We should call this what it actually is: Technofascism
On AI, Musk, Trump, and how they're working so closely together.
“When tech CEOs encode their political beliefs into the design of platforms, it’s a form of technofascism, where technology is used for political suppression of speech and to repress the organization of resistance to the state or capitalism.”
Joan Donovan, Critical Internet Studies Institute
[Please note: this is a long read - about 20 minutes, but hopefully worth it….]
Elon Musk has just deployed his media platform to promote Alice Weidel, leader of Germany’s neo-Nazi AFD party weeks before February’s election in Germany.1 This was days after Musk’s opinion piece in a Germany newspaper also supporting the AFD.2
I listened - there was nothing there that anyone should ever repeat, so I won’t. Suffice it to say, it was as at once chilling and toe-curlingly risible as you’d expect to be.
And to be clear, the AFD absolutely are neo-Nazis; one especially prominent figure in the party, Björn Höcke, has a recurring habit of slyly quoting Hitler in his speeches.3
Since the US election, in which Elon Musk spent $277 million to secure Trump’s win4, Musk has also:
Floated a huge political donation to UK far right leader Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party - and then denounced him.5
Campaigned for the release of far right racist agitator Tommy Robinson, who is currently serving a UK prison sentence.6
Actively campaigned to delegitimise Wikipedia, which he calls “Wokepedia”7
In light of Musk’s influence and new para-governmental status, all of this appears to fall quite squarely into Joan Donovan’s definition of technofascism.8
Musk, it should be noted, is now the owner of reportedly the world’s largest AI super computer - which he plans to double in size.9
But Elon Musk is hardly an outlier among Silicon Valley oligarchs; he’s just the richest.
Mark Zuckerberg has just announced the extent to which his platforms - that is Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp - will be re-calibrated to reflect the values and priorities of the incoming Trump administration.
[Product Placement: get Zuck's watch for $900,000]
Meta fact checkers were simply “too politically biased” - so they’re going.
Restrictions on discussions on topics such as immigration and gender had “gone too far” - so racism, hate speech, and right-wing conspiracies are welcomed back (as if they ever went away) .
It’s true that Meta’s moderation practices have been unfair, opaque and arbitrary; that is inevitable when one person has absolute and unaccountable control over a social media platform.10
But that’s not what this is about:
“We’re going to work with President Trump” to “push back against countries around the world that want to censor more”, like those in Europe.
In other words, Zuckerberg is only too happy to do anything the new administration requires him and his platforms to do.
This also appears to fit quite closely with Joan Donovan’s definition of technofascism.
Expect a similar announcement from YouTube/Google/Alphabet very soon.
The status of TikTok currently appears unresolved - Trump apparently wants its imminent ban lifted.11 And if it is, we can expect some performative display of fealty to the new regime from there too.
So, we should be in no doubt:
All major digital platforms are now in service to the Trump Regime
Virtually all other Silicon Valley billionaires have made excruciatingly visible their alacrity to fall in behind Trump by dining with him12, congratulating him on his “decisive victory”13, or donating to Trump’s inauguration fund14.
They almost certainly need to make these gestures, if they are to remain in business.
then there’s AI…..
Without exception, all these billionaires are precisely the same men who, like Musk, are betting all the wealth at their disposal - which is vastly more combined wealth than any humans before have ever had - on their AI systems permeating every aspect of our lives.
In other words, they are betting on AI having exponentially more impact on us than their existing digital platforms currently do.
Which should give us all pause.
After all, what other reason could they possibly have to invest $1 trillion on AI models and data centres?15 No company (and certainly not these companies) would invest that kind of money in a technology that in any way threatens their market power.
And as Musk’s recent ascension to the MAGA pantheon makes clear:
AI is every bit as central to Trump 2.0 as it is to Silicon Valley oligarchs
….and then there’s fascism
In his book, Resisting AI: an Anti-fascist Approach to Artifical Intelligence16, Dan McQuillan presciently wrote about the “resonances between AI and the emergence of fascistic solutions to social problems”.
