Techno-fascism is characterized by the ways more aspects of daily life are becoming dependent upon digital technologies that may lead to many benefits while at the same time reducing the diversity of cultural ways of knowing and by increasingly subordinating human thoughts and behaviors to the dictates of machines & LLM derivatives.
While moral foundations of techno-fascism align with values of market capitalism and progress-oriented ideology of science, its level of efficiency and totalitarian potential can easily lead to repressive systems that will not tolerate dissent, especially on the part of those challenging how the colonizing nature of techno-fascism promotes consumerism that is destroying the environment, self-rule, alternative cultural and religious lifestyles.
Under proper regulation and before capitalists reached a certain upscaling where competition is virtually impossible, there was an unhealthy but barely functional balance between the public access and private consolidation. Last century witnessed TV and radio as revolutionary tools where artists of little notoriety could reach masses with relative ease. The Internet / AI, as with all the prior technologies, are places to disrupt the status quo, used as tools to craft parallel governance structures for people.
Even with all the good work that are done on the internet and AI, this only bolsters these mega corporations to continue all consuming body of capitalism, the very same that squeezed out any radical bent from prior technologies and people. The expansion of technological and corporate power involves greater reliance upon the use of context free metaphors such as “national security” and “terrorist” to justify using the power of police, spies, sanctions or military against individuals and social groups engaged in demonstrations and acts of resistance against the destructive corporations and enslaving ideologies.
BigTech and company should heed the warning what the Italian Futurist movement provides. This love of disruption and development at all costs led Marinetti and his fellow artists to construct what some call a monument of speed and violence. They embraced fascism, pushed aside the idea of morality, and argued that so-called innovation must never, for any reason, be hindered. Marinetti and the popular movement cheered, for example, when Italy invaded Northern Africa. Italian bombardment of Tripoli from biplanes and dirigibles was the first air bombing in the history of the world, and thus are major technological innovations including H-Bombs and Nukes.
Today, some technologists praise drone warfare with similar language. Though they painted themselves as scions of a new age, the Fascists and Futurists were really ultraconservatives ideologically. Again, sound familiar? In their never-ending quest for progress at any cost, today’s companies are flirting with fascism themselves. How can we imagine a world that for the first time in generations, stops outpacing capitalism with technology and turn around to confront it to take back the mediums for the people once again?
Fascism also relies on combination of conformity in thoughts, acts, rituals and values, loss of historical memory and a perceived crisis or endpoint that requires the collective energy and loyalty of the young and old. There also needs to be a significant percentage of a population that are hyper-nationalists (Bhakts), thinks in clichés and supports use of imprisonment, troll or torture of those who challenges the rise of techno-fascism, especially ones labeled as anti-nationals who will be viewed, as like the Jews in Nazi Germany, as weakening power of the state and impeding progress.
Primary characteristic of all modern fascist movements is uniformity of thinking and behavior, which is directed and controlled by total panopticon systems that track people’s thoughts, foods, travels, worships, investments, behaviors and relationships. The latest in emerging techno-fascist arsenal of surveillance technologies are AI facial recognition systems now being adopted by local police everywhere. The systems of local control involving a variety of democratic practices and traditions of ecological wisdom must first be lost to memory.
Most important threats to what remains of our civil liberties include how social unrest resulting from extreme environmental changes can easily lead to redefining what constitutes criminal behavior. Increased dependency on computer or AI mediated learning at all levels of education contributes to conformity of thinking needed in the techno-fascist state. Lost are ethnically diverse, inter-generational narratives passed forward through face-to-face and mentoring relationships, which leave students exposed to the myths that serve the interests of the controlling elites of scientists, politicians, institutions, event managers, engineers, corporate bosses, capitalists and military establishments.
In order to understand the traditional defenses against totalitarian regimes now being lost, we need to focus more specifically upon the cultural transformations that occur as students spend more of their day in classrooms where computer-mediated learning increasingly displaces face-to-face interaction with teachers and professors who might spark their curiosity to explore beyond the orthodoxies of the day. The many hours of the day texting friends, playing video games and exploring the seemingly endless boundaries of cyberspace also shorten attention spans in ways that undermine long-term memory. Speed and context-free slogans have now replaced depth of understanding and critical judgment.
All this makes us even more determined to get up every morning and work on trying to think and build alternatives to techno-fascism. Solidarity to those of you at ground zero who are resisting. We can imagine how much harder this is for you. Just remember you have friends in many other places.