Techno-Fascism Comes to America

American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now as DOGE, staffed with inexperienced engineers linked to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees.

The historic parallels that help explain Elon Musk’s rampage on the federal government.

New Yorker By Kyle Chayka, February 26, 2025

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump during the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation, tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what, in her book “Planning for Empire” (2011), she labelled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all aspects of government and society.”

In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascistic regime would not be structured the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s, with power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader, although Kishi had travelled to Germany in the nineteen-twenties, as the Nazi movement expanded, and drew inspiration from German industrialization for his Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said, Japan “kind of slid into fascism” as bureaucrats exercised their authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor. As she explained, techno-fascist officials “acquire power by creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.” Today, Elon Musk’s DOGE is the Trumpian equivalent.

American corporations of the twentieth century flirted with a merging of state and industrial power. The entrepreneur Henry Ford promoted a system of industrial organization that came to be known as “Fordism,” whereby the state would intervene in the economy to guarantee mass production and consumption. In the nineteen-thirties, I.B.M. did business with the Nazi government through a German subsidiary, lending its technology to projects like the 1933 census, which helped identify Jews in the country.  As a recent feature in the Guardian by Becca Lewis laid out, Silicon Valley itself has exhibited right-wing tendencies for decades, embracing misogynist and hierarchical attitudes about achievement. The journalist Michael S. Malone was issuing warnings about emerging “technofascism” way back in the late nineties, when he warned about “IQ bigotry” in the tech industry and the willingness of people to push forward digital revolution while “tossing out the weak and wounded along the way.” But our current moment marks a new conjunction of Internet entrepreneurs and day-to-day government operations.

American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses. It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now as DOGE, staffed with inexperienced engineers linked to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.

Musk has slashed the ranks of federal employees, shut down agencies whose authority challenges his own, and leveraged artificial intelligence to decide where to cut, promising a government executed by chatbots such as Grok, from Musk’s own A.I. company. DOGE has gained access to Americans’ private data and developed tools to e-mail the entire federal government at once, a digital megaphone that Musk recently used to demand that employees send in a list of their weekly accomplishments. As Mimura put it, “You try to apply technical concepts and rationality to human beings and human society, and then you’re getting into something almost totalitarian.” 

The techno-fascist opportunism goes beyond Musk; one can sense other tech entrepreneurs and investors slavering to exploit the alliance between Trumpism and Silicon Valley capitalism, building infrastructure on a national scale. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, has arranged his own deals with Trump’s government, including Stargate, a heavily hyped data-center project worth a potential five hundred billion dollars. Apple recently announced its own five-hundred-billion-dollar investment campaign in the U.S. over the next four years, including a plan to begin building A.I. servers in Texas.

However nebulous, these extravagant plans signal a spirit of collaboration. On Truth Social, Trump posted approvingly that Apple’s plans demonstrated “FAITH IN WHAT WE ARE DOING.”

Erin McElroy, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies Silicon Valley, has used the term “siliconization” to describe the way that places such as San Francisco or Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to which many western tech companies have outsourced I.T. services, have been remade in the image and ideology of Silicon Valley. 

According to McElroy, the first signs of Washington’s current siliconization can be traced back, in part, to the Administration of Barack Obama, who embraced social-media platforms such as Facebook as a vector of government communication. For a time, digital platforms seemed to support democratic government as a kind of communal megaphone; but now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the established authority of the government. “There is a crisis of the state,” McElroy said, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode state power” in order to more quickly replace it.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles. Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis, a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean. 

 Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”

Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump Administration. MAGA reactionaries such as Steve Bannon tend to be skeptical of technological progress; ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fascism-comes-to-america-elon-musk?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Science_030125&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d23d24c17c6adf3bf435&cndid=30183386&hasha=432fc0d0ad6543e820e2dfcd39f76c35&hashb=e1c24f6a6459c7d1d625eb2ea55d9dfbbb4633bf&hashc=ac5a1f5526e7292c73f49dfa8fb6d5d0cb87d8773cec3b9b03d38a4ce482d7c8&esrc=subscribe-page&mbid=CRMNYR012019&utm_term=TNY_Science_Tech

March 4, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | 1 Comment

  How the Warfare State Paved the Way for a Trumpist Autocracy

 Biden said nothing about how almost 20 years of nonstop war funding and war making had already altered the character of the nation.

