429 • let. 62, 2/2025
• Intensification of the Polycrisis and the Rise of a Techno-Oligarchic Ideology In the USA
429 • let. 62, 2/2025
Blaž VREČKO ILC*
INTENSIFICATION OF THE POL YCRISIS 
AND THE RISE OF A TECHNO-
OLIGARCHIC IDEOLOGY IN THE USA**
Abstract. The article analyses the techno-oligarchic ideology in the USA 
during the 2
nd
 Trump Administration and the implications it holds for 
tackling the climate/ecological crisis. It argues that this ideology is a novel, 
far-right political ideology of the US techno-oligarchy whose rise was pre-
dicated on intensification of the polycrisis. Its central purpose is to expand 
the techno-oligarchy’s influence, power and wealth, and squash opposition 
to its dominance and any visions/policies that critically interrogate the ex-
isting ecologically unsustainable capitalist model of growth and technolo-
gical development. By analysing its central characteristics, its re-imagining 
of the state and political institutions via the introduction of AI, and in the 
context of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, the article shows that its 
novel nature stems from the centrality of technological development and 
technology(ies) in its oligarchic, anti-democratic, repressive, neo-imperial, 
eugenic, hyper-capitalist, extractive and destructive vision of society.
Keywords: polycrisis, techno-oligarchy, far-right political ideology, the 
state, AI, genocide.
INTRODUCTION
The following article analyses the rise of a new far-right ideology, a tech-
no-oligarchic ideology, which can be observed in the USA in the context of the 
2
nd
 Trump Administration and the centrality of the tech-oligarchs (e.g., Elon 
Musk)
1
 in it. This rise could have a crucial impact on the global order, especially 
in relation to an intensification of the polycrisis (above all the climate/ecological 
crisis affecting it) and the fact that the USA is at the centre of this order. An order 
1 
Musk, the richest tech-oligarch, owner/CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, X, and other companies, became 
the de facto head of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) to lead Trump’s effort to “make gov-
ernment more lean and efficient”.
 *   Blaž Vrečko Ilc, PhD, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, 
Slovenia, e-mail: blaz.vreckoilc@fdv.uni-lj.si.
 ** Research article.
  DOI: 10.51936/tip.62.2.429

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that is capitalist (the logic of the continuous expansion of capital and exploita-
tion of labour and natural resources), West-dominated, and neo-imperial (built 
on past exploitative, extractive imperial structures and asymmetrical relations of 
power, wealth and influence), ecologically unsustainable and historically prone 
to crises. Today’s polycrisis can be considered as qualitatively different since the 
various crises (from ecological to geopolitical, social and political) do not have 
clear boundaries and are not mono-causal, they are quite a complex set of vari-
ous shocks to the system and their joint effect is worse than the mere sum of 
their individual effects (Tooze 2022). Its effects are also intensifying and have 
more directly started to affect the West, specifically the USA.
We initially understand the rise of techno-oligarchic ideology as a specific 
response on the part of the American elites to the polycrisis. Given that in the 
polycrisis there is no return to normal (Tooze 2022), we initially argue that the 
rise of a techno-oligarchic ideology and its central characteristics must be seen 
as the rise of a novel political ideology that could shape the USA’s future and, 
crucially, could generally have a negative impact on sustainably and democrat-
ically tackling the polycrisis. This rise must be viewed in the context of a novel 
central part of the capitalist class – the techno-oligarchy – that utilises its power 
derived from its novel centrality in the political economy to assert its direct polit-
ical power to achieve hegemony and thereby the conditions to further consolid-
ate its power, wealth and influence in the setting of the polycrisis (see Hočevar 
and Vodovnik 2025; Sadowski 2025). Crises produce novel openings for political 
struggle to articulate and implement fresh visions of society. The polycrisis is no 
exception because one of its central dimensions is the political destabilisation of 
the ideological consensus among the major political forces concerning the future 
of society.
In modern capitalist societies it is the political sphere that is vital for articu-
lating and disseminating novel visions of the order, and rationalising and legit-
imising its specific transformations (Banjac 2025; Hočevar and Lukšič 2018; 
Zevnik Tomazin 2025). The political is critical as it is a field of strategically (re)
ordering other socio-political-economic relations, structures and institutions 
(Foucault 2001). It is the central sphere where actors articulate and politicise spe-
cific issues and solutions in order to achieve strategic goals. There is a continu -
ous contestation of various visions promoted by specific actors and formed into 
specific political ideologies. The latter are a coherent set of ideas that establish 
the basis for organised political action to preserve, modify or overthrow existing 
systems of power (Heywood 2021). They are an instrument of political mobilisa-
tion and include a critique/celebration of the existing order, a vision of a desired 
future order, and the theory of political change/consolidation. Their success is 
related to the extent that their views on particular concepts become normalised. 
Each political ideology has a cluster of core concepts, which ensures coherence in 
spite of variations concerning the adjacent and peripheral concepts and notwith-
standing their ambivalences and contradictions (Freeden 1998).