Dan’s book was published in 2022, just months before the current wave of AI hysteria broke with the release of ChatGPT.
And I’m not sure even he expected it to be quite this resonant.
He says: “Our concern with AI is not that it is fascist per se but that, because of its core operations, it lends itself to ‘fascization’, or solutions operating in the direction of fascism.”
Incidentally,
has just shared an excellent conversation with Dan McQuillan here:
In Resisting AI, Dan cites an older definition of fascism from Roger Griffin that describes it as:
‘Palingenetic Ultranationalism’.
”The palingenetic bit simply means national rebirth,” Dan writes, “that the nation needs to be reborn from some kind of current decadence and reclaim its glorious past, a process which will inevitably be violent.”
It’s impossible to miss the resonances there with Trump’s dark MAGA mythologies.
My personal definition of fascism would add:
Fascism is a violent, despotic fusion of capital, military and state power.
Donald’s Journey
Was Trump a fully fascist leader in his first term? Perhaps, but I would have hesitated to say so.
That would be partly because using the term “fascist” too readily can seem lazy and trite; it somehow risks debasing the historical record of 20th century fascism.
But it’s also because Trump then didn’t quite fit as a truly fascist leader; hampered by process and his own ineptitude, he was never able to amass quite enough power to be one.
Although, that was not for the want of trying.
But plainly for Trump’s second attempt, and even before he returns to power, the fraying contours of the political landscape have now been warped and twisted irrevocably.
And it is in these contours of power - in capital, in state and in military power - that we can immediately see how technology platforms and infrastructures, and in particular AI, will be essential to the incoming Trump regime.
In my next post I want to explore the weaponization of AI - and how Silicon Valley is ratcheting up tensions with China.
[Spoiler alert: Automated AI systems for lethal violence is no longer a debate, they’re in use or in development - and its terrifying]
In this post I want to focus on how Trump is now able to command the power of capital, the state and AI to serve his project.
And how we must see that as a fundamentally fascist project.
On Musk and Trump
At this point, we should note that it’s almost impossible to meaningfully grasp the fusion of commercial, technological, national security and political interests that the alliance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk fully represents. But as it so comprehensively transgresses all structures of democratic norms and accountability, perhaps it is best seen as a kind of emergent “complex”, with echoes of the “Military Industrial Complex”, of which Eisenhower helpfully warned as he was leaving the White House in 1961.
However, whereas the Military Industrial Complex was - and is - out of view, lurking in the shadows of embedded power and geopolitical intrigue, by contrast, this Complex – which, after all, has at its nexus the world’s two most accomplished narcissists - will be spotlit on the world’s main stage, and their own digital platforms.
It is through this emergent Complex that Trump has been able to assume almost complete control over the entire US technology industry, which is now by far the most powerful sector - in terms of profit and market value - in the US and global economy.
So, even before he returns to office, Trump already has more power over capital than he would have dared to imagine in his first term.
Silicon Valley’s (actually quite short) journey to MAGA
In recent months, there has been a lot of discussion in the media about the extreme rightward shift of Silicon Valley - as if this was some strange, inexplicable anomaly.
But these authoritarian shifts are in no way an anomaly; they are a logical and inevitable evolution for a small cadre of billionaries who always advocated for unregulated capitalism. These billionaires have simply amassed far too much power and wealth to be willingly constrained by democratic processes.
Putting this in context, the combined stock market value of the six most valuable US tech companies is currently around $17.1 trillion; that is about two thirds of the GDP value of the entire US economy.
As Cory Doctorow said recently: “if the state does not regulate firms to prevent them from getting too big, then the firms themselves become regulators”.17
Or, as the great anti-trust reformer Louis Brandeis (supposedly) said around a century ago18:
“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.”
