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.

______________

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

The post Technofascism and the AI Stage of Late Capitalism appeared first on Void Network.

I’m the host of a podcast and YouTube show called Give Them An Argument (GTAA). Last month, a thumbnail was removed from one of our videos. It was a clip from my interview with left-wing YouTuber Natalie Wynn (“ContraPoints”). The email from YouTube claimed that it violated their “Sex and Nudity” policy. I’m about to show you the image. I’d say that prudes should avert their eyes but…well…

There are at least two odd things about this. First, Natalie is fully clothed in that image. Second, it’s just the GTAA frame around the same profile picture she uses for her wildly popular YouTube channel. YouTube’s censorship machine has never come down on her for using it. So what happened?

I have no idea, because YouTube wouldn’t tell me. The company eventually reversed its decision but never explained to me how the image came to be taken down in the first place.

Very annoying, but maybe just a misunderstanding or algorithmic glitch. Yet a few weeks later, a mob of hardcore Trump supporters stormed the Capitol in a last-ditch attempt to overturn the 2020 election. I hosted a livestream about it with philosopher Ryan Lake, historian Djene Bajalan, my producer Forrest Miller, and poet and left-wing commentator C. Derrick Varn. To put it mildly, none of these people are Trump supporters. In fact, a fair amount of the stream was spent parsing the issue of whether Trump supporters technically counted as “fascists.”

All of that made it more than a little surprising when, about a week later, YouTube removed the video… on the grounds that we were promoting Trumpist conspiracy theories about the election. The email from YouTube claimed that we’d violated their terms of service by posting content “that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election.”

We filed an appeal the night that the stream was taken down. We have yet to get any sort of response.

About a week after that, I was put in what’s come to be known as “Facebook jail” for several days. I could read posts, but I couldn’t interact with them. I could receive messages but I couldn’t respond to them.

I’d posted the YouTube stream on Facebook, so there might be a connection between the stream being taken down and the Facebook “jailing.” Or the two could have been entirely unrelated. Facebook told me that I’d violated “community standards” in some way but didn’t tell me how I’d violated them or even what post got me in trouble.

The fact that I was being “jailed” for the first time since I started my account fourteen years ago, and that this happened while all the major tech platforms were ramping up censorship after the Capitol riot is suggestive, but it could have been a coincidence. One of the most frustrating things about this sort of tech censorship is that there’s simply no way to know what’s happening behind the curtain.

Does any of this matter? It’s certainly an inconvenience for podcasters and streamers like me, but that surely ranks very low on any list of injustices worth losing sleep over. But these companies’ actions do matter. Social media is a key part of the information commons of the twenty-first century, but it’s been enclosed by private companies.

Even if the right standard for what should or shouldn’t be sayable on the digital commons falls somewhere short of free speech absolutism, it’s a problem that the standards we have are arbitrarily arrived at and opaquely applied by private companies whose primary allegiance is to making money rather than serving the public good, and who provide no basic due process for users to appeal suspensions or even find out what they allegedly did wrong.

Socialism and Free Speech

Some progressives have excused tech companies de-platforming people we don’t like by adopting a basically libertarian definition of “free speech,” according to which only government censorship can violate it. The idea is that since tech platforms are privately owned, nothing they do can be a threat to “free speech” by definition. But this is far too narrow.

Think, for example, about the Hollywood blacklist in the 1950s. In a fit of anti-Communist paranoia, the Hollywood studios made a list of suspected Party members and fellow travelers and denied them employment. The effort to end the blacklist was a fight for the right for Hollywood workers to express controversial political ideas — even though the studios were private entities.

The reason to take a hard line against government censorship is that we care about things like the value of individual expression and the societal benefits of free and open discussion of controversial ideas. The same consideration should lead us to see free speech as at least one important value to be balanced against others in a variety of non-government contexts. And it should certainly lead us to be alarmed by the amount of control a few tech CEOs currently have over the flow of information in our society.

The anecdotes I started with about my own brushes with the tech censors are relatively trivial. But we’ve seen much more disturbing indications of how bad private sector tech censorship can get in the last few months.

When many liberals worried that New York Post revelations about Hunter Biden would swing the election to Donald Trump, Facebook and Twitter both stepped in to stop users from sharing the story. A common defense of the companies’ actions was that they were motivated not by the painfully obvious political concern but by the failure of the Post to live up to proper journalistic standards.

That’s difficult to take seriously under the circumstances. But even if it were true, the idea that Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg — corporate CEOs with no democratic accountability to the general public — should be empowered to decide which newspapers are journalistically responsible enough for all the millions of Facebook and Twitter users to be allowed to see is deeply disturbing.

Similarly, a case can be made that Donald Trump deserved to be removed from a variety of social media platforms after the events of January 6. But whatever you think of the outcome, it’s astonishing that the decision about cutting off major lines of communication from the most powerful elected official on the planet to the general public is in the hands of a few corporations.

Nor is it difficult to imagine circumstances under which the Left would rightly be outraged about a parallel decision. Imagine a President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeting encouragement to workers during a general strike and being accused by social media companies of “inciting” any violence that took place on picket lines.