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The political struggle is always-already unequal as the capitalist nature of 
modern liberal representative US democracy inherently subverts the fantasy of 
political pluralism and its notions of equal competitions among interests. The 
US political system has strong oligarchic tendencies whereby corporations and 
the wealthy disproportionally influence political decisions (see Gilens and Page 
2014), which is understandable when we consider that the power of US capitalists 
rests not only on the political-ideological sphere but is tied to the repressive state 
apparatus and their economic power that determines the living conditions of all 
societal groups (Mau 2023).
We argue that the techno-oligarchic ideology is a vision of a novel oligarchy 
articulated, promoted and implemented by its individual and collective mem-
bers. Oligarchy in general refers to a system in which a wealthy minority holds 
and maintains power at the expense of the common good and by excluding the 
majority from political power. The US political system can be understood as a 
form of oligarchy where the super-rich control governance. Yet they have done 
this in an indirect way through influence over impersonal state institutions, 
making the USA a form of civil oligarchy. The tech-oligarchic ideology promotes 
a mutation of this system into a ruling oligarchy where the oligarchs play an act-
ive role in consolidating their power, wealth and influence and govern directly 
in a collective manner via institutions and infrastructure that they themselves 
control (see Van den Bosch 2025). Here the technological dimension plays a 
central role as the techno-oligarchy derives its strength not only from its wealth 
but above all from their control over the core technological infrastructure that 
society needs for its functioning and survival. This enables them to imagine and 
potentially implement a novel intrusive system of coercion, manufacturing of 
consent and determining the living conditions of individuals and communities 
to assure public obedience and maintain control. Despite technology(ies) playing 
a role in previous political ideologies (e.g., in liberalism and socialism) and play-
ing a central role in the foundational ideological legitimisation of the capitalist 
social form (Mau 2023), we argue that technology(ies) and technological devel-
opment play an unprecedented central role in the techno-oligarchic ideology. 
Upgrading our materialist framework with neo-luddite analytics, we initially 
argue that technology(ies) and technological development are conditioned by 
the capitalist social form and its imperatives. And that they are determined by a 
set of choices made by the capitalists which are intended to reinforce their power 
(asymmetrical power relations) in the class struggle, their domination over com-
munities and workers (and users of technology) and curtailing their autonomy, 
enhance their capabilities for expanding the accumulation of capital and exploit-
ation of workers and natural resources (Merchant 2023).
In the context of the above framework, the core question that will guide us 
in our analysis concerning the rise of a techno-oligarchic ideology is what are 
the conditions for its rise and crucially what is its core set of ideological notions, 
and which implications do they hold for the present and the future of not just the 

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US order but also the global implications for tackling the most prescient issues, 
primarily the intensifying climate/ecological crisis.
 INTENSIFICATION OF THE POL YCRISIS AND THE IDEOLOGICAL-
MATERIAL CONDITIONS FOR THE RISE OF A TECHNO-OLIGARCHIC 
IDEOLOGY
Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic and the succession of ‘historical’ nat-
ural disasters, the polycrisis has started to massively affect the USA. 2024 was 
the hottest year on record globally and a year of catastrophic hurricanes, floods, 
droughts and fires that continued into 2025.
2
 The crisis was also societal, geopol-
itical, economic and public health-related and, combined, these crises were truly 
unprecedented and have led to an intensification of the existing political crisis. 
Trump’s victory in the US presidential election of 2024 and the intensification of 
the polycrisis under Biden has put to rest the fantasy of centrist political forces
3
 
that the first Trump Administration was an aberration (see Frank 2020). The 
worsening of the climate crisis, rampant inflation, uneven economic growth and 
exploding inequality, falling life expectancy, the plethora of intensified geopolit-
ical crises that have further destabilised the US-dominated global order demon-
strate the specific limits of the US-led western powers (Russo-Ukraine war), their 
belligerent nature (trade war on China) and their explicit hypocritical, neocolo-
nial, racist nature by enabling the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. These crises 
show that destabilisation is a consequence of the constitutive contradictions of 
the capitalist global neo-imperial order. The latter is ecologically and socially 
unsustainable due to its organising imperatives and logic of ever-expanding cap-
ital accumulation. This has inevitably led to the unsustainable exploitation of 
finite natural resources, ecological catastrophe(s) and a general degradation of 
living conditions, ever increasing levels of exploitation and domination of people 
as workers, carers, and further neo-colonial expropriation, exploitation and 
extermination of third-world populations and first-world marginalised popula-
tions. It has caused ever stronger geopolitical competition for strategic resources, 
control over crucial value chains and general speculative financialisation and 
assetisation of social and natural life as the avenues for expansive growth become 
harder and financial bubbles are becoming bigger and more dangerous. It has 
also led to higher levels of inequality and growing isolation and segregation of 
elites from the lives of the common people and escalated discontent of common 
citizens with the existing order and greater political radicalisation, especially in 
Western countries that are inextricably tied to re-articulated and novel political 
2 
See https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-202413.
3 
It refers to all political forces that subscribe to a variation of the status quo concerning the fun-
damental organisation of society on the basis of capitalist logic and imperatives of continuous growth, 
commodification and the private ownership of the means of production and the private property system 
and the capitalist sovereign nation state and the neo-imperial global system of geopolitical domination 
and capitalist exploitation.

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ideologies promoting various visions of a future order that would specifically 
resolve the polycrisis (Dunlap 2024; Patel and Moore 2017; Vodovnik 2025). 
The most central expression of these destabilisations was the rise of left-wing 
populist and (far)right-wing quasi-populist movements and the radicalisation of 
the centrist political forces in cracking down on the discontent targeting primar-
ily populist left movements that were anti-systemic (Frank 2020). Centrist and 
far-right visions represent pro-or-hyper systemic ideologies that differ only in 
the ways in which specific constitutive elements of the existing unsustainable 
capitalist neo-imperial order are being intensified. The far-right ‘alternative’ is a 
more sadistic version of the existing order with regard to the oppression of mar-
ginalised communities (e.g., immigrants, Native American, Latino and Black 
communities, the LGBTQ community) and above all oppression against all (e.g., 
homeless, poor, disabled) that do not conform to the ‘normal productive’ Amer-
ican population and its ‘natural’ hierarchies where wealth and economic success 
is perceived as directly linked to the moral and biological/racial superiority of 
existing elites. Hence the partial fascistic leanings of these visions concerning 
the state where it is imagined as a tool of oppression of marginalised communit-
ies and of workers and their autonomous organised power. A tool for destroying 
any emancipatory potential and forces. A tool for materially strengthening cap-
italist oligarchy (plutocrats) by expanding the repressive apparatuses (the police, 
the military, the prison system, secret services) targeting the marginalised and 
workers (the law and order doctrine) and also via the destruction of state capa-
cities to provide material benefits to marginalised communities and at least to 
partially hold corporations and capitalist responsible (e.g., the minimum wage, 
working conditions, workers’ rights, ecological standards) that were gained 
through successful past democratic emancipatory struggles. These visions ideo-
logically strengthen the capitalist oligarchy as they subscribe to the ideological 
tenet concerning law and its application since they explicitly make a distinction 
between the in-group(s) that the law protects but does not bind and the out-
groups whom the law does not protect but binds (Harris 2023).
The similarity of centrist and far-right ideologies can also be traced to their 
similar veneration of technologies and technological development and the gen-
eral constitutive capitalist techno-deterministic, utopistic, solutionist ideology. 
Both the founders/CEOs of technological corporations are imagined as inher-
ently beneficial for the progress of humanity, for a continuous resolution of sub-
sequent issues and problems, and as an expression of the genius and superiority 
of a nation, a “race”, a civilisation (McQuillan 2023). This common feature is 
essential for understanding the context of the rise of the far-right techno-olig-
archic ideology and the changing political allegiance of most of the crucial Sil-
icon Valley (CA, USA) adjacent techno-oligarchs that switched sides and began 
to explicitly support Trump. Previous darlings of the centrists, such as Musk, 
participated in the campaign with unprecedented financial, technological and 
ideological support and became part of the new Trump Administration. Musk 