Of course, the extreme right wing impulses of Silicon Valley have been hiding in plain sight for decades. Peter Thiel, one of the “PayPal Mafia” (with Musk) and early investor in Facebook, is frequently cited as the most obvious manifestation of that, and his influence can be seen everywhere. But there are plenty of others.
The extreme libertarian strains of tech have been mestastasizing in the warm, swampy alt-right pools of cryptocurrencies, which have particular influence over Trump, having donated $245 million to him19, almost as much as Musk.
It’s important to note that many in these crypto swamps are increasingly jaded even with libertarianism; it turns out that advocating for everyone to do what they want is actually not what they want at all - especially when those people disagree with them.
Consequently, the crypto-bros and leading figures in Silicon Valley are increasingly swayed by the “dark enlightenment” musings of Curtis Yarvin, who yearns for a despotic regime with a tech CEO monarch20 or the even more unhinged theories of Balaji Srinivasan, author of self published The Network State, where he advocates for secessionist crypto-states with barely concealed authoritarian leanings21.
Both Yarvin and Srinivasan have been funded by Peter Thiel. They have an enormous influence over J.D.Vance (mentored by Thiel), and many of Trump’s leading Silicon Valley supporters; Musk of course , and also the hugely influential venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, one of the earliest internet pioneers and author of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto22 (Srinavasan was formerly a partner at Andressen Horowitz).
In the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Andreessen admiringly quotes the Italian futurist and prominent fascist Thomas Marinetti, whose own trajectory offers some insight on where right wing fixations on technology normally lead.
Nationalist UnPopulism
Critical to understanding this authoritarian shift is the near ubiquitous belief across the entire technology elite that Silicon Valley’s founders and investors are a uniquely gifted and selfless strata of preternaturally “smart” super humans23.
In the tech elite’s eyes, their leaders are digital upgrades for the heroically exploited and marginalised industrialists in Ayn Rand’s delusional libertarian opus, Atlas Shrugged24 (as close to a bible as Silicon Valley has, alongside Star Trek series 1).
Elon Musk is inevitably the ultimate embodiment of this ideal; equal parts business genius, fearless freedom fighter, saviour of civilization, interplanetary colonizer, and digital polymath (with apparently astonishing, if somewhat contested, prowess at video games25).
Indeed, for many in Silicon Valley, the main reason to support the incoming regime is simply that it is the closest they will get to seeing South Africa-born Musk as President in his own right.
Deeply embedded in the tech industry’s support for Trump, then, is an intense outrage and indignation that wider society can’t begin to grasp their brilliance; that the feckless public and corrupt politicans have - mostly through ignorance and envy - subjected tech leaders these past few years to unremitting hostility and contempt. For the crime of being essentially superior humans.
It is impossible to overstate how all-pervasive in Silicon Valley’s higher echelons this view is.
Once AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) arrives - as it surely will soon - these tech leaders are quite certain it will be they who commune with AGI to decide what becomes of the rest of us; that is, the lesser humans, who have been rendered entirely redundant and thereby dependent on them.
And just so you know:
When you hear tech leaders advocating for a Universal Basic Income, this is precisely what they mean.
So, if you’ve ever wondered about UBI, even idly, do please be careful what you wish for.
But there are pressing practical reasons for a deep alliance between MAGA and Silicon Valley, as well as philosophical and petulant ones.
And that comes down to AI.
The AI Race
In the past year, as the hyperbolic chatter around AI has rumbled ever onwards and upwards, so too has the increased alarm at the incredible expense and scale of the infrastructures required for the leading AI models, and the energy and resources required to feed them.
Microsoft is building a data centre primarily for ChatGPT that will cost $100 billlion and require 5GW of power26 - about twice as much power as required by Berlin27.
The next iteration of so-called frontier AI models may cost around $10 - 100 billion to train28. And it is reported that every query of OpenAI’s most advanced model requires $1000 worth of computation for every query.29
These immense resource demands are a strain even for an economy the size of the US; they essentially require AI to be a state planned industrial sector.