Biden’s designated successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, displayed a traditional militaristic reflex while campaigning against Trump ……… she pledged to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

 In 2024, as in 2016, Trump notably benefitted from the unwavering militarism of his Democratic opponent.

While the warfare state seems all too natural to most politicians and journalists, its consequences over time have been transformational for the United States in ways that have distinctly skewed the political climate. Along the way, militarism has been integral to the rise of the billionaire tech barons who are now teaming up with an increasingly fascistic Donald Trump.

 SCHEERPOST, February 28, 2025 , By Norman Solomon / TomDispatch

Donald Trump’s power has thrived on the economics, politics, and culture of war. The runaway militarism of the last quarter-century was a crucial factor in making President Trump possible, even if it goes virtually unmentioned in mainstream media and political discourse. That silence is particularly notable among Democratic leaders, who have routinely joined in bipartisan messaging to boost the warfare state that fueled the rise of Trumpism.

Trump first ran for president nearly a decade and a half after the “Global War on Terror” began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The crusade’s allure had worn off. The national mood was markedly different than in the era when President George W. Bush insisted that “our responsibility” was to “rid the world of evil.”

Working-class Americans had more modest goals for their government. Distress festered as income inequality widened and economic hardships worsened, while federal spending on war, the Pentagon budget, and the “national security” state continued to zoom upward. Even though the domestic effects of protracted warfare were proving to be enormous, multilayered, and deeply alienating, elites in Washington scarcely seemed to notice.

Donald Trump, however, did notice.

Status-Quo Militarism

President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represented the status quo that Trump ran against and defeated. Like them, he was completely insulated from the harsh boomerang effects of the warfare state. Unlike them, he sensed how to effectively exploit the discontent and anger it was causing.

Obama was not clueless. He acknowledged some downsides to endless war in a much-praised speech during his second term in office. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he affirmed at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.”

…………………………………………….President Bush’s messianic calls to rid the world of “evil-doers” had fallen out of fashion, but militarism remained firmly embedded in the political economy. Corporate contracts with the Pentagon and kindred agencies only escalated. But when Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016, being a rigid hawk became a negative with the electorate as pro-Trump forces jumped into the opening she provided.

Six weeks before the election, Forbes published an article under the headline “Hillary Clinton Never Met a War She Didn’t Want Other Americans to Fight.” 

Clinton was following a timeworn formula for Democrats trying to inoculate themselves against charges of being soft on foreign enemies, whether communists or terrorists. Yet Trump, deft at labeling his foes both wimps and warmongers, ran rings around the Democratic nominee. In that close election, Clinton’s resolutely pro-war stance may have cost her the presidency.

……………………………….. Leading Democrats and Republicans remained on autopilot for the warfare state as the Pentagon budget kept rising.

On the War Train with Donald Trump……………………………………………………………….

While the warfare state seems all too natural to most politicians and journalists, its consequences over time have been transformational for the United States in ways that have distinctly skewed the political climate. Along the way, militarism has been integral to the rise of the billionaire tech barons who are now teaming up with an increasingly fascistic Donald Trump.

The Military-Industrial-Tech Complex

While President Trump has granted Elon Musk unprecedented power, many other tech moguls have rushed to ingratiate themselves. The pandering became shameless within hours of his election victory last November.

“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory,” Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote. “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.” Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, Whole Foods, and the Washington Post, tweeted: “wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”

Amazon Web Services alone has numerous government contracts, including one with the National Security Agency worth $10 billion and deals with the Pentagon pegged at $9.7 billion. Such commerce is nothing new. For many years, thousands of contracts have tied the tech giants to the military-industrial complex.

Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and smaller rivals are at the helm of corporations eager for government megadeals, tax breaks, and much more. For them, the governmental terrain of the new Trump era is the latest territory to navigate for maximizing their profits. With annual military outlays at 54% of all federal discretionary spending, the incentives are astronomical for all kinds of companies to make nice with the war machine and the man now running it.