Last week, a variety of socialist pages were removed from Facebook. The company later said this was due to an “automation error.” Maybe it was. On the other hand, Jacobin subscription appeals have been repeatedly banned from Facebook for months on the grounds that they constitute “political advertisements.” But the Wall Street Journal, for example, faces no similar restrictions.

In addition to principled considerations about free speech, a good reason for the Left to oppose tech censorship is that we should know perfectly well that the Silicon Valley plutocrats aren’t our friends. If we aren’t currently the main targets of the censors, that’s because they don’t take us sufficiently seriously as a threat to their economic interests.

As satisfying as it can be on a visceral level to see racists, fascists, and reactionaries de-platormed, the Left shouldn’t adopt the libertarian “only government censorship counts” definition or cede the issue of free speech to our ideological enemies. Instead, we should point out corporate censors are an enormous threat to free speech, particularly when they own our communications commons privately. And we actually offer solutions to this censorship.

For example, as Shaun Richman has advocated, we should push for aggressive new labor laws to protect workers against being fired for speaking out against the boss. And we should advocate bringing massive tech platforms into public ownership so that the protections of the First Amendment will apply on those platforms.

The lingering memory of the flawed Soviet model of state socialism has given many people the impression that capitalism and free speech go hand in hand. Nothing could be further from the truth. The heart of democratic socialism is an acknowledgment that private sector authoritarianism can be as much of a threat to meaningful freedom and equality as authoritarian government policies. That’s why we want to extend democracy into the workplace. And that’s why we want to extend the fight for free speech into the private sector.

______

Ben Burgis is a philosophy professor and the author of Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left. He is host of the podcast Give Them An Argument.

source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/01/censorship-big-tech-facebook-twitter

The post The Left Should Oppose Censorship by Big Tech Companies- by Ben Burgis appeared first on Void Network.

The FBI, Pentagon, and CIA are “interviewing” Assange. Kwiatkowski writes:

Interviewing is the wrong word.  I’d like to say doctoring him, because it would be more accurate, except that word implies some care for a positive outcome.  Chemical Gina has her hands in this one, and we are being told that Assange is being “treated” with 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ. 

BZ is a powerful drug that produces hallucinations. “Soldiers on BZ could remember only fragments of the experience afterward. As the drug wore off, and the subjects had trouble discerning what was real, many experienced anxiety, aggression, even terror,” the New Yorker reported. “…The drug’s effect lasted for days. At its peak, volunteers were totally cut off in their own minds, jolting from one fragmented existence to the next. They saw visions: Lilliputian baseball players competing on a tabletop diamond; animals or people or objects that materialized and vanished.”

Assange is being chemically lobotomized prior to being extradited to the United States to stand trial on bogus computer hacking charges that—and the corporate media won’t tell you this—passed the statute of limitations three years ago (see 18 U.S. Code § 371. Conspiracy to commit offense or to defraud United States).

Forget about the statute of limitations. The US government has long violated both domestic and international law. It is a rogue nation led by an ignorant clown who opened the back door and ushered in neocon psychopaths notorious for killing millions. In normal times, these criminals would be in the dock at The Hague standing trial for crimes against humanity. But we don’t live in normal times.  

The message is clear: if you expose the massive criminal enterprise at the heart of the US government, you will be renditioned, chemically tortured (a favorite of Chemical Gina, now CIA director), chewed up and spit out until you’re a babbling mental case like David Shayler (who believes he is the Second Coming of Christ). Shayler, a former MI5 agent, made the mistake of exposing the UK’s support of terror operations in Libya. Shayler spent three weeks at Belmarsh after a conviction for breaching the Official Secrets Act. He emerged from prison broken and delusional. 

I seriously doubt most Americans care about the chemical torture of Julian Assange. On social media, liberals and so-called progressives, along with their “conservative” counterparts, celebrate Assange’s arrest, confinement, and torture. Members of Congress have called for his execution, while one media talking head (teleprompter script reader) demanded the CIA send a hit team to London and assassinate Assange. 

Americans are similar to the propagandized and brainwashed citizens of Nazi Germany. Most went along with Hitler right up until the end when their cities lay in smoldering ruins and their once proud country was carved up, half of it given over to the communists. They set up the Stasi to deal with East Germans who were not following the totalitarian program.

________________________________________

source: https://kurtnimmo.blog/

The post Julian Assange Tortured with Psychotropic Drug appeared first on Void Network.

The post Survival of the Richest- The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind- Douglas Rushkoff appeared first on Void Network.

In 1989, when the internet was predominantly ASCII-based and HyperCard had yet to give birth (or at least act as a midwife) to the world wide web, R.U. Sirius launched Mondo 2000. “I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-web day,” William Gibson said in a recent interview. “Posterity, looking at this, should also consider Mondo 2000 as a focus of something that was happening.”

Twenty years ago, it was cypherpunk that was happening.

And it’s happening again today.

EARLY CYPHERPUNK IN FACT AND FICTION
CYPHERPUNK WAS BOTH AN EXCITING NEW VISION FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
AND A FUN SUBCULTURE DEDICATED TO MAKING IT HAPPEN

Flashback: Berkeley, California 1992. I pick up the ringing phone. My writing partner, St. Jude Milhon, is shouting down the line: “I’ve got it! Cypherpunk!”