AI CEOs frequently cite the Manhattan Project as their model for the scale of resources required. Free enterprise this most certainly is not.
(This may well be another reason why some AI billionaires are tiring of libertarianism.)
Marc Andreessen, the techno-optimist venture capitalist, has candidly admitted as much (albeit to his annoyance) when he recounted a meeting with US Officials: “They basically said AI is going to be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government and we're going to basically wrap them in a government cocoon, we're going to protect them from competition, we're going to control them.”30
Like so many of the turns in the downwards slide towards technofascism, these shifts towards a planned AI economy predate the Trump administration. There have already been massive US Government efforts to secure AI supply chains. Think of the US CHIPS act, through which the US Government essentially coerced leading Taiwanese chip maker, TSMC, to build a semi-conductor plant in Arizona31. The Biden administration has also placed restrictions on China buying the latest AI processors and semi-conductor manufacturing tools32.
In the coming months AI companies will be certain to press the new administration to open up new oil and gas fields to power new data centres, as well as divert other energy sources and water supplies towards this immense national effort.
Needless to say, tech companies’ Net Zero targets, already broken, will be expunged from the records. They’ll quickly bury any links to this legacy of woke ideology, and there is simply no other way they can stay in their “race to AGI” (Artificial General Intelligence) .
Tech companies (or at least some tech companies) will also press Trump to double down on tariffs and sanctions against Chinese technologies - to preserve and extend American AI dominance33.
So this presents another key reason why AI infrastructures will come to embody -if we can call it that - the priorities and predilections of the incoming regime;
Any technology requiring this comprehensive level of support from a state, can only become an adjunct of that state. There really is no other plausible outcome.
And that goes a long way to explaining Silicon Valley’s fealty; if they want to keep developing their AI models, then this is what they have to do.
Alignment
In the world of AI, researchers have for years discussed the philosophically fraught “Alignment Problem”; that is, the challenge of ensuring powerful AI systems are aligned with human values34 (although whether those values relate to the humans that use AI systems, the humans impacted by AI systems, or the humans who own AI systems, may well be a far more critical alignment problem, which gets far less attention).
Well, the Alignment Problem has finally been solved;
AI will be aligned with Trump. And with Musk.
The interests of Trump, Musk and the entire AI industry, which is to say the US technology sector, are now likely to be so intertwined, as to be inseparable.
They will be all but one entity.
So we should probably call this complex the Trump/Musk AI Complex.
Any time we use AI large language models, we should be under no illusion; we are brought ever closer into the orbit of this emergent technofascism.
And there is no alternative AI, ethical AI, open source AI or independent AI that can in some way disentangle us from it; by design, AI necessarily requires these staggeringly vast infrastructures to exist, and that only the largest - and thereby most Trump aligned - tech companies can provide.
Would you care to dance?
….And so the Silicon Valley oligarchs, as with their Chinese and Russian counterparts, now enter into a delicate dance, like nobles in the court of a despotic renaissance monarch. If they follow the ordained dance steps correctly (which may or may not be made clear to them), they can expect huge new income streams to open up before them, and any threats of platform regulation to evaporate into the febrile palace air.
But if they put a foot wrong, a fleeting glance could take everything away from them – or worse.
And of course the most powerful of them of all, Elon Musk, is watching on from the gallery, with a chorus of online attack mobs, lawyers and compliant government agencies, just waiting to pounce - and no doubt mop up any orphaned digital assets.
The Art of The Deal
Trump is sure to agree to all of the AI industry’s demands; more oil and gas, more water, more measures againts China and so on.
But of course, as we know with Trump, all relationships are crudely transactional; Trump will always exact a price.
And as we can see from Zuckerberg’s statement, we can see quite clearly what that price is likely to be.
AI and the state
Within days of the election, Trump issued dark warnings about the “Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists, and depraved corporate news media”35 who were destroying America.
