Techno-Fascism Takes Shape

Last week, Argentina’s president Javier Milei was the star turn at a global rally of the far-right in Madrid organized by Spain’s neo-fascist Vox party.

At the rally, participants professed love for Trump, Israel and unregulated capitalism, and hatred for leftists, Marxists and Islamism.

Milei followed this up by touring California where he met with the Silicon Valley billionaire elite, thumbs-upping with Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI boss Sam Altman.

It was a real mask-off moment for the self-appointed ‘do no harm’ guardians of humanity.

Here we have a key political figure in the global far-right meeting the men who control our online lives and have ambitions to control our offline lives too.

Earlier in May, at the Argentine presidential mansion, Milei had met with Peter Thiel, the chairman of Palantir, the spy tech/data harvesting company which is deeply enmeshed in the US security state. Elon Musk has long been a fan, broadcasting Milei speeches into showroom Teslas.

We’re witnessing the solidifying of a trans-national techno-fascist movement right before our eyes.

Yet there has been a curious lack of mainstream news coverage that would join the dots for people.

So let’s start here: for supremacist tech bros hatching plans to re-configure global society, Milei is a god-send.

He preaches free markets with religious zealotry and wants to abolish the state. He is hellbent on withdrawing all state support for unemployed and disabled people, and has spoken of installing facial recognition every few metres across the country.

This aligns perfectly with billionaires who, hungry for data, need a blank, country-sized canvas empty of sick or poor people onto which they can project their dreams of a trans-human future. Eugenics underpins their philosophy.

They need Milei and the proto-Milei’s bubbling under the surface in western politics to destroy the structures of the regulated welfare state. They need these political acolytes to create the state-sized vacuums into which their software and hardware can slide.

Sam Altman said recently that the AI-ification of everything will mean “the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration."

Milei is a god-send for those with god-like dreams to begin the world anew.

And Milei is hard at work. He’s only been the president for six months, but is already leaving a trail of utter devastation. The cost of fuel in Argentina has doubled, food prices have risen 50 percent, and inflation has exceeded 250 percent. What workers can buy with their money - real spending power - is falling 14 percent per month. American financiers like billionaire Stan Druckenmiller have gushed in praise at Milei for causing “basically a depression.”

Whether Milei can keep this up and achieve the transformation he and his billionaire fan-boys crave will depend on whether Argentina’s institutions, and the people that run them, have the will and independence to resist.

Protestors have been out in force, but Milei has a good deal of institutional support among the wealthy Argentine elite.

But it’s worth saying here that the Mileis, Theils and the Musks don’t want the state entirely destroyed. They want there to be just enough of it so they can grift on government contracts and profit from the military industrial complex.

Thiel’s Palantir wouldn’t exist without the American war machine. The company is a longstanding contractor for the US and other NATO militaries, providing analytics and data processing software for weapons and targeting systems.

In September Palantir won its first hardware contract to build an AI-enabled vehicle for the US army which will “process data received from space, high altitude, aerial and terrestrial layers.” On CNBC Palantir’s chief technology officer Shyam Sankar said the vehicle, known as the TITAN project, will “provide deep sensing to enable long-range precision firing…to deliver outsized lethality on the battlefield.”

To deliver outsized lethality on the battlefield.

You’d struggle to find a more horrifically clinical combination of words.

In the minds of these people then, the state should exist to buy their AI-guided killing machines, but it shouldn’t exist to help those who are suffering, or to give them money or jobs.

There is another insightful component to this story: Israel.

In January, Palantir signed a deal with Israel to provide battle tech for war-related missions. The project “involved selling the ministry an AI platform that uses intelligence reports to make life-or-death determinations about which targets to attack,” according to a report in The Nation. Palantir’s technology is believed to be behind Israel’s Lavender program which indiscriminately murders Gazans and has been implicated in the April attack on the World Kitchen aid convey.

The CEO of Palantir Alex Karp has casually admitted “our product is used on occasion to kill people.”

Milei, no surprise, is a big Netanyahu fan, visiting Israel on one of his first trips outside of Argentina and expressing deep support for Israel’s attempted annihilation of Gaza.

Israel then, far from being a victimized little country standing up for itself in a hostile region, as the propaganda would have us believe, is actually a critical node in the techno-fascist organizing structure attempting to usher in automated genocide and 21st century feudalism.

A techno-fascist future where no guardrails against suffering exist, where our existence provides nothing more than data inputs, and genocide is just an opportunity for AI-learning, is closing in.

So where can we look for resistance to this agenda? It won’t come from the centrists, the Bidens and the Starmers and the Olaf Scholzs whose instinct is to build the security state that bolsters techno-fascist interests.

Resistance right now is coming from some of Milei’s Latin American neighbours. Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, to be precise.

Brazil and Colombia are vocal opponents of the Milei agenda and both have ended relations with Israel over the slaughter in Gaza.

Today Mexico elected Claudia Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and pro-Palestine jew. The first female president of Mexico, she won with the largest margin of victory ever achieved by a Mexican head of state.

Her victory (which puts the turgid choice faced by the US in November into stark relief) is a rare glimmer of hope. A Mexico-Colombia-Brazil bloc that can push against the techno-fascism of Milei, Palantir and US-led empire is now a very real prospect.

Those of us who live in the belly of empire should listen, learn and support those in South America who could yet help guide us away from the worst futures.

*****

“Democrats are trying very hard to bring back covid lockdowns” says Trump in a video which has been doing the rounds on conservative social media in recent weeks.

I smiled.

The word covid, of course, hasn’t graced the lips of a Democrat for months.

As for lockdowns, both sides agree they are a cultural artefact to be locked away forever in 2020.

He goes on to rant about how “we won’t abide by new school shut-downs or mask mandates.” All fantasies at this point, but solid red meat for the base.

Trump’s video however, is a glimpse into the cultural saliency that lockdowns and the “covid hysteria” (his words) still possess for the right.

And it also highlights how, by ceding the public health agenda to the right, Democrats have made it virtually impossible for Biden to campaign on an issue that was central to his 2020 victory.

I mean, think about that.

Amid the second-worst covid wave in US history this winter, the White House said, and did, nothing. When she was asked about whether masks were needed again in hospitals, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre rolled her eyes and said it was a matter for the states.

Can you see Biden making a robust defence of lockdowns, mask mandates even vaccine mandates?

The failure of Democrats to stand up for pandemic policies has allowed the cultural narrative around pandemic policies to drift unchallenged to the MAGA right.

The ‘freedom convoy’ position on covid, mocked and pilloried just three years ago, has become the sensible position.

In polite company it has become more acceptable to say the vaccine rather than the virus is the cause of new health issues.

Trump knows all this.

Biden will not defend shut-downs, masks or vaccine mandates, despite the fact they objectively saved many lives.

The Democrats, aided and abetted by the corporate media and grifting academics, have helped make them toxic issues.

And it is going to give Trump a free hit in campaigning ahead of November.

An incredible L.

The destruction of public health in the US under Biden may end up being his most enduring legacy.

It’s a tragedy.

It foreshadows chaos and mass death if and when H5N1 virus slips into unrestrained human-to-human mode.

It’s also a lesson.

If we don’t have leaders willing to defend public health, especially when public health is in opposition to capitalist business-as-usual, we lose public health.