The Origins of Technofascism

"Technofascism" is a word that disturbs. It disturbs because it evokes a past we prefer to believe unrepeatable, because it mixes two domains — twentieth-century politics and twenty-first-century technology — that seem to belong to different universes, and because anyone who uses it risks sounding catastrophist, unable to distinguish the irritating from the dangerous.

And yet the term describes something real, and abandoning it for convenience would be a diagnostic error with practical consequences. Not because the present is identical to the 1930s, but because some deep structures repeat: the fusion of economic and political power outside any democratic accountability, the cult of technical force as a substitute for legitimacy, the construction of an ideology that turns the interest of the few into the inevitable destiny of all.

To understand how we got here, we need to trace a genealogy. Not a list of villains, but a chain of ideas — and of money — that turned an obscure academic philosophy of the 1990s into a global project of power in the 2020s.

The question, once again, is the one that matters: who pays the costs of this transformation, and who reaps the benefits?

I. Fascism as a response to dissolution: rereading Arendt

Before talking about technofascism, we need to understand what makes fascism — in a structural, not historical sense — a recurring response to crises of capitalism.

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), identifies a condition that precedes and generates historical fascism: the dissolution of intermediate social structures that gave individuals a sense of belonging, collective identity, protection from arbitrariness. When these structures collapse — through accelerated industrialisation, forced mobility, precarisation — a mass of atomised individuals emerges, "superfluous" with respect to the economic system, available to any promise of order, identity, greatness. Fascism is not a deviation from modernity: it is an internal response to it, produced by its own contradictions.

Wolfgang Streeck, the German political economist, has updated this diagnosis for contemporary capitalism. In Buying Time (2013) and How Will Capitalism End? (2016), Streeck describes the long agony of postwar democratic capitalism: the compromise between accumulation and redistribution that had held for thirty years crumbled from the 1980s onward, replaced by a regime of financialisation that progressively eroded the material foundations of the middle class. The result is not a crisis that resolves itself, but a permanent crisis that produces, as Arendt had foreseen, masses of dislocated individuals searching for alternative narratives of meaning.

Technofascism emerges precisely in this void. It brings no uniforms or marches. It brings algorithms, cryptocurrencies, and manifestos about technological progress. But the structure is recognisable: the promise of a new order that owes nothing to existing democracy, the fusion of economic elite and political authority, the construction of an ideology that turns privilege into destiny.

II. Carl Schmitt in silicon: sovereignty, exception, neo-reaction

There is a philosopher who almost never appears in discussions of techno-capitalism, yet is the most precise theoretical link between twentieth-century political philosophy and that of Silicon Valley: Carl Schmitt.

Schmitt, the Weimar Republic jurist who became the crown theorist of National Socialism, is famous for two concepts. The first: "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception." The second: politics is defined through the friend/enemy distinction, not through dialogue or compromise.

Nick Land — the CCRU philosopher at Warwick, the theorist of right-wing accelerationism we encountered in the previous essay — is profoundly Schmittian, even when he doesn't cite him explicitly. His Dark Enlightenment is a theory of techno-capitalist sovereignty: the sovereign of the future will not be a democratic state but a technical entity that decides on the permanent state of exception of the global market. Democracy, in this vision, is the obstacle to real sovereignty, not its expression.

Peter Thiel — founder of PayPal, first outside investor in Facebook, financial backer of Trump — has made this position explicit with a brutality rare among techno-billionaires. In a 2009 essay for Cato Unbound, he writes that "freedom and democracy are no longer compatible," and that the libertarian project must find new spaces — cyberspace, outer space, ocean seasteads — in which to escape democratic politics.

Quinn Slobodian, in the fundamental Crack-Up Capitalism (2023), has systematically mapped this project: the construction of free zones, private city-states, special jurisdictions in which democratic rules do not apply. From Dubai to Singapore, from China's Special Economic Zones to "startup city" projects in Honduras, the pattern is consistent: build enclaves where sovereignty belongs to capital, not to populations. Slobodian calls this "crack-up capitalism": not the conquest of the state, but its progressive erosion through exit — building parallel territories where questions about who pays the costs cannot be asked because there are no mechanisms to ask them.

III. Bitcoin: the political genealogy of a currency

To understand technofascism in its contemporary form, Bitcoin is the most revealing case study — not because it is the most important phenomenon, but because it shows with surgical precision the trajectory from ideology to practice.

David Golumbia, in The Politics of Bitcoin (2016), performed an intellectual operation many preferred not to do: tracing the ideological genealogy of crypto-anarcho-capitalism. The community that developed and adopted Bitcoin did not emerge from a vacuum: it emerged from decades of forums, texts, and organisations combining Austrian monetary theories (Hayek, von Mises), conspiracism about central banks as instruments of global control, and radical libertarianism. Distrust of the state, of regulated financial institutions, of "fiat" money — all positions consistent with a worldview in which any form of collective governance is tyranny and the unregulated market is freedom.

Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever he was, had a more limited and genuine project: to create a peer-to-peer currency that would escape the control of centralised financial institutions. The original 2008 white paper is a sober technical document, not an ideological manifesto. But the project was immediately colonised by the anarcho-capitalist community waiting for it — a community with a precise political agenda and a precise answer to the distributive question: the benefits go to those who enter first, the costs fall on the latecomers and on those who cannot afford to participate.

The subsequent trajectory is instructive. Bitcoin as currency — a stable, accessible, deterritorialised medium of exchange — did not develop. Bitcoin as speculative instrument — safe haven for those fearing inflation, high-risk casino for those wanting to get rich quickly, store of value for those who already have capital to invest — dominated. This is not an accidental degeneration: it is the coherent realisation of the underlying ideology. The goal was not a currency for everyone, but a system of accumulation without rules for those already inside.

The moment Donald Trump — who in 2019 had tweeted that he was not "a fan of Bitcoin" — became the crypto industry's preferred candidate in 2024, raising over $131 million from sector figures, is not a contradiction. It is the completion of the project: turning deregulated accumulation into direct political influence, and political influence into further deregulation.

IV. Surveillance capitalism as infrastructure of power

There is a second pillar of contemporary technofascism that the crypto narrative tends to obscure: surveillance capitalism.

Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), described the economic architecture of the dominant digital platforms — Google, Facebook, then Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — with a precision that has no equivalent in critical literature on technology. The model is not simply the sale of personal data: it is the construction of predictive and behaviour-modifying capacities of human action as a commodity sold primarily to advertisers, but progressively applied to political, insurance, health, and labour contexts.

Zuboff's crucial point is not privacy in the strict sense. It is the structure of power: for the first time in history, there exists a class of economic subjects that knows more about us than we know about ourselves — our habits, our fears, our desires, our points of vulnerability — and that can use this asymmetric knowledge to orient our behaviour without our being aware of it. This cognitive asymmetry is a form of power that has no historical precedent and that none of the traditional political categories — neither the public/private distinction nor the state/market one — is equipped to describe adequately.

Surveillance capitalism is the material infrastructure of technofascism. Not because every digital platform is fascist, but because this concentration of knowledge and capacity for influence represents exactly the kind of power outside democratic accountability that technofascism requires. When Elon Musk acquires Twitter/X and turns it into a platform that systematically amplifies far-right narratives, or when Meta abandons fact-checking and explicitly embraces the Trumpian political agenda, these are not neutral editorial choices: they are sovereign decisions about which public reality is constructed and distributed, made by individuals who answer to no electorate.

V. The climate crisis as fuel for nihilism

There is an element almost always missing from analyses of technofascism: the role of the climate crisis as a political-psychological accelerator.

Climate change is not just an ecological crisis. It is a crisis of the imaginary of the future. For decades, the implicit promise of liberal capitalism was the following: the present may be imperfect, but the future will be better — richer, more stable, safer. The climate crisis breaks this promise irreparably: the physical future of the planet is degraded with respect to the present, and projections systematically worsen.

This rupture produces two possible political responses. The first is solidarity — recognising that the crisis is collective and requires collective solutions, which implies redistribution, international cooperation, shared energy transition. The second is "every man for himself" — recognising that the resources to survive comfortably in a deteriorating world are limited, and that the rational goal is to secure a place among the survivors, regardless of what happens to the others.

Right-wing accelerationism and technofascism explicitly choose the second path. The bunkerism of billionaires — properties in New Zealand, private survival systems, fallout shelters — is not eccentric: it is the coherent practical application of the ideology. If the future is scarcity and crisis, the rational question is not "how do we distribute resources?" but "how do I make sure I'm among the winners of the selection?"

Nick Land had written, in the 1990s, of a civilisation in accelerated collapse toward its own end. What seemed philosophical nihilism has become, with the climate crisis, a prediction that the world's wealthiest have begun to find plausible — and for which they prepare individually, while collectively obstructing every systemic response. Yanis Varoufakis, in Technofeudalism (2023), describes this dynamic precisely: the "cloudalists" — the owners of digital infrastructure — do not need a functioning planet to accumulate rent; they only need their platforms to function.

VI. AGI as the final stake

At the centre of contemporary technofascism is a specific stake that gives it a dimension unprecedented in any prior reactionary movement: artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Marc Andreessen, in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto (2023), formulates the position with disarming candour: "There are no material problems, including those caused by technology, that cannot be solved through more technology." AGI is the culmination of this logic: an artificial intelligence system superior to human intelligence that, in the right hands, could solve all problems — climate crisis, disease, poverty, death itself. It is what in the movement's jargon is called the "cosmic lottery ticket": if you win, you get utopia; if you lose, you get extinction.

