Good Night, Tech-Right: Pull the Plug on AI Fascism | It’s Going Down
Jan 26, 25
Filed under: Analysis, Anarchist Movement, Anti-fascist, Capitalism, Environment, Featured, Technology, The State
On January 20th, at a ceremony attended by both far-Right and neo-fascist leaders from around the globe and some of the richest tech billionaires in the world, including the heads of Apple, Google, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Amazon, Donald Trump took power for the second time. In exchange for tech elites financially backing his campaign and inauguration, Trump has already announced massive new investments in tech infrastructure, focused primarily around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and has pushed to expand into cryptocurrenies.
The start of Trump’s second term has been marked by a flurry of executive orders, designed to test the existing legal institutions and the loyalty of the Republican party, as he sends active-duty troops to the southern border, calls to end birthright citizenship which is enshrined in the 14th amendment, and demands that his far-Right loyalists be approved by the Senate.
Trump wants extreme executive power, but more broadly, his larger agenda is directly tied to the interests of the tech billionaires who forked out millions to put him in the White House. Since riding down his golden escalator, Trump has built a political machine off of weaponizing anger by those de-classed and imiserated by neoliberal policies, painting the Democrats as both radical leftists and corporate elites. Yet it is these billionaires, who became rich through these very policies, who Trump now works to carry out an agenda for.
Rise of the Tech-Right
This emerging “broligarchy” has been marked by a continuing shift by many tech elites towards authoritarian and neo-reactionary ideas, represented most strongly by people like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, who reject “democracy in all its forms” and call “some form of state-as-corporation.” Yarvin, also known by the pen-name , is a software engineer who called for turning houseless people into “biodiesel,” pushes racist pseudo-science, and advocates for transforming the US into a monarchy, run of course, by a CEO. Yarvin has been cited as an influence by JD Vance, himself a protege of Thiel. Elon Musk, who worked with Thiel at PayPal, and who during a celebration following Trump’s recent inauguration, repeatedly gave several Nazi salutes to a crowd of adoring MAGA fans, also has a long history of promoting authoritarian, white nationalist, and neo-fascist ideals and movements. After buying Twitter in 2022, Musk welcomed neo-Nazis and far-Right influencers back onto Twitter, purged it of antifascist accounts, embraced neo-fascist parities like the AfD in Germany (Musk just recently spoke at an AfD campaign event), attacked unions and labor organizing, and has rallied in support of anti-Semitic and white nationalist conspiracy theories. Tech billionaires like Zuckerberg have also recently begun to move towards far-Right ideas, while Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has cozied up to Trump while suppressing journalists critical of him at The Washington Post, which he owns.
But supporting Trump in the 2024 election is not the first push into right-wing politics by tech elites. In the bay area of California, right-wing tech capitalists have also recently helped engineer and spearhead campaigns alongside “traditional business and real estate elites in an effort to oust some of its most progressive leaders and undo its most progressive policies.” Utilizing a network of AstroTurf organizations, as Mission Local reported:
[B]illionaire-backed pressure groups that have mushroomed in San Francisco, excoriating progressives for urban ills from drug-infested streets to sclerotic housing production, one stands head and shoulders above the rest.
Neighbors for a Better San Francisco Advocacy, the group launched in 2020 and backed largely by real estate and technology money, has in short order become the most well-funded, top-spending organization active in San Francisco politics.
It supplied the majority of the spending to recall then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin in 2022, and was the No. 1 spender in the school-board recalls that same year. Neighbors alone accounted for more than one of every $10 spent in San Francisco political campaigns between 2020 and 2024 — at least $8.7 million of $80.3 million total, according to an analysis of campaign finance data.
The group, a “social welfare” nonprofit founded by two Realtor lobbyists and backed by Republican mega-donors, almost exclusively spends on law-and-order causes, backing tough-on-crime policies and candidates far more than housing, transit or other policy issues.
While the group was initially focused on supervisorial races, it quickly expanded and successfully funneled millions to recall the district attorney, reverse criminal justice reforms, fight alternatives to incarceration and bolster the police department.
