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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