The structure of this narrative is theological, not scientific. But its political function is precise: to justify any means in the name of an end so great that it makes any intermediate consideration irrelevant — including questions about who controls the systems, who accesses the benefits, who is put at risk during development.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, valued his company — which started as a nonprofit — at over $300 billion while negotiating with governments and investors for the resources needed to develop AGI. The contradiction is structural: an organisation founded explicitly to ensure that AI "benefits humanity" turns into one of the most powerful instruments of private accumulation in history. Whoever controls AGI controls not just a technology but a new form of sovereignty — the capacity to decide who gains access to a system that could be more capable than any existing institution.

Walter Benjamin had written that fascism is "the aestheticisation of politics" — the transformation of material questions of power and distribution into spectacle, myth, aesthetics. The narrative of AGI as "cosmic lottery" is exactly this: the aestheticisation of control, the transformation of the question "who owns the systems that will govern us?" into an epic narrative about the destiny of humanity.

VII. The pattern: from philosophy to power

Let us recapitulate the trajectory, because its coherence matters.

*1990s:* Nick Land and the CCRU build a philosophy of radical techno-capitalist acceleration, openly anti-humanist and anti-democratic. It is niche academic thought, circulating in fanzines and university forums.

*2000s:* the ideological core migrates toward libertarian and anarcho-capitalist online communities. It grafts onto Austrian monetary theories and crypto-anarchism, producing the ideological base of Bitcoin and the community that develops it.

*2010s:* Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, the PayPal Mafia build an infrastructure of economic power — platforms, venture capital funds, networks of influence — that is not ideologically neutral but coherent with the anti-democratic core of right-wing accelerationism. Land is rediscovered and explicitly cited.

*2020s:* the ideological and financial infrastructure merges with direct political power. Thiel funds Trump and a generation of Trumpian candidates. Musk acquires the main public communication platform, becomes the largest donor to the 2024 presidential campaign, and obtains a formal role in government in return. The crypto industry funds candidates from both parties who commit to deregulation. OpenAI negotiates with the U.S. government for privileged access to AGI development.

It is not a conspiracy. It is something more effective than a conspiracy: it is a coherent ideology that has found its material agents and equipped them with the tools to act.

VIII. Beyond resistance: what to oppose to technofascism

Diagnosing technofascism is not enough. Critique without an alternative proposal produces, at best, paralysis; at worst, the feeling that the future is already heading in only one direction.

*The problem of digital sovereignty.* If technofascism is, structurally, the construction of forms of sovereignty outside democratic accountability, the answer is not nostalgia for pre-digital institutions but the construction of new forms of democratic sovereignty adequate to the era. This means platform governance, AI regulation, taxation of digital rents — not as punitive measures, but as mechanisms to bring technological decisions back to the fundamental question: who pays the costs, who reaps the benefits?

*The problem of common infrastructures.* Zuboff is right to diagnose surveillance capitalism, but her response — privacy as an individual right — is insufficient. The problem is not just that platforms know too much about us: it is that they control the infrastructure of public communication. The alternatives cannot be only individual (leave Twitter, don't use Google) but collective: public investment in non-profit digital infrastructure, open standards, data portability as a structural right.

*The problem of the imaginary.* Here we return to Fisher. Technofascism has a powerful imaginary: the singularity, transhumanism, the colonisation of space, survival of the fittest in a world in crisis. It is a dystopian but seductive imaginary — it promises adventure, excellence, escape from the mediocrity of the present. Whoever criticises it must offer something equally powerful, not just the defence of the existing. Automated abundance for all, liberation from necessary work, knowledge as a common good — these are imaginaries that can compete, but they must be built and diffused with the same energy with which the other side builds its own.

*The problem of speed.* One of the most dangerous asymmetries of the moment is temporal: technofascism moves at the speed of corporate acquisitions and algorithmic decisions; democratic institutions move at the speed of legislative processes and elections. This asymmetry is not resolved by slowing down technology — it is impossible and probably counterproductive — but by accelerating the capacity of democratic institutions to respond. It requires technical competence in public institutions, agile regulatory capacity, real-time accountability mechanisms.

Conclusion: Fascism without black shirts

Technofascism will not arrive with the marches and symbols of the twentieth century. It will arrive — in part it has already arrived — with the promise of progress, with the rhetoric of innovation, with the narrative of inevitable destiny.

The structure that Arendt identified in historical fascism — the fusion of economic and political power outside any democratic accountability, the construction of an ideology that turns privilege into destiny, the creation of disposable masses to whom only emotional participation in the myth of greatness is offered in return — repeats with new instruments but analogous logic.

The question that allows us to recognise it, and to oppose it, is always the same: who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits? It is a question that technofascism makes invisible by every means at its disposal — ideological, narrative, technical. To make it visible, to keep it at the centre, to build around it institutions and imaginaries capable of answering it: this is the most urgent political work of the present.

It does not require nostalgia. It requires lucidity, urgency and — as Fisher insisted — the capacity to desire something other than what we are offered.