In San Francisco, tech elites weaponized and manufactured hatred of the houseless to push through attacks on progressive policies and elected officials, rolling back criminal justice reforms and promoting a return to drug-war era “law and order,” which has helped to accelerate gentrification and displacement in the bay area. This embrace of reactionary policies in a progressive bastion of California mirrors the growing support by many tech billionaires for Trump, which is driven in part by ideology but centered around shared class interests. As the Green European Journal wrote:
There are a few reasons why the tech right is more politically active and visible now than in previous US elections. For one, the group has found political leadership that has been eager to adopt its priorities on issues like AI and crypto (the 2024 Republican Party Platform includes plans to deregulate both industries)…The US technology sector is facing more direct competition from Chinese companies, which has helped create a different investment environment with higher interest rates. This has also caused priorities to change, and venture capitalists are now putting more money into defence companies such as Anduril, the weapons maker backed by the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Government contracts, especially in the areas of defence and border security, provide a stable flow of income. As Silicon Valley’s relationship with the US government changes, so too do the priorities of the investor class.
The emerging bloc of tech oligarchs, who saw the Biden administration as too committed to regulation and competition within the capitalist marketplace, see Trump as an instrument who will cut regulations and taxes, rewarding tech corporations with lucrative government contracts, especially as Musk moves to slash state spending and move towards privatization. Trump’s push to “drill, baby, drill,” is also central to their project of boosting AI infrastructure, as AI requires massive amounts of energy and water.
In short, the technocrats bought and paid for Trump’s presidency, and they plan to cash in on everything: from expanded AI production, laws that favor their companies and shield them from regulations, to profiting off mass detention, surveillance, and war. And baby, business is good.
Trump and the Tech-Right
Such a process has already begun, as Trump has announced a $500 billion deal (mainly for data centers and power plants) with OpenAI, a move that has also led to tensions within the tech elite, as Musk has taken to trashing OpenAI, which he helped co-found, and its CEO, Sam Altman, the creator of ChatGPT. At the border, corporations like Palantir, which was “co-founded by the billionaire Peter Thiel, [have] received more than $1 billion over the past four years,” and are playing a central role in providing ICE with tech. Meanwhile at the Pentagon, “Palantir and Anduril, two major players in defense technology, are in talks with SpaceX, OpenAI, Scale AI, and Saronic to form a powerful consortium aimed at reshaping how the U.S. government procures military technology,” by pushing AI driven “defense technologies.” For the billionaire elite, the future looks bright, “as venture capitalists bet on increased federal spending on national security, immigration, and space exploration.”
And while the war pigs eat their fill, social media companies are hard at work providing the public with bread and circuses. Twitter (despite struggling to bring in money) remains a platform for mass right-wing disinformation, as Facebook and Instagram, owned by Zuckerberg, have rolled back fact-checking while censoring posts about abortion pills following the inauguration of Donald Trump, building on years of deplatforming anarchists and antifascists, silencing pro-Palestinian content, and pushing far-Right conspiracy theories.
It should be stated that another section of the Trump coalition, represented by white nationalists like Laura Loomer and neo-fascists like Steve Bannon, have publicly feuded with Elon Musk, meekly criticizing the tech elite for wanting to create “techno-feudalism.” Despite these attacks, its clear that such bark doesn’t have much juice, as Musk has moved to silence far-Right detractors like Loomer on Twitter and has already set up shop at the White House (although Susie Wiles seems to have frozen him out for now). Bannon’s words also ring hollow, as he has stated he hopes to weaponize Musk’s vast wealth to win electoral campaigns for neo-fascist parties across Europe and “flood the zone” with disinformation. Some on the far-Right might whine about some of their racialist ideological concerns (such as Musk’s support for H-1B visas – which allow tech companies to hyper-exploit immigrant workers) not aligning with the authoritarian class interests of the technocrats, but in the end, they know who signs their checks.
