To answer a question like “Is techno-fascism a thing?” requires a broader look at the nature and role of technology in human affairs. And oh yes, what are the values that we humans must live by as the epoch of industrial civilization comes to an end, and we face the chaotic early phase of the Anthropocene?
We have lived in a world in which the industrial-consumer political economy has defined most of the things we now consider important. Yes, things have become dominant values, often quite trivial things, which nevertheless override social relations. Things dominate the consumer culture, which is the source of institutional influence on all of us persons, families, and groups. Yet, if we look closely at the trends in “Big Tech,” we are in for a sea change in the ways we are expected to live, or are able to live, unless ‘we the people’ begin to exert much more control over our own lives.
Technological Transformation and Us
For most of the industrial era, we have all been trained to accept the inevitability of technological innovation and our own adaptation to whatever new technology the Technosphere hands us. Many of the new technologies along the way, which are only possible with the widespread adoption of fossil-fueled energy, have provided the means to support an ever larger population and a plethora of consumer products. Industrial agriculture has made it possible to feed far more people than traditional agriculture. (However, organic methods, which are mostly more labor intensive, have been shown capable of producing just as much volume of product, but which contains far more nutrients than the ‘forced-growth’ methods focused on maximum yield with the quickest crop turnaround time.) The problem is that industrial agriculture, by destroying soil ecosystems, is unsustainable, as are most “advanced” technologies in similar ways. It depends on petroleum for artificial fertilizers, having destroyed the natural soil ecosystems where it operates.
As I and many other analysts of the trajectory of industrial modernity have said, the imperative growth of the economy of industrial expansion and growth of capital accumulation by the financial elites, have obvious limits on this finite planet. Ever since Donella Meadows, et al, reported the prediction of the limits to growth, in 1972, establishment economists have continued to deny or ignore this simple but fundamental fact.
Now, the explosion of “artificial intelligence” (AI) computing models, which require vast quantities of electricity to attempt to override human reason, are sucking up huge portions of available water as well as energy, depriving local communities where their data centers are being installed, risking severe shortages of in the near term and even now.
While all sorts of data processing functions can be speeded up with vast increases of data used, such as medical diagnostics, writing computer code, fraud detection in finance, and even military targeting, many dangers arise. That girls school that U.S. forces bombed in Iran was incorrectly determined to be a military target by an automated AI-driven targeting-decision system contracted out to Palantir, a US spy tech company, when any human analyst could look at satellite images and see that the ‘potential target’ was actually a school. Hundreds, mostly children were killed by automatic targeting, because Pete Hegseth wanted to hit a lot of targets fast. Fascists don’t care who or how many they kill, other than relishing the power that killing represents.
Technology, Politics, and Human Wellbeing
In the rush of development of high tech products and data processing capability due to the development of ever faster and smaller computer chips, giant technology companies have come to dominate our economies. As is the case with other very large corporations, these mega-tech companies—Microsoft, Meta, Apple, Google, etc, and now NVIDIA, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.—have become increasingly political in their quest to dominate economies and societies.
The ‘tech-bro’s’ heavy donations to Trump’s inauguration, gaudy White House ‘ballroom,’ and the multi-millions ‘invested’ in influencing elections, are only the tip of the political-influence iceberg of dark money deals. Their operators show increasing expressions of fascist ideology in their pronouncements, with perhaps Elon Musk—‘worth’ an estimated $800-billion, purportedly the richest man in the world—standing out as the most blatant racist techno-authoritarian expression of the fascist worldview. These fools think that they are so smart they should control the world—in their own naïve immediate power-interests, of course, making the rest of us superfluous when they retreat to their presumptively secure prepper fortress-mansions once “the event” befalls the world. Their perspective is both autocratic and apocalyptic, and AI may become their most powerful weapon. Ultimately, it will fail, but may take the rest of us down with the collapse it increasingly helps cause.
Techno Fascism or Our Future
Technically, almost any technology could be designed and deployed as a means of allowing individuals to take more control of and enrich their lives. But that is not the goal of the techno-fascists, quite the opposite. Mark Zuckerberg was one of the earlier ones to use his technology to develop and deploy Facebook’s algorithms to manipulate social media users to maximize views and clicks (and thereby advertising revenue) by inciting anxiety, anger, and hate, while enabling loneliness and despair.
ChatGPT was just sued for the messages it sent a user who then went out and killed another person. Research on the effects of screen time and both psychological development and cognitive performance has now demonstrated, especially for children and adolescents whose personalities are still ‘in development,’ the damage to individuals’ capacity for empathy and genuine human interaction. The Surgeon General’s report on loneliness has confirmed the problematic consequences of more interaction with social media, making face-to-face interaction with other humans more difficult.
Large Language Models (LLM) are indifferent to human values; they operate on complex algorithms that build or organize text based on massive databases of word associations related to the ‘prompt’ they receive from humans. Moral indifference is one of the key negative consequences of the neo-liberal economic model that assumes that the only criterion for organizational behavior is corporate profit. Various forms of mass surveillance can contribute to that goal and to goals of the state. Movement in that direction is already underway. That is as close to fascist notions of autocracy as you can get.
Many people find ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini convenient sources for checking some historical or current fact, or summarizing a long document, transcribing or summarizing the talk in a meeting, or writing a term paper. However, research on cognitive skills of students has shown that the use of LLM’s to write for them results in cognitive decline. And, they don’t much know or understand what they submitted for a grade. How pathetic is that?
At a larger scale, the collective consequence of AI’s widespread use and its deployment for autonomous mass surveillance and social control through psycho-social manipulation—tailored propaganda—or violence, is the loss of personal freedom and democracy.
In the extreme climate emergency now upon us, the primary source—excessive energy extraction, use, and waste—is not being faced by politicians or their corporate benefactors, not even by some of the scientists who understand it. If they did face this crisis directly, AI would be in trouble. The exploding development and deployment of AI products and services is already putting an additional strain on energy systems and water resources—those huge server farms require massive amounts of water to keep them cooled enough to run efficiently.
No imaginary methods of extracting carbon from the atmosphere will put more than a temporary dent in the accelerating increase in the worsening global energy input/output imbalance. The one key necessity for providing a future for coming generations is a low-energy consuming society. That will require a New Great Transformation of the global industrial-consumer political economy. Anything less is part of the “business as usual” delusion.
The accelerating increases in degradation of key Earth System elements, which are rushing toward tipping points, require total transformation to an ecological civilization, in which low energy use communities integrate and harmonize with their local/regional ecosystems. The public discourse has so far failed to face this fundamental fact. The technofascists are increasing their power, and they would keep it that way, and so far are succeeding, except at the local level where many civic leaders recognize the direct damage massive data centers (server farms) do to local/regional water supplies and electricity systems. They are also standing up against similar threats to their communities’ resource bases by the conversion of large warehouses to vast concentration camps to store victims of the white nationalist move to purge the nation of as many people of color as they can. Some people are waking up to the danger of all forms of fascism, which is definitely a thing.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 