will be made redundant by AI. The media created a narrative of fear and hope familiar to technological development: that we are living in a great period of technological advancement and that things will never be the same.

Although still progressing rapidly, we can now observe that the AI landscape appears more established today, in March 2025. Big Tech is now the broligarchy, proudly parading at Trump inauguration day and showing its ideological alignment to his Project 2025. The reactionary project of Trump and the tech broligarchs is to depoliticize technology and AI. By depoliticizing AI, I mean abdicating the responsibility of questioning its role and power in society. This is a form of fatalism that accepts the current state-of-affairs without questioning its legitimacy. The Tech Broligarchy is a new form of oligarchy since it draws its symbolic power from the image of technology as sheer unstoppable force. They deserve their position due to their almost divine connection to prometheia, the faculty of foresight. They hold power because they participate in technological progress, and we should not hinder this new great acceleration. However, the issue with this image of technology is its monolithic and linear understanding. AI is thus portrayed as the pinnacle of technological evolution (well-captured in ChatGPT’s teleological advertisement).

Antidemocratic decisions, Sieg Heil salutes, geopolitical threats as well as other inflamed speeches from Donald Trump and Elon Musk in the recent weeks have produced an emerging collective recognition that fascism is not simply coming, but that fascism is now in power in the United States. It is a commonplace to claim that yesteryear’s fascism will not look like a new form of fascism. This is a point worth emphasizing, however, given the malleability of reactionary ideas to thrive in new sociopolitical environments. The question “how do we recognize fascism?” is thus untimely (in Nietzsche’s sense), both a historical and contemporary one.

The arrival of technofascism

Elon Musk’s unelected Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), tasked to reorganize U.S. Digital Services, has de facto seized control of the United States administration with an incredible speed. The same Musk, who was warning against the existential threat of AI, is now designing a new AI system to modernize process and identify possible layoffs. An executive order signed on Inauguration Day set to revoke AI safety measures that required “developers of AI systems that pose risks to US national security, economy, health, or public safety to share the results of safety tests with the US government.”

Core to technofascism is a belief that regulations hinder corporate innovation by preventing exploitation of people, nonhumans and nature (whether it is manufacturing safety standards, worker protections, clean air and water protections, food safety, conservation, or financial regulations). This is based on a dogmatic image of technology as unidirectional (innovation going either forward or backward), while in reality, technological progress is based on incremental improvement, maintenance, and regulation.

Elon Musk’s statement that “[r]egulations, basically, should be default gone,” expresses his abhorrence to all forms of state interference (fiscal, legal or social) in favor of “natural” order in which the strong or the chosen ones (the autocrats) will rule. In this mindset, regulations are seen as burdensome obstacles to unhindered acceleration of innovation (much like the overhyped, mocked and now defunct “hyperloop”). Some have analyzed how this was conceived as state institutional “reboot.” Musk is asking the public to adopt a CEO tech bro mindset that values and rewards coders and makers over maintenance and responsible tech workers, or, to put it differently, aggressive technological innovation over careful integration. He called this an “AI-first strategy”, but this is deeply antidemocratic because there can be no rule of law without any rules, laws or norms. This perceived anarchy, praised by a self-styled rebel, is actually a power-grab: a merger between Big Tech and the US federal state.

Thus, technofascism seized power by promoting a familiar image of technology rooted in an innovation-centric history—that is, predominantly white, male and wealthy. This history obscures the everyday use of non-Western, non-rich, non-white and non-masculine technologies (or “creole technologies”) by the majority of the world population. At its most utopian, technofascism wants to automate government, not for the collective good as envisioned by Allende’s project Cybersyn in the early 1970s, but for the benefits of the fossil fuel and tech shareholders.

The capture of critical infrastructure

Why is the Silicon Valley suddenly interested in exercising direct political power as well as in merging with the US federal state? Political economist Cédric Durand provides a working answer to this question: big tech entrepreneurs do not merely seek to lower costs or meet demand; their aim is to “…[create] a dynamic of dependence which ensnares individuals, businesses and institutions alike. This is partly because the services offered by Big Tech are not commodities like any other. They are often critical infrastructures on which society depends.”

The automatization of state action pursued by Musk is not the ultimate objective of the project but a means to an end: state capture. Big Tech is using the image of technology outlined above to build the new critical infrastructure from the ground up. Musk and his Doge team aspire to establish “a new, inherently undemocratic deep state.” This is not driven by benevolence or goodwill, but by a strategic business move to increase capital and profit. For instance, OpenAI was clear that without violating copyright laws, there can be no “‘training” of the ChatGPT model. In essence, the clients of OpenAI, Gemini or Grok are not the US citizens or consumers, but the US “deep state” itself. It is embarrassing for libertarians to be so reliant on the state for their business operations when all they do is idealize living in a tax heaven.

Why call this mode of governing technofascism? Fascists have swapped their black boots and black shirts for keyboards, but their misogyny and their aggressive culture persist. Technofascism is here when AI systems developed in the Silicon Valley are used by the Israeli army to “help decide who lives and who dies.” We are witnessing an authoritarian rule that breaches the rule of law and liberal values, and substantial violence committed (against USAID-recipients, benefit claimants, and job redundancies).

Beyond these more physical forms of technofascism, another subtle dimension must be considered: tyranny. By removing fact-checking and misinformation prevention, as well as undermining equality and diversity programs, we are witnessing transformation in the media infrastructure, which leads to a legitimization of bullying, discrimination and systemic algorithmic harm. The tyranny extends to the workplace, where a culture of bullying and “hustling” originating from the Silicon Valley will also have their own toll on those at the sharp end of the grind. Musk, like many industrialists before him, is interested in creating a new form of work ethic (“outline what you have done last week or you’ll be fired”). He used Twitter as his training ground, and he intends to implement a similar strategy in the U.S. administration.

In the coming few weeks and months, legal battles will unfold, serving as a stress-test to already-damaged democratic institutions. There is a significant amount of work to be done in rebuilding alliances that not only passively defend the status quo, but also present concrete and desirable alternatives.

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Benoit Dillet is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bath (UK). He is the author of The Political Space of Art (with T. Puri) (2016) and the translator of Bernard Stiegler’s Philosophising by Accident (2017). His work focuses on political theory of technology, affect theory and future climate imaginaries.

SOURCE: https://blog.apaonline.org/2025/03/10/technofascism-and-the-ai-stage-of-late-capitalism/?amp

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