The ideological forces at play within the tech elite are numerous, but it is important to form a coherent critique of them and understand what animates them, and more importantly, the story they are attempting to sell to others in elite circles. Like Libertarians, they see the central contradiction in society as being the supposed restraints placed on capital; be they in the form of state regulations, taxes, or demands from workers in labor unions, on strike, or in social movements. Unlike Libertarians however, they want to use the state to secure access to capital through contracts and actively expand the repressive power of the security state. Like the Alt-Right, they see this overall as an elite project, but while the Alt-Right sought to reach out to upper-middle class college students bound for a career as a GOP staffer or writing for Tucker Carlson, the Tech-Right desires to ‘liberate’ themselves as a class from the supposed shackles of modern multicultural, democratic society. And while they may embrace a totalitarian worldview, they reject fascism as a mass movement for not being explicitly pro-capitalist. Like the white nationalists, they see their project as an ill-liberal, anti-democratic, and anti-egalitarian movement, but while neo-reactionary thinkers like Yarvin and Nick Land may embrace racist pseudo-science, ultimately they want their dictatorship to mimic the authoritarian structures already found within capitalist society itself, not take capital out of the hands of elites and make it work for the nation, much less, the people – even the white ones. The future is here, you just weren’t invited.
Understanding the Changing Terrain
It’s important that we understand that Trump has come back to power during a massive shift in the existing economic and political terrain. As Marxists like Jamie Merchant have mapped out in The Brooklyn Rail, the neoliberal order is coming to a close. Following the upheavals of 2020, the global pandemic, and the attempted coup on January 6th, Biden rushed to pump money into Republican states in the hopes of securing social peace, and pushed back on the growing power and influence of China through various trade war initiatives. This reality has been coupled with a new rush by countries to ramp up energy production to fuel AI (despite the growing threat of climate change) and increasing hostiles between the US and BRICS aligned nations. Against this backdrop, tech elites are throwing the old neoliberal order out the window and hitching their wagon to the global far-Right. Lucky us.
But as we have seen here in the US, the Trump coalition is a hodgepodge of various factions: from Christian Nationalists who want a red white and blue theocracy, to post-Libertarians who dream of a techno-dystopia. White Nationalists like Steven Miller fantasize of mass deportations while working next to oligarchs like Elon Musk, who calls for more immigrants to work in the US through H-1B visas, while simultaneously boosting neo-Nazis. Despite this ideological swamp, what remains clear is that the central push of the Trump administration is to enrich elites through slashing taxes on the wealthy, gutting regulations, and securing massively lucrative corporate contracts. Someone’s getting rich, but it sure as shit ain’t us.
But this reality comes with the glaring contradiction that Trump has long branded himself as a populist that would bring down the cost of everyday items like food, energy, and rent. As the late anarchist David Graeber pointed out, Trump positioned himself as a classic corporatist, who reached out to angry workers with the bedtime story that he would unite with them against financial elites. In reality, Trump has already begun to walk back his claims that he would be able to bring down prices, but he’s also attempted to cement the idea in people’s heads that increased energy production will lead to lower prices for working-class people, despite all data to the contrary. In reality, this push for increased fossil fuel production – by Trump’s own admission – is simply to power new AI data centers, and it is already causing some to see a rise in their electricity bills. According to some studies, consumers could soon see “their electricity bills increase 70% [due to] surging energy demand from AI data centers.” Not to mention, many economists have also warned that Trump’s proposed tariffs could also lead to a further spike in prices, as egg costs have skyrocketed due to an outbreak of bird flu amidst fears of future pandemics, all under the watch of RFK.
There is also the very real possibility that the AI bubble could just simply, burst. As Forbes recently noted:
Andrei, AI/ML expert and cofounder of Technosophics, was even much bolder in his prediction, noting that the Gen AI bubble is right on the verge of bursting. “The influx of money pumped into Gen AI without clear ROI has inflated expectations to unsustainable levels,” Andrei explained.
He cited American billionaire Tom Siebel, the founder and CEO of C3.ai, who has been quoted saying “the market is overvaluing AI” and that “there’s absolutely a bubble,” as an example of the sentiment by many CEOs and experts across Silicon Valley. Andrei also noted the growing resistance to gen AI among professionals and the public alike, which could further deflate the hype.