Jude was an excitable girl and she was particularly excitable when there was a new boyfriend involved. She’d been raving about Eric Hughes for days. I paid no attention.

At the time, Jude and I were contracted to write a novel titled How to Mutate and Take Over the World. I wanted the fiction to contain the truth. I wanted to tell people how creative hackers could do it — mutate and take over the world — by the end of the decade. Not knowing many of those details ourselves, we threw down a challenge on various hacker boards and in the places where extropians gathered to share their superhuman fantasies. “Take on a character,” we said, “and let that character mutate and/or take over.” The results were vague and unsatisfying. These early transhumanists didn’t actually know how to mutate, and the hackers couldn’t actually take over the world. It seemed that we were asking for too much too soon.

And so I wound up there, holding the phone away from my ear as Jude shouted out the solution, at least to the “taking over” part of our problem. Strong encryption, she explained, will sever all the ties binding us to hostile states and other institutions. Encryption will level the playing field, protecting even the least of us from government interference. It will liberate pretty much everything, toute de suite. The cypherpunks would make this happen.

For Jude, cypherpunk was both an exciting new vision for social change and a fun subculture dedicated to making it happen. Sure, I was skeptical. But I was also desperate for something to hang the plot of our book on. A few days later I found myself at the feet of Eric Hughes — who, along with John Gilmore and Tim May, is considered one of the founders of the cypherpunk movement — getting the total download.

This was my first exposure to “The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto.” Written by Tim May, it opens by mimicking The Communist Manifesto: “A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy.” In a fit of hyperbole that perfectly foreshadowed the mood of tech culture in the 1990s — from my own Mondo 2000 to the “long boom” of digital capitalism — May declared that encrypted communication and anonymity online would “alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret.” The result would be nothing less than “both a social and economic revolution.”

Just as a seemingly minor invention like barbed wire made possible the fencing-off of vast ranches and farms, thus altering forever the concepts of land and property rights in the frontier West, so too will the seemingly minor discovery out of an arcane branch of mathematics come to be the wire clippers which dismantle the barbed wire around intellectual property.

Those words were written way back in 1988. By 1993, a bunch of crypto freaks were gathering fairly regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. In his lengthy Wired cover story, Steven Levy would describe them as mostly “having beards and long hair — like Smith Brothers [cough drops] gone digital.” Their antics would become legendary.

John Gilmore set off a firestorm by sharing classified documents on cryptography that a friend of his had found in public libraries (they had previously been declassified). The NSA threatened Gilmore with a charge of violating the Espionage Act, but after he responded with publicity and his own legal threats, the NSA — probably recognizing in Gilmore a well-connected dissident who they couldn’t intimidate — backed down and once again declassified the documents.

Phil Zimmermann’s PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) software was being circulated largely thanks to cypherpunk enthusiasts. According to Tim May’s Cyphernomicon, PGP was “the most important crypto tool” available at the time, “having single-handedly spread public key methods around the world.” It was available free of charge for non-commercial users, and complete source code was included with all copies. Most importantly, May wrote, “almost no understanding of how PGP works in detail is needed,” so anyone could use its encryption to securely send data over the net.

In April 1993, the Clinton administration announced its encryption policy initiative. The Clipper Chip was an NSA-developed encryption chipset for “secure” voice communication (the government would have a key for every chip manufactured). “Not to worry,” Phil Zimmermann cuttingly wrote in an essay about PGP. “The government promises that they will use these keys to read your traffic only ‘when duly authorized by law.” Not that anyone believed the promises. “To make Clipper completely effective,” Zimmermann continued, “the next logical step would be to outlaw other forms of cryptography.” This threat brought cypherpunks to the oppositional front lines in one of the early struggles over Internet rights, eventually defeating government plans.

John Gilmore summed up the accomplishments of the cypherpunks in a recent email: “We did reshape the world,” he wrote. “We broke encryption loose from government control in the commercial and free software world, in a big way. We built solid encryption and both circumvented and changed the corrupt US legal regime so that strong encryption could be developed by anyone worldwide and deployed by anyone worldwide,” including WikiLeaks.

As the 1990s rolled forward, many cypherpunks went to work for the man, bringing strong crypto to financial services and banks (on the whole, probably better than the alternative). Still, crypto-activism continued and the cypherpunk mailing list blossomed as an exchange for both practical encryption data and spirited, sometimes-gleeful argumentation, before finally peaking in 1997. This was when cypherpunk’s mindshare seemed to recede, possibly in proportion to the utopian effervescence of the early cyberculture. But the cypherpunk meme may now be finding a sort of rebirth in one of the biggest and most important stories in the fledgeling 21st century.

The post CYPHERPUNK RISING: WIKILEAKS, ENCRYPTION, AND THE COMING SURVEILLANCE DYSTOPIA by R.U.Sirius appeared first on Void Network.

The post “Modern Technology and Anarchism” (1986) by Sam Dolgoff appeared first on Void Network.