While Democrats in Congress have long denounced Trump as an enemy of democracy, they haven’t put any sort of brake on American militarism. Certainly, there are many reasons for Trump’s second triumph, including his exploitation of racism, misogyny, nativism, and other assorted bigotries. Yet his election victories owe much to the Democratic Party’s failure to serve the working class, a failure intermeshed with its insistence on serving the industries of war. Meanwhile, spending more on the military than the next nine countries combined, U.S. government leaders tacitly lay claim to a kind of divine overpowering virtue.

As history attests, militarism can continue for many decades while basic democratic structures, however flawed, remain in place. But as time goes on, militarism is apt to be a major risk factor for developing some modern version of fascism. The more war and preparations for war persist, with all their economic and social impacts, the more core traits of militarism — including reliance on unquestioning obedience to authority and sufficient violence to achieve one’s goals — will permeate the society at large.

During the last 10 years, Donald Trump has become ever more autocratic, striving not just to be the nation’s commander-in-chief but also the commandant of a social movement increasingly fascistic in its approach to laws and civic life. He has succeeded in taking on the role of top general for the MAGA forces. The frenzies that energize Trump’s base and propel his strategists have come to resemble the mentalities of warfare. The enemy is whoever dares to get in his way.

A warfare state is well suited for such developments. Pretending that militarism is not a boon to authoritarian politics only strengthens it. The time has certainly come to stop pretending.

March 2, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Technogarchy Goes to Washington

The “Muskification” of Meta and the Free Speech, Fact-Checking Charade

Billionaire tech owners who align themselves with whatever administration occupies the White House undermine democracy by threatening a dangerous consolidation of private and public power.

Project Censured, By Mischa Geracoulis and Mickey Huff, February 20, 2025

On January 7, 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on “Fox & Friends” that the recent US elections point toward the need to prioritize free speech, proclaiming that Meta’s fact-checkers have been too politically biased.

Meta’s new global policy chief, former deputy chief-of-staff in the George W. Bush White House and energy lobbyist, Joel Kaplan, lauded Meta for returning to its free expression roots. No stranger to Meta, during Trump’s first reign, the GOP operative oversaw changes to Facebook’s algorithm to promote right-wing content and advocated against restricting racially incendiary and conservative content.

The Biden Administration also had influence over Meta’s algorithms, as Zuckerberg revealed to Joe Rogan and the House Judiciary Committee. According to Zuckerberg, under the guise of fact-checking, Facebook was pressured to “moderate” (ie. censor) certain information, too, especially around issues like the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 origin, and pandemic policies (including satire and humorous posts). In a recent letter to the Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg lamented, “I believe the government was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” He also noted that tech companies should not cave to political pressures in either direction.

Zuckerberg’s statements and revelations to Rogan, however, contradict that Meta—and other social media platforms, as documented by the Twitter Files—actually do fall in line with the reigning political party. This is deeply problematic in both aforementioned examples as it acts to further erode public trust. Time will tell, but if past is prologue, it appears the opposite has been the trend with Big Tech kowtowing to the political establishment.

Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network and former PolitiFact editor-in-chief, who also served on Facebook’s original fact-checking team, told Poynter that Meta’s 180-degree turn on fact-checking appears as though Zuckerberg is seeking to please Trump and, once again, to conform with the goals of the right………………………………..

Following in the footsteps of Elon Musk, slated to co-chair the Trump administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Zuckerberg and other Big Tech CEOs made pre-inauguration pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration. Taking a cue from the Silicon Valley CEOs, even New York City mayor Eric Adams turned up at Mar-a-Lago just days before the inauguration, presumably hoping to dodge 2024 corruption charges for accepting bribes from and conspiring with the Turkish government.

The Billionaire Row Big Tech CEOs who attended Trump’s inauguration, including Musk, Zuckerberg, Amazon/Washington Post’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, had “better seats than most of the cabinet members.” The opulent optics of that inaugural spectacle did not come about by accident. They were crafted to convey a clear message about who was lining up to support the new Trump administration, with Big Tech’s oligarchs and the digital information interests they represent positioned at the forefront. The role these entities play moving forward should be carefully scrutinized, especially around issues of narrative control, agenda setting, and censorship in service of Trump and the MAGA GOP……………………………………………………………………………………….

