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TECHNO-FASCISM COMES TO AMERICA  
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Kyle Chayka
February 26, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ An unelected tech billionaire has so much power over the
government. Tech titans fell in line behind Trump, MAGA-style populism
is giving way to an optimization-oriented vision for the country’s
future. Historic parallels help explain Musk’s rampage. _

Illustration by Ariel Davis // The New Yorker,

 

When a phalanx of the top Silicon Valley executives—Mark Zuckerberg
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Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk
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and Google’s Sundar Pichai—aligned behind President Trump
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the Inauguration in January, many observers saw an allegiance based on
corporate interests. The ultra-wealthy C.E.O.s were turning out to
support a fellow-magnate, hoping perhaps for an era of deregulation,
tax breaks, and anti-“woke” cultural shifts. The historian Janis
Mimura saw something more ominous: a new, proactive union of industry
and governmental power, wherein the state would drive aggressive
industrial policy at the expense of liberal norms. In the second Trump
Administration, a class of Silicon Valley leaders was insinuating
itself into politics in a way that recalled one of Mimura’s primary
subjects of study: the élite bureaucrats who seized political power
and drove Japan into the Second World War. “These are experts with a
technological mind-set and background, often engineers, who now have a
special role in the government,” Mimura told me. The result is what,
in her book “Planning for Empire
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(2011), she labelled “techno-fascism”: authoritarianism driven by
technocrats. Technology “is considered the driving force” of such
a regime, Mimura said. “There’s a sort of technicization of all
aspects of government and society.”

In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern
China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism.
Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed
to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the
collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known
as _zaibatsu_, he instituted a policy of forced industrial
development based on the exploitation of the local population. When
Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a
clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he
pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the
expense of private interests and labor rights. This fascistic regime
would not be structured the same way as Mussolini’s or Hitler’s,
with power concentrated in the hands of a single charismatic leader,
although Kishi had travelled to Germany in the nineteen-twenties, as
the Nazi movement expanded, and drew inspiration from German
industrialization for his Manchurian project. Instead, Mimura said,
Japan “kind of slid into fascism” as bureaucrats exercised their
authority behind the scenes, under the aegis of the Japanese emperor.
As she explained, techno-fascist officials “acquire power by
creating these supra-ministerial organs and agencies, subgroups within
the bureaucracy that are unaccountable.” Today, Elon
Musk’s _DOGE_
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the Trumpian equivalent.

American corporations of the twentieth century flirted with a merging
of state and industrial power. The entrepreneur Henry Ford promoted a
system of industrial organization that came to be known as
“Fordism,” whereby the state would intervene in the economy to
guarantee mass production and consumption. In the nineteen-thirties,
I.B.M. did business with the Nazi government through a German
subsidiary, lending its technology to projects like the 1933 census,
which helped identify Jews in the country. As a recent feature
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the _Guardian_ by Becca Lewis laid out, Silicon Valley itself has
exhibited right-wing tendencies for decades, embracing misogynist and
hierarchical attitudes about achievement. The journalist Michael S.
Malone was issuing warnings
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emerging “technofascism” way back in the late nineties, when he
warned about “IQ bigotry” in the tech industry and the willingness
of people to push forward digital revolution while “tossing out the
weak and wounded along the way.” But our current moment marks a new
conjunction of Internet entrepreneurs and day-to-day government
operations. American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical
abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with, in the vein of
intermittent fasting or therapeutic ketamine doses
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It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested
right now as _DOGE_, staffed with inexperienced engineers
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to Musk’s own companies, rampages through the federal government.

Musk has slashed the ranks of federal employees, shut down agencies
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authority challenges his own, and leveraged artificial intelligence to
decide where to cut, promising a government executed by chatbots such
as Grok, from Musk’s own A.I. company. _DOGE_ has gained access to
Americans’ private data and developed tools to e-mail the entire
federal government at once, a digital megaphone that Musk recently
used to demand that employees send in a list of their weekly
accomplishments
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As Mimura put it, “You try to apply technical concepts and
rationality to human beings and human society, and then you’re
getting into something almost totalitarian.” The techno-fascist
opportunism goes beyond Musk; one can sense other tech entrepreneurs
and investors slavering to exploit the alliance between Trumpism and
Silicon Valley capitalism, building infrastructure on a national
scale. Sam Altman
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the C.E.O. of OpenAI
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has arranged his own deals with Trump’s government, including
Stargate, a heavily hyped data-center project worth a potential five
hundred billion dollars. Apple recently announced its own
five-hundred-billion-dollar investment campaign in the U.S. over the
next four years, including a plan to begin building A.I. servers in
Texas. However nebulous, these extravagant plans signal a spirit of
collaboration. On Truth Social, Trump posted approvingly that
Apple’s plans demonstrated “FAITH IN WHAT WE ARE DOING.”