“There is a rising movement of ordinary people from diverse professions, such as writers, artists, computer scientists, engineers, and philosophers, who found common ground against the gen AI paradigm. This has raised awareness within the general population of the irreconcilable issues posed by technology and the fact that it is being forced onto people by billionaires and their organizations,” he concluded.
Beyond the increasing financial and environmental costs, accelerated AI production also means creating technologies that by the admission of their own creators, will automate out of existence many jobs – and not just white-collar ones. Many fast-food chains are already working to automate out their workforce through AI, from drive through windows to inside the restaurants themselves. This reality creates a paradox: Trump barely squeaked out a win in 2024 through weaponizing growing resentment against neoliberalism; an economic system defined by corporate globalization and a declining standard of living. But as Forbes wrote, “[A]utomation technology has been the primary driver of U.S. income inequality over the past 40 years…50% to 70% of changes in U.S. wages since 1980 can be attributed to wage declines among blue-collar workers replaced or degraded by automation.” The push by Trump to fuel the growth of AI will of course only accelerate this reality. In short, the Bannonite fantasy of “America First” is simply snake-oil: let’s call it for what it is, neoliberalism coming home to roost.
Pulling the Plug
Poor and working people face a multitude of crises: growing wealth and social inequality, the increasing threat of climate change, and the rising power of the authoritarian far-Right. Instead of working to better humanity and attack systemic inequalities, the billionaires have instead run in horror at rising anger against them, pushing to centralize and control even more wealth and power; weaponizing disinformation, elections, and existing political systems in the process. This is why people like Elon Musk need you to fear immigrants and trans people – because the billionaires want you distracted while they rob you.
We need to realize the moment that we are in. We should be clear about the contradictions and the opportunities that this creates for potential organizing and intervention. We should also be resolute in our understanding that Trump will not make the lives of poor and working people better in the US; he is not a solution to the problems caused by decades of neoliberalism, but the acceleration of the capitalist forces that pushed it forward. Moreover, we should work to understand and explain to people the overall project that Trump and the Tech-Right are working to accomplish: that building up the capacity of AI will not benefit us in the slightest. Instead, we should point out the dramatic costs to the continuation of industrial capitalism and the threats that AI in particular represents.
Past struggles and social movements offer us many lessons. We would be wise to study the interventions against tech in the 2010’s by groups like Counterforce in the bay area as well as mass ecological struggles in places like Germany against Telsa’s push for expansion. We can learn from Indigenous water protectors, movements like Stop Cop City in Atlanta, and from Appalachians fighting to stop pipeline projects, as we work to stop the expansion of AI data centers – struggles which are already breaking out all over. Strikes by workers at Amazon and fast-food companies can be used to build bridges and unite campaigns. Antifascists can help to map the connections between white supremacists, the State, and the Tech-Right. The Abolish ICE struggle and the BDS movement can give us tools to push back against tech companies profiting off of war, surveillance, and the militarization of the border and mass detention. There is lots of work to do, but we need to weave these struggles together and explain to the broader population how they all connect.
And as previously stated, fights by local communities against AI data centers are already popping up across the social landscape and will only increase in number. If people are looking for a way to push back against the oligarchs and their techno-authoritarian future, here is your chance. 2025 may be marked less by clashes with Proud Boys marching through the streets, and more by local communities banding together to stop AI infrastructure projects.
The Tech-Right is united, but less by their scattered reactionary ideologies, and more by their shared class interests. They want us divided, thinking we’ll fight each other over the scraps they offer us, or by generating the latest outrage on social media platforms they control. We need to organize and build around our shared class interests, reaching across divisions, around common goals and struggles. We want homes for everyone. We want a livable planet for our children. We want control over our labor. We want to abolish the systems that are destroying us.
In the 1990s, anarchists, labor unions, anti-sweatshop activists, and environmental groups helped mobilize thousands in militant protests against corporate globalization, all under a Democratic president. Using decentralized networks, independent media, and affinity groups, they helped to create a growing movement, rooted in anti-capitalist analysis and direct action. We did it before, we can do it again.
The oligarchs want a king. Let’s give them a peasants’ revolt instead.
photo via BlueSky, artist unknown
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