Is the United States moving into a new political formation that is not fascism in the old sense, but something even colder: a “techno-oligarchy” that seeks to replace human judgment, democratic process, and the rule of law with automated systems of control? I explore this in my latest Substack essay (see link in comments).

We need to zero in on the deep transition now underway: from law, which is slow, interpretive, and mediated by human beings, to code, which executes instantly and admits no appeal. In such a system, institutions like government, journalism, universities, and even basic rights can be dissolved into data flows and private platforms. AI does not simply assist governance. Increasingly, powerful actors imagine AI becoming governance. What used to require deliberation, friction, and accountability gets replaced by machine-speed decision-making, whether in housing, employment, policing, surveillance, or war.

Reviewing Anton Shekhovtsov’s analysis of “techno-oligarchy,” I argue that this order does not mobilize society around a collective destiny. It hollows out the state while preserving coercion. It treats human beings not as citizens but as units of value, risk, and utility. In this framework, those who fall behind can be excluded, locked out, or even erased. After all, human beings are seen as obsolete, slowing down the progress toward a cyborg utopia.

In the U.S., we are living in a failed state where the system pushes growing numbers of Americans toward homelessness, despair and rage. As inequality deepens and democratic channels are blocked, resistance may spread in unpredictable forms. If the ruling class refuses to meet basic human needs, social breakdown, resistance and revolt will become rational alternatives to many. 

 

Addendum: We have been inundated to be canonicals by our government. We have been taught since birth to be motley worms, and clowns in the court of the hell created to sustain our pitiful existence of slavery by those who rule us, and to not only accept it, but defend it.