The end of DEI could lead to real-life harms

Meta joins the growing list of companies—including Target, McDonald’s, Walmart, Boeing, Molson Coors, Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, and Amazon—that are ending or scaling back their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is “culturally neutered” and could do with more masculine energy and aggression. Statistics show, nevertheless, that women comprise just 25 to 35 percent of tech jobs in the US, and only 11 percent hold executive positions. Juliet A. Williams, gender studies professor and Social Science Interdepartmental Program chair at UCLA, asserts that the term “neutered” is gendered dog whistling that promotes gender traditionalism and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

St. John’s University law professor Kate Klonick told The Intercept, “To pretend these new rules are any more ‘neutral’ than the old rules is a farce and a lie.”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Director General Thibaut Bruttin has stated the “‘Muskification’ of the Meta group’s platforms obeys a political strategy that allows private sector interests to prevail over the need for a public conversation based on facts.” Signaling hostility toward journalism, Meta is accentuating its disengagement from the universal right to access reliable news and information, “reinforcing a model based on virality, at the risk of amplifying hate speech, manipulation and false information,” Bruttin wrote.

……………………………………………………………..The Technogarchy displaces democracy and journalism

The new changes will also permit users to post more acerbic criticism of ethnicity and nationality, which has been at issue in places such as the Philippines and Myanmar and that RSF finds troubling. At present, Meta’s changes only apply to its users in the United States, but RSF warned that new US policies might foreshadow “a global strategy of marginalizing journalism and its actors in the name of a freedom of expression perverted to serve ideological interests.”

Amnesty International reported that in 2017, Facebook’s algorithms “substantially contributed to the atrocities perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people.” How to Stand Up to a Dictator, Philippine journalist and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s 2022 book, documents Facebook’s role in disseminating dangerous disinformation during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential campaign and election, which was “accomplished with a loyal ‘troll army’ that boosted pro-Duterte narratives on social media, while smashing down opposition.”

Ressa warns that Meta’s end to fact-checking and DEI policies come down to safety issues. A “world without facts” becomes “a world that’s right for a dictator.” Ressa is right to be concerned. However, there is an elitist assumption at play here, based on tacit faith in those fact-checkers as infallible, unbiased judges of complex, charged issues such as DEI policy or Russiagate. Ascribing to any individual or group a monopoly on the truth stifles legitimate debate about such controversial issues. Despite its best intentions, a protectionist approach to fact-checking may inadvertently undermine public trust when members of the public discover that fact-checking organizations have stifled fact-based perspectives deemed to be unpalatable. More broadly, as suggested previously, this furthers the erosion of public trust especially in government institutions and the Fourth Estate, both of which are near or at record-low approval ratings, according to the Pew Research Center.

Marc Owen Jones, associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar and author of Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East (2022), views Zuckerberg’s changes as indicative of the U.S’s move toward authoritarianism, which thrives in an environment of disinformation and a manufactured “war against reality.” Getting rid of fact-checkers, Jones told Democracy Now!, signals acquiesce to Trump’s demands, perpetuates the right-wing notion that the United States suffers from a crisis of censorship, and promotes what Jones has elsewhere called “institutionalized violence by algorithm.”

Vaidhyanathan sees it differently because, according to him, in the United States, the government worships corporations. Zuckerberg is not bowing to Trump, but the other way around, Vaidhyanathan told Democracy Now!. “Zuckerberg always gets what he wants out of the United States government,” Vaidhyanathan asserted, adding that, now, Zuckerberg “sees an opportunity to get even more of what he wants out of the Trump administration.”…………………………………………………….

The evergreen need for independent journalism and critical media literacy

Meta’s changes ultimately point to a more productive solution—the evergreen necessity of independent media and critical media literacy. Crowdsourced content, pundit-driven infotainment, and AI can never replace research, investigative journalism founded on ethical reporting practices, and critical thinking skills. It’s only been since 2016 that fact-checking, under the purview of Big Tech, became an entity separate from the job of journalism, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi has noted. That’s a problem best addressed by educators and journalists, not outsourced to Big Tech.

Social media, even in the presence of fact-checkers, was never, and can never, serve as a replacement for the work of an independent free press— one that not only checks facts, but checks the power of Big Tech, government, and the corporate media, holding them accountable to the public.  https://www.projectcensored.org/technogarchy-washington-muskification-meta/

February 25, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment