CYBERPUNK – The New Totalitarian System

In the essay I summarize below (in a shorter version) and in the "Major Themes" section (in a longer version), we return to one of the major themes of our time (and of this blog): the risks facing our democracies, and in particular American democracy right now. The alliance between a less and less creeping authoritarianism and the power of mega-corporations is creating a rapidly accelerating space-time continuum.

In this new essay, imbued with the urgency of our times, Asma Mhalla, a French-Tunisian political scientist and essayist specializing in technological public policy, attempts to account for the speed of the world's transformation. This work, with its aim of clarifying and raising awareness, also reminds us that possibilities for resistance exist if we are willing to change our ways of thinking.

The Summary (of my summary…)

The alliance between a techno-reactionary fringe and a demagogic, authoritarian billionaire is sketching, in the United States, the shadow of a possible 21st-century (techno)fascism.

In the new century, fascism takes on multiple forms: while political leaders, whether fascist or not, or just a little bit, follow one another and resemble each other, are interchangeable even in their frenetic madness, techno-political entities are systemic. They are strategic bottlenecks for our states, for the lives they constrict. When a few technologists with profoundly anti-democratic sympathies insert themselves directly into the democratic process, when they are not dependent on any election, on any popular legitimacy, when they are nevertheless the new pillars of our economic, (geo)political, and social system, this does not simply signal the possibility of a threat; it is already a problem.

The future is behind us.

In the turbulent moments of history, we often realize the shifts and upheavals too late. We don't always grasp the distance between our era and its self-understanding. Let's state once and for all that the future, whether feared or hoped for, is not a prospect yet to come. The evidence is unfolding before our eyes: dystopia is not a projection; it is all around us. We live in the world we once feared with fascination.

For our time, the equation to solve is techno-political in nature. It revolves around the Big Tech-Big State alliance. The Big State is an imperial state that derives much of its power from and thanks to technological giants. For now, apart from the United States and China, few states can claim this status. It is worth noting that only the Big States have managed to cultivate Big Tech companies that have become hybrid and systemic actors. As the possibilities for projecting technological power, and therefore domination, increase, the threats to freedoms worsen in the same proportions of scale and speed. The new techno-political paradigm encounters little resistance: our technologies, our lives, and our imaginations were already primed to accommodate it.

Our relationship to time, or more fundamentally our capacity to think about our time, was disrupted with Trump's return to power, this time with Elon Musk in his wake. They were moving faster than our capacity to theorize the present, a present that, as it was being created, was becoming a historical turning point. (…) A curious "retro-futurism," marked by the powerful slogan "Make America Great Again," which promises the return of a mythical golden age of the past while compulsively working to accelerate chaos, made possible by hyper-technologies, in order to impose a new order.

From there, the unraveling of American democracy would unfold in three stages.

Phase 1 – The Trump I Era, late 2016–2021: the era of "Post-Truth Politics."

 From 2016 onward, facts no longer mattered; they could even be "alternative," according to Trump I. Through the sheer force of social media's attentional regime, one regime of truth could replace another in just a few months. The erasure of facts, the fog of attention, not only created a new regime of truth but a new regime of reality. Confrontation with reality became almost impossible. Reality was disappearing; this was our first shift.

Phase 2 – Trump II Era, 2025, ongoing: the era of "Post-law politics."

Enveloped in the manipulative techniques of post-truth, America embarked further on the deconstruction of its democratic foundations in the name of the fight against the "deep state," the "woke," the establishment, and the bureaucracy. While the promise of bureaucratic streamlining is not unreasonable from a purely public policy perspective, the method has suddenly morphed into a witch hunt: by "streamlining bureaucracy," the prevailing view was to dismantle the checks and balances of the constitutional framework.

Phase 3 – Post-Trump Era: "Post-State Politics."

Only two types of hyper-power remain: the "unitary executive," an old American conservative fantasy revived in its maximalist version in Project 2025, which grants the president free rein, and algorithmic power, both serving a new theory of the state, minimal in its architecture, total in its capacity for control.

Two names haunt Silicon Valley, home to the architects of the technological infrastructure: Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, architects of the neo-reactionary thought from the West, commonly known by the acronym NRx. Let's call this small techno-reactionary group the F-NRx Brotherhood. (...) The F-NRx embodies an elite in revolt, tired of having to compromise with the common people. A split has emerged: the tech elite against everyone else. The elites are seceding.

The post-Western cyberpunk world is one where engineers have replaced thinkers, where the empire is rebuilding itself with algorithms, hypersonic weapons, and rare earth mines. Facing China, the new America flexes its muscles: the return of steel, rockets, and oil—high-tech capitalism is once again conquering, colonial, and voracious. The logic of power is self-referential; it now aims solely at its own reproduction, settling into a dynamic of perpetual, technical, and performative surpassing.

Paradoxically, it is perhaps in its relative marginalization that Europe can forge a geopolitical alternative. No longer considered a strategic partner, the European Union has the opportunity to reorient its alliances toward other middle powers, united not by the same asymmetrical relationship with America.

The European project is not obsolete. It is orphaned. It needs a face, a narrative, a break. No longer a Europe of mere norms, but a Europe of life, meaning, and memory. Otherwise, it will remain a map without a narrative, a territory without a destiny.

Contemporary fascism is not a replica. It is post-ideological. It performs fascism on three levels: form (slogans, clashes, symbolic purification), structure (unitary state, weakening of checks and balances, appointments), and ecosystem (think tanks, influencers, X/Twitter, and Alt-Tech platforms). However, it does not (yet?) have a single party, nor centralized physical terror.

Fascism is never the dominant narrative but presents itself first and foremost as a counter-narrative, feeding on the labored breathing of a political and informational system that is suffocating itself. Its meteoric rise stems from this. It breaks the monotony, rails against “decadence,” and channels the anger of millions of people who are screaming their need to exist. Understood from this perspective, Trumpism is not a rupture but the culmination of a political model, called liberal democracy, imperfect by nature, failing in times of crisis, and sick from the consensus it believes it embodies without any alternative.

Postmodern fascism is inherently technological. In its element, it can amplify at will the blurring of the lines between "true" and "false" in a generalized informational and attentional fog. Images, narratives, and simulacra become more real than reality itself. This simulacrum-fascism has no need to be based on proven reality or even on facts. Its flawed ideology, its internal contradictions, and its internal power struggles are part of its essence. Its lack of direction guarantees its plasticity; it can say and do whatever it wants, depending on the context of the moment, without being constrained by the slightest ideological backbone.

It's not so much that the United States is no longer a democracy, but rather the—more interesting—idea that being or not being a democracy is no longer relevant. At the time of its rise to power, postmodern fascism is an authoritarianism without dictatorship. There's no need for camps (and even then, if we were talking about ICE camps…? Mikael's note) or any kind of secret police; it's enough for people to believe in the regime's omnipotence for them to obey and censor themselves. (…) It's not an illiberal democracy but something else: a regime where citizens believe they are living under the yoke of a fascist power where there are only symbols of fascism… but strangely, symbols that are just as effective and performative as a real fascist organization.

As if seeking a rational explanation for our intellectual inability to grasp the complexity of the new world, everyone began endlessly sharing their feelings of "astonishment." Behind this sense of awe, a new attentional regime is taking shape: saturation as a new political expression of censorship.

Fascism-as-simulacrum draws inspiration from the phenomenon of "gaslighting," a type of psychological manipulation that reverses the burden of proof between perpetrator and victim, dominant and dominated, strong and weak: if the weak complain of violence or inconsistency on the part of the strong, it is they who are wrong, who are actually the persecutor, or even who are insane.

The heart of the performative lie is a statement repeated until it becomes experienced as true, not through its factual basis, but through its social and symbolic effect.

What is said becomes true, not because it is verified, but because it is internalized. It imposes an alternative regime of reality. It does not merely dominate a social or political space; it reconfigures the very perception of the world. It erases contradictions, rewrites the past, sabotages science and disqualifies knowledge, and reverses the burden of proof. It fragments the social body into secondary conflicts, presented as ideological, to the point of preventing any space for discussion from forming, each person entrenched in their own mental trench. It does not refute reality; it replaces it. It eliminates the institutions that produce competing truths, destabilizes the benchmarks of shared knowledge, and transforms the public sphere into a continuous receptacle of equivalent statements. The lie becomes the equal of the fact.

In controlled chaos, democracy can no longer guarantee the existence of a shared truth.

In March 2025, under the guise of modernization, the Trump administration began building an infrastructure for the total control of citizens. At the heart of the system: the megacorporation Palantir, mass data sorting tools, and the merging of dispersed sensitive data. A slide toward invisible, technological, and potentially repressive power.

At the helm of the leading capitalist power, two capitalists enrich themselves, preside, redirect power to their own advantage, manipulate it according to their ideology, automate, reduce, liquefy, and mechanize the state apparatus, which has become a mere technological pyramid. A Leviathan with elusive hyperpower, disseminated throughout the infinite realm of coded matrices.

The history of collusion between politics and economic powers is not new, even in democracies. The difference lies in the scale of power. They are no longer private actors but system actors, owners of vital infrastructure, geostrategic bottlenecks across all layers of cyberspace, collectors of some of the most sensitive data, and they partly shape the nature and tone of our public debates and our access to information on a global scale.

The minimal state is not merely authoritarian or semi-privatized; it is technological. When Elon Musk began his project to purge the federal government, he played with ID numbers, lines of code, and figures, not with real people. This transforms the rule of law, conceived, built, and regulated by and for human justice, into a cold, disembodied fiction.

The mechanisms of cognitive totalitarianism are already in place. Saturation: orchestrating constant distraction, preventing any possibility of independent thought, any critical distance, and even any hope. Artificial intelligence systems: predicting and modeling preferences, desires, and choices before they even reach consciousness. Algorithms: adjusting behaviors to maintain the social and market order, rendering any form of rebellion ineffective. Virtual reality: manipulating perceptions through filters, fabricating images and narratives with artificial intelligence. As in The Matrix, we can become, and in part already are, extensions of the social machine.

A new fundamental freedom will soon take center stage: cognitive freedom. In other words, the right to think for oneself, to preserve the integrity of one's mind, to refuse the colonization of one's neurons. Claiming this freedom is an act of inner sovereignty. It is making free thought a fundamental right, a new dignity to be protected.

The author goes on to explore the resistance movements that are organizing and lists the fundamental freedoms we must defend, before proposing scenarios for a future that is difficult to predict.

It's a fascinating essay that I read twice, almost back-to-back… For my more complete summary and concluding remarks, click here to read them in the "State of the World" section of the "Major Themes".