He proclaimed that “The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed”.
Trump appears to be directly targeting social media platforms as his first priority - as Zuckerberg obligingly confirmed. But it would be inconceivable for these measures not to be be applied to all AI models too.
As Trump has already said, all efforts at AI regulation will be swept away, and any measures for “censorship” will be outlawed, even the word disinformation will be banned from public officials to “protect freedom of speech.”
This will of course result in the precise opposite; it will mean direct intervention on AI models to ensure their output aligns with the incoming administration’s values, preoccupations and personal vendettas.
In effect, the incoming regime’s officials will make especially sure that AI applications - as well as all our digital platforms, services and infrastructures - are as a synthetically generated always-on mirror, compliantly shining their reality back at them in all it’s dark MAGA majesty.
And whenever we go online, we’ll all get to shine too - in their despotic glow.
It is not hard to imagine the spectacle of vast multi-billion dollar contracts being awarded to Musk’s xAI to expedite the mass firing of tens of thousands of civil servants in the name of government efficiency.
And AI systems will almost certainly be deployed in Trump’s flagship policy: the enforced deportation of up to 11 million undocumented migrants. It’s not a leap to imagine this will be implemented with performative levels of violence, and if AI is involved, of course random arbitrariness. After all, in this particular use case, as with so many weaponised AI use cases, randomised, and even hallucinated targets will be a feature, not a bug.
This then, is the most likely shape of the AI future towards which Silicon Valley is so hurriedly herding us.
An AI-enabled pogrom fit for the 21st Century.
None of this should sound remote to anyone reading this. Indeed, I suspect quite the reverse; it will sound quite obvious.
It is important that we spell this out now, because it should be bluntly clear at this moment, that whenever we are using these vast AI large language models:
We will be feeding this AI Complex the data it craves; we will be validating its existence; we will be normalising the wider deployment of AI – not just in contexts we approve of, but in all those in which we do not.
We will be accelerating AI’s relentless colonisation, manipulation and mutation of all our digital interactions.
And we will be acquiescing to the violences that this AI Complex will direct against its political targets and enemies - real and imagined.
And those targets may very well turn out to be us.
That is because there is no realistic outcome here, other than for these vast digital infrastructures to become hostile - and violently hostile - to all who oppose them.
Because once you set out on this path to technofascism, it’s like stumbling into a conspiracy rabbit hole on a toxic social media platform. There is only ever one direction of travel: spiralling ever downwards, shouting into the abyss, while the abyss algorithmically shouts back at you.
And it turns out, if you’re rich enough to buy the rabbit hole down which you have fallen, it only makes everything very much worse.
So when you hear another breathless report of the latest AI release, and you’re tempted to find out more, make sure to ask yourself:
How will this AI product/model/service insulate me from technofascism?
If the answer isn’t immediately clear, it almost certainly won’t.
Thanks for reading this far….
I’ll add my thoughts very soon on how AI is now a weapon. In the meantime, lt me know what you think….
Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (Molly White - Citation Needed)
Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Dan McQuilllan
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto (a16z.com)
Although it’s important to note, that many people in tech below these rarefied levels, feel very differently
Silicon Valley’s Most Disturbing Obsession (Vanity Fair)
List of power stations in Germany (Wikipedia)
Marc Andreessen on AI, Tech, Censorship and Dining With Trump (The Free Press)
AI alignment (Wikipedia)
Thank you very much for this clear explanation. In recent days we've seen the list of words that apparently US researchers are not allowed to use anymore, including words like women, LGBT+, equity, bias,etc. Reading this I realised that this ban, plus the training is these new AI models will erase information and bias these new models in terrifying new ways
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this! I really enjoyed the read. I'll need to take time to digest it and form my own thoughts about it, but I'd love to ask more about why you think independently trained, small-scale AI models (those created by artists, for example), also contribute to technofascism?