Erin McElroy, a geographer at the University of Washington who studies
Silicon Valley, has used the term “siliconization” to describe the
way that places such as San Francisco or Cluj-Napoca, Romania, to
which many western tech companies have outsourced I.T. services, have
been remade in the image and ideology of Silicon Valley. According to
McElroy, the first signs of Washington’s current siliconization can
be traced back, in part, to the Administration of Barack Obama, who
embraced social-media platforms such as Facebook as a vector of
government communication. For a time, digital platforms seemed to
support democratic government as a kind of communal megaphone; but
now, a decade later, technology seems to be supplanting the
established authority of the government. “There is a crisis of the
state,” McElroy said, and Silicon Valley may be “trying to corrode
state power” in order to more quickly replace it.

Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers
know better than anyone else: they can do better at disseminating
information, at designing an office, at developing satellites and
advancing space travel. By the same logic, they must be able to govern
better than politicians and federal employees. Voguish concepts in
Silicon Valley such as seasteading and “network states” feature
independent, self-contained societies running on tech principles.
Efforts to create such entities have either failed or remained
confined to the realm of brand-building, as in the startup Praxis
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a hypothetical plan for a new tech-driven city on the Mediterranean.
Under the new Trump White House, though, the U.S. government is being
offered up as a guinea pig, McElroy said. “Now that we’ve got Musk
running the state, I don’t know if they need their little offshore
bubbles as much as they thought they did before.”

Such visions of a technologized society represent a break from the
Make America Great Again populism that drove the first Trump
Administration. _MAGA_ reactionaries such as Steve Bannon
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to be skeptical of technological progress; as the journalist James
Pogue has explained
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their goal is to reclaim an American culture “thought to be lost
after decades of what they see as globalist technocracy.” Bannon has
denounced Silicon Valley’s ideology as “technofeudalism” and
declared war on Musk. He sees it as antihuman, with U.S. citizens
turned into “digital serfs” whose freedom is delimited by tech
companies. In a January interview
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Ross Douthat, of the _Times_, Bannon said, “They have to be
stopped. If we don’t stop it, and we don’t stop it now, it’s
going to destroy not just this country, it’s going to destroy the
world.” Whereas the _MAGA_ right wants to restore things as they
were (or as they imagine things were), the tech right wants to, in
Mark Zuckerberg’s phrasing, break things. In
the _Times_ interview, Bannon called Musk “one of the top
accelerationists,” referencing another technology-inflected
political ideology that treats chaos as an inevitability.

Accelerationism has been popularized in the past decade by the British
philosopher Nick Land, who is part of the so-called neo-reactionary or
Dark Enlightenment movement populated by figures including Curtis
Yarvin, a former programmer and blogger whose proposals for an
American monarchy
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enjoyed renewed relevance during Trump 2.0. The accelerationist
attitude is, as Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at
Chapman University who studies accelerationism, put it to me, “This
collapse is going to come anyway—let’s rip the Band-Aid.”
Accelerationism emerged from Karl Marx’s idea that, if the
contradictions of capitalism become exaggerated enough, they will
inspire proletarian revolution and a more egalitarian society will
emerge. But Molle identifies what he calls Muskian
“techno-accelerationism” as having a different end: destroying the
existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with
engineers at the top. Musk “has to completely break any kind of
preëxisting government architecture to impose his own,” Molle said.
He added that a government thoroughly overhauled by Musk might run a
bit like the wireless system that operates Teslas, enabling the
company to theoretically update how your car works at any moment:
“You’re allowed some agency, but they are still in control, and
they can still intervene if the course is not going in the direction
that it is supposed to go to maximize efficiency.”

Techno-fascism’s cold-blooded pursuit of efficiency quickly results
in a state of alienation that may not be appealing to either side of
the political spectrum. If Japan is any example, the collaboration
between technocrats and right-wing politicians is unlikely to last
forever. In 1940, the Japanese Prime Minister announced the New Order
movement, which sought to overhaul the government’s structure to
create a single-party state with absolute power. Mimura, the
historian, said, “It reminds you a little bit of now: everything
needs to be fixed, all at once. It is a little eerie to draw that
historical comparison: this is the New Order in America.” Yet the
power of Japan’s technocrats began to wane. When the country started
faring poorly in the war, the military pushed to continue the campaign
past the point that technocrats considered feasible. Kishi, the
architect of technocratic Manchuria, left the government in 1944.
Still, as Mimura explained, the bureaucrats had no political
constituency or party to hold them accountable for their
techno-fascistic program. When the U.S. sought to rebuild Japan, in
part as a counterbalance to Soviet power in the region, Kishi and his
colleagues were the ones who set about industrializing the nation once
more. Their status as unelected officials meant, ironically, that they
could stage a return to politics without “any blood on their
hands,” Mimura said. In 1955, Kishi helped establish a new political
party, and a few years later he became Prime Minister.

_[KYLE CHAYKA [[link removed]] is
a staff writer at The New Yorker. His column, Infinite Scroll
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people and platforms shaping the Internet. His books include
“Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture
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* Elon Musk
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* Fascism
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* federal government
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump Administration
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* Trump 2.0
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* Administrative Coup
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* power grab
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* regime change
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* Silicon Valley
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* World War II
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* Nazi Germany
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* Imperial Japan
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* AI
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* Technology
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* information technology
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* Industrial policy
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* artificial intelligence
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