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and other techno-oligarchs (e.g., Zuckerberg (Meta), Bezos (Amazon)) began to 
explicitly subscribe to the far-right political visions (from anti-environmental-
ism, selective anti-migration, to the retrenchment of (parts of) the state, milit-
arisation, neo-imperial expansion, hyper-nationalism, anti-China positions, to 
elitism, hyper-masculinity, and eugenics) joining the list of far-right tech-billion-
aires such as Thiel,
4
 Schmidt,
5
 Andreesen,
6
 Karp
7
 etc. (see Aronoff 2025; Lewis 
2025). We argue that this is part of the political awakening of the techno-olig-
archy (Big Tech and the techno-oligarchs) and the rise of the techno-oligarchic 
ideology in the context of the gradual re-configuring of the political economy 
and the perceived danger to its novel central position. The latter was connec-
ted with centrist policies, especially those that intensified the anti-democratic 
developments of the system. These policies established a national and global 
regulatory framework that enabled the techno-oligarchy to amass unpreceden-
ted power and wealth, to establish monopolies and crush competition, and to 
establish highly exploitative employment practices and unprecedented intrusive 
accumulation and surveillance regimes targeting the users of their technologies 
for the purposes of algorithmic governance to increase engagement and/or for 
tailored advertisement and the general commodification of people’s lives. Whilst 
ever their activities could be ideologically framed as “defending our demo-
cracy” and furthering American interests globally, the Big-Tech abilities to sur-
veil, discipline, and stifle dissent and crush competition had a stamp of centrist 
approval (Doctorrow 2023; Larson 2020). The legitimising of these activities by 
the centrist forces must be seen as part of a larger decades-long neoliberal dis-
mantling of democratic achievements of past emancipatory struggles (Slobodian 
2018). It should also be understood as a fundamental dimension of the process of 
expanding, consolidating and/or retaining the USA’s global political, economic 
and military power and hegemony over the global neo-imperial capitalist order. 
Since the 1990s the US establishment forces have seen the control over central 
Internet technologies, the fundamental infrastructure of digitalised capitalism 
and neo-imperialism, as essential for American supremacy (Levine 2019). Suc-
cessive crises (the 9/11 attacks (2001), the global financial crisis (2008) and the 
COVID-19 pandemic (2020-?)) have further strengthened the power, capabilities 
and importance of the techno-oligarchy that has ascended “the commanding 
heights” (cf. Lenin) of American capitalism (joining the finance, fossil fuel, and 
4 
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, is directly connected to Trump’s administration 
and to Musk. Vice-President JD Vance is his protege and he is primarily responsible for the success of 
PayPal’s IPO where Musk, a part owner, received an enormous payout of several hundred million dollars, 
that acted as the foundation of his subsequent acquisition of Tesla.
5 
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google/Alphabet, and promoter of ‘AI hype’ and technological 
neo-imperialism.
6 
Marc Andreesen is one of the crucial financiers of Silicon Valley start-ups and is very close to the 
2nd Trump Administration.
7 
Alex Karp, co-founder and CEO of Palantir, the surveillance/spyware company providing tech to 
the NSA.

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transport industries) and become the most important sector of the US economy. 
Given that the policy responses to each of these crises leaned on the tech sector 
as the provider of ‘solutions’, these corporations became central to people’s lives, 
central to the economy and politics, and central to the USA’s global power (Lar-
son 2020; Morozov 2022).
Starting in the 1990s, the Silicon-Valley-centred techno-oligarchy, the cor-
porate (and new) media, and politicians have established an ideological Teflon-
like framework where the hype to do with the capabilities of technologies and 
radical breaches of existing laws and various negative effects of technologies on 
people’s lives, the democratic political processes, economic competition, could 
be obfuscated without any serious push-back from centrist forces (Marx 2022). 
The Teflon-like nature was retained despite various crises such as the dot.com 
crash of 2000, the 2010 Occupy Movement, the 2013 Snowden revelations, and 
the 2016 social media crisis that temporarily shook this ideological framework. 
In part, the early “Internet utopianism” of “open networks” enabling a “glob-
alised, connected world”, the idea of the Internet as an engine of democracy, a 
technology that should not be regulated by state power was muted and a new 
focus was given to the notion of technology as a weapon in the service of US-na-
tional interests. Until the mid 2010s, US technological corporations were dom-
inant and the first framing was beneficial to their power and thus to the interests 
of the US state in consolidating its global hegemony. As soon as other countries 
(especially China) began to catch up and overtake US corporations, the second 
framework became more prominent and the techno-oligarchy partly re-branded 
itself as central to US neo-imperial interests and started to shed their image of 
defenders of an open Internet and claim the mantle of primary defenders of 
American online spaces from ‘foreign nefarious forces’. They also framed their 
monopolistic power as necessary for the USA’s technological supremacy (Doc-
torrow 2023; Marx 2022; Levine 2019).
On the level of the societal legitimisation of wealth, influence and power 
of the US techno-oligarchs, this ideological framework drew from the fantasy 
of the ‘typical’ Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which contrary to the facts turned 
these oligarchs into inherent geniuses, maverick entrepreneurs, self-made men, 
pioneers who through their individual brilliance and by going against the dom-
inant trends, practices, technologies in their garages out of nothing created 
world-changing innovations and disruptions of existing structures and practices 
for the benefit of all humanity. Their success was imagined in the public sphere 
as giving them the exclusive right, despite a complete lack of any actual expertise 
and knowledge, to articulate the future of society and ‘improvements’ in every 
societal sphere and to formulate tech-based solutions to every central issue (Lar-
son 2020; Sadowski 2025). This acted like a Teflon-like shield against criticism. 
Their belief in their inherent superiority and elitism (e.g., Bezos, Gates, Musk, 
Zuckerberg, Thiel), dabbling in eugenic racist thinking (e.g., Musk), pronatal-
ism (e.g., Musk), hyper-masculinity, sexism and patriarchy (Gates, Bezos, Musk, 

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Zuckerberg etc.), hyper-nationalism, American exceptionalism, and totalitarian 
fantasies taken from various science fiction stories (e.g., Zuckerberg and the 
Metaverse) make the notion of the sudden right-wing turn of the techno-ol-
igarchs and corporations problematic (Lewis 2025; Torres and Gebru 2024). It 
should be understood as an instrument of centrist forces that in a self-serving 
manner absolves them from blame by rationalising and legitimising their past 
(future?) collaboration with the techno-oligarchy and past centrist policies that 
established the conditions for its rise.
The changing political allegiances must instead be viewed as the rise of a 
techno-oligarchic political ideology in response to the (limited) curtailment of 
its power. This was linked to the tech-clash tied to various scandals that revealed 
online platforms’ detrimental effects on societies ranging from negatively effect-
ing adolescents, to fostering genocide (e.g., the Rohingya genocide), negatively 
effecting the democratic political process by promoting far-right views (e.g., the 
Cambridge Analytica scandal that is thought to have led to the first Trump elec-
tion victory in 2016 and the success of the Brexit referendum). Public trust in 
the techno-oligarchy was also heavily eroded by the process of “enshittification” 
(Doctorow 2023) tied to the “rot economy” (Zitron 2023) that has made crucial 
technological services substantially worse due to Big Tech’s increased power over 
consumers, business, advertisements and the media and their sole focus on max-
imising growth and share prices.
The centrist elites became open to the idea of regulating these corporations 
especially following the 2020 presidential campaign. To secure Biden’s victory, 
Bernie Sanders’ large voting block needed to be accommodated. Hence, the 
Biden Administration implemented several policies to at least partially curtail 
the power of the tech-oligarchy (Vassallo 2025). Various US federal agencies (e.g., 
the FTC) began to take important steps to regulate the tech sector and its blatant 
breaches of existing laws.
8
 For instance, Musk’s companies faced over 20 gov-
ernmental investigations and reviews to do with environmental harm, the safety 
of Tesla cars, detrimental working conditions (harassment, sexism, racism) and 
were given various fines.
9
 However, the policies of the Biden Administration 
were contradictory because regulation activities were accompanied by the con-
tinuing veneration of the tech sector and its dubious innovations (e.g., generative 
“AI”). During the Biden Administration, the entanglement of Big Tech (Musk’s 
companies
10
, Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc.) with the federal government grew 
even deeper. They expanded their provision of crucial technological infrastruc-
ture via lucrative government contracts. Further, they influenced public policy 
and the government’s day-to-day functioning and were positioned as critical 
for the US state’s power. Despite prospering under Biden, the novel regulatory 
8 
In 2024, a federal judge ruled Google was a search monopoly, and that it had violated Antitrust Law.
9 
See https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/20/us/politics/elon-musk-federal-agencies-contracts.html.
10 
Musk’s companies accounted for approximately USD 15.4 billion in contracts in the last 10 years.

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activities were perceived by most of them as dangerous for their monopolies, 
for their economic, political and societal power. This was deemed even more 
potentially dangerous as the US regulatory undertakings were not isolated from 
those in other contexts like the EU and China (Del Valle 2025). The tech-olig-
archy began to intensify their activities (e.g., lobbying, financing political cam-
paigns, ideological warfare via owned or subservient media) to apply pressure to 
the centrist forces to stop these policies (see Vassallo 2025). They also perceived 
the existing volatile political situation as a strategic opportunity to expand their 
power and began to distance themselves from the centrist political forces and to 
support the far-right and its anti-democratic/authoritarian, anti-welfare, anti-
union, racist, sexist, hyper-nationalist, neo-imperial, genocidal political pro-
ject(s) (Blakeley 2025). Practically the whole techno-oligarchy either explicitly 
(e.g., Musk) or silently supported Trump’s candidacy. They were unbothered by 
the optics of attending Trump’s inauguration, even for paying for it.
11
 They not 
only started to explicitly commend and represent the far-right forces and policies 
as generally beneficial to the technological sector but also to articulate their own 
techno-oligarchic political ideology that, as we show in the following part, is 
anti-democratic, anti-emancipatory, anti-sustainable, exploitative, exclusionary, 
elitist, and eugenic in nature. It has a specific framing of the past, understanding 
of the present central issues, and a highly dangerous vision of the future.
CENTRAL NOTIONS OF THE TECHNO-OLIGARCHIC IDEOLOGY 
In order to critically interrogate the techno-oligarchic ideology, we shall 
focus on the core notions promoted by central actors of the techno-oligarchy 
ranging from prominent techno-oligarchs (Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Thiel, Alt-
man, Andreesen, Ellison
12
 etc.) to Big Tech to specific policies and their ration-
alisations enacted by DOGE,
13
 while drawing from and synthesising reflections 
from various analysts (Gallagher 2025; Gebru and Hanna 2024; Ongweso and 
Sadowski 2024). We shall consider various sources, including statements that 
accompany their actions, while focusing on ideological manifestos that clearly 
outline key central elements of their ideology. In this context, the manifesto of 
the tech-oligarch Mark Andreesen, the 2023 The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, 
represents an illuminating general framework for understanding the various 
dimensions of the techno-oligarchic ideology.
The techno-oligarchy represents itself in a self-aggrandising manner that 
legitimises its distancing from centrist political forces and their (far)right-wing 
11 
Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Pinchai (CEO of Alphabet/Google) attended, while Amazon, 
Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Uber made a corporate donation and Cook (CEO of Apple), Altman (Open 
AI) and Zuckerberg made personal donations for the inauguration (USD 1 million each). See https://
www.commoncause.org/articles/big-tech-is-donating-millions-to-trumps-inauguration/.
12 
Ellison is the billionaire founder of Oracle.
13 
DOGE – Department of Government Efficiency – is a creation of the 2nd Trump Administration 
and can be considered a personal instrument of Musk to radically transform the US administrative and 
regulatory state according to the ideology of the techno-oligarchy. 

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drift, while promoting authoritarian policies and politics and an oligarchic sys-
tem in which they enjoy an exalted social status. They frame themselves as vic-
tims of the ungrateful public and the state that not only fail to see their crucial 
contribution to the prosperity of all but also have broken an unwritten contract 
to not interfere in their presumably socially beneficial activities by (starting to) 
regulating them and their technologies and the free markets that presumably 
enable the unprecedented technological development. Any critique of them-
selves and their technologies and the ways they are developed is de-legitimised 
as irrational and dangerous for humanity as it could lead to regulating technolo-
gical development (see Andreesen 2023).
They perceive this as leading to the curbing of growth, a process that must 
never be stopped. Only growth is deemed to lead to higher well-being. As tech-
nological innovation is imagined as the central element of growth, and popula-
tion growth and natural resource utilisation are deemed to have limits, any form 
of ‘artificial’ limit on technological development is considered harmful. Growth 
is framed as an issue of survival since stagnation (or even worse degrowth) is 
seen as leading to the ultimate death of society (Andreesen 2023). This is diamet-
rically opposite to the extensive scientific research on the unsustainability of our 
capitalist model of development and its contribution to potentially making our 
planet uninhabitable for humans (Wallace-Wells 2020). 
Similarly to growth, technological development is seen as inevitable, as some-
thing that realises our inherent potential. They subscribe to techno-optimism 
in the sense of technology being a non-corruptible force for good and dismiss 
any notion of technology and technological development having negative effects 
on humanity, society and the environment and, ultimately, on a liveable future. 
They also subscribe to techno-determinism and techno-utopianism in the sense 
of ascribing an inherently beneficial nature to (novel) technologies and ima-
gining these (novel) technologies (generative AI being the focus of today) as 
instrumental for reaching a utopia of unimaginable productivity, energy and 
abundance. They believe that not only should there not be any obstacles to tech-
nological development and any prohibition on developing certain technologies, 
but that the pace should be accelerated (Andreesen 2023; Vance 2025).
They see no contradictions between accelerating development and the degrad-
ation of a liveable natural environment. This belief is based on the notion that 
our domination of nature is something positive and crucial for building a better 
world and the implicit notion that technologies are detached from the materi-
al-natural world. They are imagined as instruments that allow us to create more 
valuable things. And expanding markets and consumption are imagined as the 
only proper measurement of the quality of life. They still believe in the fantasy of 
competitive markets as obstacles to the consolidation of power and as agents of 
fostering technological innovation precipitating the continuous advancement of 
societies (see Andreesen 2023; Bezos 2025).
Moreover, they perceive that continuous growth and technological devel-

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opment is inherently connected to the expansion of energy production and use, 
which they believe, contrary to scientific facts, is not detrimental to the natural 
environment (Andreesen 2023; Altman 2024). This is based on notions of tech-
nological solutionism and total technological substitution. The latter notion refers 
to the idea that natural resources could be replicated technologically ex nihilo as 
technologies are imagined divorced from their dependence on natural resources 
(Patel and Moore 2017). The notion of technological solutionism is even more 
central to disregarding the negative effects of technological development and of 
expansive growth on the natural environment, societies, groups and individu-
als. It is a notion that is constitutive of our capitalist industrial order (Merchant 
2023). It refers to the idea that no ecological, social, political or economic prob-
lem exists that cannot be solved through technology. There is no need for any 
structural politico-economic change to address the causes of given issues (e.g., 
burning fossil fuels for energy). The problems that were, are, and will be created 
by technology (or the market) will be solved by more technology (or more markets).
These beliefs are founded upon a fabulous tale of technology solving past 
problems according to which hunger, poverty, exploitation, pollution and other 
social ills were solved by technology. These fables gloss over the actual history of 
capitalist societies and the fact that these issues have either persisted or intens-
ified in various (historical) contexts. They present as lies the actual negative 
and destructive effects of the implementation of capitalist technologies during 
industrialisation (a reduction of wages, unemployment, poverty and immisera-
tion, massive increases in inequality and the domination of workers, detrimental 
health effects for workers and society, and due to pollution, environmental 
destruction) that is increasingly affecting the global ecological well-being and 
threatening to catastrophically erode the foundations of a liveable planet (Harris 
2023; Jensen et al. 2021; Merchant 2023; Noble 1999) (see Andreesen 2023). And 
they gloss over the fact that capitalist technologies are being utilised by the (neo)
imperial West for the ecological-social-cultural destruction and exploitation of 
non-Western peoples and environments (Harris 2023). These fables also silence 
the fact that the beneficial societal effects of technologies and the partial tack-
ling of issues have been predicated on the resistances, struggles and revolutions 
of workers, citizens, exploited and oppressed masses and movements that have 
forced capitalist states and capitalists to make concessions and adopt policies 
that have (partly) addressed these issues and (partly) limited the power of the 
capitalist classes in favour of increased well-being of the masses. Without the 
movements that struggled to (re)distribute the wealth and benefits of capitalist 
industrialisation and technological development, the beneficial effects would be 
massively outweighed by their negative effects (Merchant 2023). 
The techno-oligarchs imagine themselves as singularly capable of under-
standing and directing the ‘inevitable’, ‘divine’ force of technological progress. 
They claim for themselves the status of infallible prophets/kings who should 
be given free reign to do what in their “divine” minds is seen as necessary, be 

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celebrated, and not face any doubts or criticism for their actions and ideas since 
they are the harbingers of fantastical technology-enabled futures (Marx 2022; 
Nobel 1999). In the latter, there is no place for doubters and no place for reality 
as these imagined futures are built on technologies that are either fantastical/
impossible or ecologically devastating and accelerating a path to dystopia, not 
utopia (e.g., generative “AI”). They assert this ‘divine’ status based on their past 
and present success measured in their present wealth and power and based on 
their technological innovations that they either made themselves or claimed 
ownership over (see Andreesen 2023).
They completely obfuscate the structural societal conditions of their suc-
cess, their appropriation of the collective work of innovation, the dependence of 
their innovation and their success on luck and contingency and certain public 
policies. The techno-oligarchs’ eugenic obsession with the notion of intelligence 
and its problematic measurements such as IQ becomes understandable as their 
supposed superior intelligence makes their success inevitable. They are touched 
by the ‘divine’ not only in the sense of their capability to create technological 
inventions but by being inherent, biological geniuses. They deem their ‘expertise’ 
and their superior intellect as above any type of specialist expert knowledge that 
should be ignored, if and when they decide that this would be ‘beneficial’ for 
tackling specific issues and for the future of society. They also believe themselves 
to be above and beyond any laws and regulations, traditions and existing pro-
cedures that they can and should be able to ignore, breach, and make obsolete. 
Other experts, politicians, as well as citizens (the masses) should accept and fol-
low their lead without question (Gebru and Tores 2023; Merchant 2023)
They also project the historically singular uncritical glorification of techno-
logy and innovators and their superior status into the past as something normal. 
This is closely connected with their experience in the context of the rise of the 
novel ICTs in the 1990s through to the mid-2010s when they were uncritically 
glorified and their transgressions were normalised and left unchecked. It was in 
this context that the problematic principles of “move fast and break things” and 
“do not ask for permission, ask for forgiveness” were formulated (Harris 2023; 
Levine 2019).
Their claim to exalted societal status also draws from the framing of society 
as analogous to contemporary (computer) software. The majority of tech-olig -
archs are computer software engineers and the majority of Big Tech are primar-
ily software corporations (Ed Zittron 2025; Scott 2025). Software is imagined 
as principally developed for the purpose of continuous expansions and growth, 
entailing a continuous deepening of its invasion into our lives via ever expansive 
surveillance and data gathering. It is framed as a universal means to achieve 
innovation in practically all industries and societal spheres. Innovation is 
presented as achievable only insofar as the tech-oligarchy via its software penet-
rate and disrupt the ‘old-fashioned, tradition-rules-regulation-following’ ways of 
doing and thinking. Thus, every type of societal structure and institution should 

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be either open to interventions from the tech-oligarchy and emulate software 
companies, especially Silicon Valley start-ups that are imagined as uniquely 
innovative, agile, problem-solving collectives with extreme working conditions 
(e.g., long hours, sleeping in the office) and meritocratic high-risk, high-reward 
cultures where only the best can thrive.
14
 In the contemporary oligopoly of cent-
ralised Big Tech, innovative start-ups are however either destroyed or taken over 
by Big Tech, thereby stifling any disruption of the status quo. The notion of a 
meritocratic high-risk, high-reward culture is also factually problematic given 
that the vast majority of founders come from privileged backgrounds and are 
predominantly part of the white majority, are male, heterosexual, and able-bod-
ied (Larson 2020; Liu 2020).
15
The start-up fantasy is a tool for making palatable a plethora of problematic 
issues of the oligopolistic and oligarchic reality of the contemporary tech-sector 
and its material and ideological dominance of our societies. Notions of innov-
ation and efficiency have become thoroughly colonised where they are deemed 
to be exclusive to Big Tech and the tech-oligarchs and to their digitalisation of 
everything and the automation of every societal process. The tech-oligarchy has 
normalised its right to determine what these notions refer to, while simultan-
eously normalising general surveillance, authoritarian censorship, propaganda, 
exclusion and domination via its ownership, development, implementation and 
control over specific software (Scott 2025).
The tech-oligarchic ideology is transforming the notions of citizenship rights 
and sovereignty. The techno-oligarchy claims for itself the prerogative of a sover-
eign, that is authoritarian, absolutist, unaccountable, arbitrary and should have 
the absolute right to change (user) agreements/terms and conditions (‘laws’), 
change the functionality of the software, change the user experience, arbitrarily 
ban some and privilege other users, to extract as much data as possible, to breach 
laws and regulations concerning privacy, freedom of expression and anti-dis-
crimination, and to make leaving the service/software as hard and unpleasant 
as possible (Doctorow 2023). Big Tech ultimately owns and controls the central 
digital infrastructure and utilises it to extract as much value from users in the 
form of surveillance, data-gathering, algorithm manipulation, and ad-selling as 
possible regardless of the fact that you are paying for the service/software. They 
imagine themselves and in many ways are a corporate autocracy. A sovereign 
that is deemed to have no accountability to its users, the general public, and the 
state (Doctorow 2023; Zitron 2023).
Still, the state and political institutions figure prominently in the techno-olig-
archic ideology as the re-imagining of the state represents a central set of notions 
and provides a framework in which a systematic legitimisation is made as to 
14 
DOGE is an almost perfect example of utilising this ideological fantasy of start-ups to radically 
transform ‘legacy’ US state institutions.
15 
There are very few exceptions (e.g., Sundar Pichai (Alphabet/Google), Satya Nadella (Mi-
crosoft)).

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who counts as relevant, whose interests are naturalised and made unquestioned 
in the context and in relation to the capitalist representative democratic state. 
And above all, whose interests should the state heed, what is the public interest, 
who should articulate it, and what role should the common citizens (the masses) 
play in it. As we show in the next section, this re-imagining mirrors and radic-
alises the role of the state during the industrial revolution when representative 
political institutions were not only firmly aligned with the interests of nascent 
industrial capitalists but actively supported the industrial revolution by ideolo-
gically and materially brutally attacking any resistance to industrialisation as 
irrational, anti-progress and techno-phobic and primarily contrary to the public 
interest, which was conflated with the interests of industrial-capitalists (Mer-
chant 2023). We argue that this re-imagining is fundamentally predicated on the 
specific central fantasy of the ‘unimaginable’ capabilities of “AI” systems and on 
the template of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and the relationship 
of the US state and tech-oligarchy with it. 
 THE RE-IMAGINING OF THE STATE VIA AN ‘AI-POWERED 
REVOLUTION’
The techno-oligarchic ideology draws heavily from far-right re-imaginings of 
the state and democracy, their nature, scope and necessary transformation that 
were articulated as a reactionary-revolutionary response to the New Deal capit-
alist and biopolitical welfare administrative-regulatory state developed following 
the Great Depression and the Second World War. In this context, we can observe 
various interrelated re-imaginings of the state. These include the sleek state whose 
purpose is to maximise the returns on investment and the shackled state that is 
unable (legally and organisationally) to provide well-being to the majority of the 
population, especially the most vulnerable parts (Slobodian 2025).
The notion of the sleek state is built on the idea of government as a special 
corporation that has a monopoly on violence and cannot go bankrupt. As a cor-
poration, it should be made as efficient as possible by shedding every service and 
staff that, according to ‘analyses’ of private-sector-trained managers perceived as 
having a better grasp on efficiently allocating resources, are declared redundant/
wasteful. As a corporation, the government should outsource as much as possible 
to the private sector as it is deemed to be inherently more efficient. Along with 
outsourcing, the state is imagined as a crucial source of funding for privately 
oligopolistically controlled and directed technological development (Slobodian 
2018). Here the notion of the public interest and nation state interest plays a cent-
ral ideological role. The tech-oligarchy frames its interests, its (control over) tech-
nological development and technologies as beneficial to wider society. It presents 
the (massive) financial (and scientific) support it receives as normal, necessary, 
competition-re-affirming and inherently socially beneficial if the state funding 
is not tied to strict (or any) regulation and the tech-oligarchy has free reign over 
how it develops and implements technologies (see Andreesen 2023).

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The notion of the shackled state is utilised to delegitimise the public regu-
lation of the tech-oligarchy’s actions, and problematise who has the legitimacy 
to articulate and enact the public interest. Even more generally, it is an ideolo-
gical attack on the general functioning of the state especially in relation to its 
policies, its administrative-regulatory institutions that have a mandate to assure 
the well-being of society, including its (historically) marginalised communities. 
The post-war (New Deal) welfare state that has been under continuous ideolo-
gical and material attack from the right-wing and centrist political forces, cor-
porations and the oligarchs at least since the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s is 
in the context of this ideological attack re-framed as a fantastical right-wing rep-
resentation divorced from any facts (Slobodian 2018). Putting a modern twist on 
the Cold War anti-communist paranoia, the state and its institutions are seen as 
totally dominated by leftists, above all Marxists, who have co-opted the state to 
wage war against the ‘silent majority’, against the interests of hard-working, pro-
ductive Americans and private entrepreneurial wealth. Welfare policies, policies 
addressing past and present harms and discriminations (DEI policies), environ-
mental policies and similar policies that (strive) to provide for the well-being of 
general society and are generally socially desirable are re-framed as universally 
wasteful, fraudulent and being systematically abused by nonproductive special 
interests (e.g., liberal elites, minority rights NGOs, illegal immigrants) (Slobod-
ian 2025).
16
The techno-oligarchic ideology frames these polices as part of a ‘sinister ideo-
logical project’ to promote ‘wokeism’, which can include everything (e.g., critical 
race theory, transgender rights, feminism) that critiques the right-wing white-
washed fantasy of US history, its social structures, institutions, and relations. The 
latter fantasy silences their genocidal, racist, sexist, discriminatory, class-exploit-
ative, expropriational, white-supremacist, patriarchal, hetero-normative, ecolo-
gically devastating and imperial history and its present legacies that determine 
the radically asymmetrical life-possibilities of various social groups depending 
on their place in the societal hierarchies (see al-Gharbi 2024). It naturalises exist-
ing social hierarchies, the radically asymmetrical wealth and income distribu-
tion, the radical divergences in life expectancy, the disproportionate criminal-
isation of marginalised minorities and other forms of structural discrimination. 
It legitimises what Gilmore (2023) calls organised abandonment by the state and 
capital whereby marginalised communities, those deemed less worthy by being 
less well-off, the less productive, are left behind or biopolitically killed (cf. Fou-
cault 2001) via disinvestment, privatisation and environmental degradation. 
The concept of “alternative facts” also becomes central to these ideologic-
al-material undertakings in line with the notion that if the reality does not corres-
pond to ideological fantasy, then the reality should be obfuscated via censorship 
16 
The central mantra of DOGE is fighting waste, fraud and abuse by destroying the regulatory and 
administrative state.

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and propaganda. A crucial element of the ultimate ideological goal of the notion 
of the shackled state is, apart from the abolition of all policies that respond to 
the demands of citizens, the goal of incapacitating administrative and regulat-
ory institutions to collect data on various inequalities and discriminations and 
hence to destroy the specific data-gathering capabilities used to formulate and 
implement socially desirable policies. Censoring reports on the wrongdoing of 
corporations
17
 and official statistics enables unhinged propaganda to be created 
by the tech-oligarchy and the wider right-wing political forces and also hinders 
emancipatory struggles. The ideological goal is a very specific deconstruction of 
the administrative and regulatory state and its capabilities to curtail the power, 
wealth and influence of the tech-oligarchy and the broader US elites and corpor-
ations and regulate their socially, politically and ecologically detrimental beha-
viour, while simultaneously framing this deconstruction as being in the public 
interest, as democratisation, as socially beneficial, in line with the will of the 
people (see Doctorow 2023; Gilmore 2023). Any kind of expansion of the regu-
latory state contrary to the interests of the tech-oligarchy is re-framed as illegit-
imate, irrational, a Marxist-communist coup, and being infected by the “woke 
mind-virus” (Gallagher 2025; Slobodian 2025). In the most radical expression of 
its ideology, the tech-oligarchy imagines itself as the central arbiter that decides 
who ultimately has fundamental civic and political rights, including eligibility 
to vote.
18
 
The ideological notions of the sleek and the shackled state are conjoined by 
a specific vision of technology, technological innovation and specific technolo-
gies as the central means to enact the above-mentioned ideological goals, while 
also disciplining, deskilling, punishing and reducing the number of the pub-
lic administrative workers who the techno-oligarchy frames as lazy, inefficient, 
“woke” and “radical/Marxist” etc. Here, the ideological mystification of AI sys-
tems plays a key role. The tech-oligarchic ideology imagines AI systems as unpre-
cedentedly powerful automation and decision-making technology that will 
enable enormous efficiency and productivity gains and a stark reduction of gov-
ernment workforce (directly fired by AI), by automating and streamlining work 
processes, speeding up administrative decisions, and making them properly 
unbiased and neutral by radically reducing the input and autonomy of human 
workers with their biases, personal preferences, ideologies, labour rights, and 
their biological limitations. The AI systems are framed as inherently beneficial, 
universally applicable, value-neutral, supremely capable technologies and impli-
citly or explicitly presented as inevitably leading to a novel radical reorganisation 
of government for the benefit of all (Andreesen 2023; Altman 2024). Workers, on 
the other hand, are framed as being ultimately replaceable by these inherently 
17 
Under Trump’s 2
nd
 administration, the FTC removed online material critical of Big Tech.
18 
According to Trump’s decree (25 March 2025), Musk’s DOGE is positioned as central in deciding 
who is eligible to vote by reviewing state voter rolls. The latter is supposed to be done via technological 
means (AI systems). 

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superior systems or as logically subservient to these systems, while austerity is 
re-framed as a necessary step towards unimaginable abundance being unleashed 
by the power of AI (McQuillan 2023).
Research (Boulamwini and Gebru 2018; S. Nobel 2018) demonstrates that 
AI and related automating technologies used by governments, police, juridical 
systems, educational institutions, financial institutions and employers in gen-
eral perpetuate, reinforce and intensify existing asymmetries of power, existing 
historically established discriminations and marginalisations of individuals 
and communities by naturalising their ever more extensive surveillance, con-
trol and breaches of privacy (gathering of their personal data). And by creating 
the appearance of the impartiality of automated-decisions that have historical 
socio-political, economic, biological and cultural biases, hierarchies and asym-
metries of power baked into them and produce even more discriminatory out-
comes than human-led decision-making and make these decisions even more 
unchangeable and even less accountable. These technologies empower the bosses 
and the tech-oligarchy, while dis-empowering the workers and the individual 
and the communities that are their users/targets. When these systems are imple-
mented, the results are always in line with the imperatives of the capitalist ruling 
forces, as well as with austerity for the workers, their exploitation, and domina-
tion and repression, dispossession, disciplining and punishing of marginalised 
communities and individuals and the masses generally and exuberant profits 
for the owners and controllers of these technologies. Their implementation 
leads to worse results as they make ethically reprehensible results normal and 
obscure the accountability of managerial elites.
19
 These systems are prone to fail-
ures and incapable of properly replacing human workers but make the work of 
humans worse. They destroy institutional knowledge passed from generation to 
generation, and atrophy crucial skills or destroy the context where they can be 
learned.
20
 These systems are also implemented of the purpose of scaring workers 
into submission (Merchant 2023). 
These technologies are developed and implemented by Big Tech in an author-
itarian way that prevents those negatively affected by them to participate in and 
influence their design, implementation and functioning. They are developed 
with logic and imperatives fundamentally opposed to public interests and the 
needs and interests of the masses of citizens, government workers, and margin-
alised communities. Moreover, their implementation makes the complex work-
ings of government institutions that have been built on (at least partial) respons-
iveness and resilience substantially more prone to failure and dysfunctional by 
19 
For an overview of various examples, see K. de Liban – AI Means “Oh-No” for Low-Income Amer-
icans – https://inequality.org/article/ai-means-oh-no-for-low-income-americans/.
20 
See the Microsoft study concerning critical thinking skills and various reports on how the use of 
generative AI negatively effects the skills of computer programmers where experienced ones are losing 
skills, while junior ones even fail to learn many fundamental skills of programming (see Namanyay 2025) 
– https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning.

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concentrating control, erasing redundancies built to ensure the continuous func-
tioning of core government services. It makes the functioning of these services 
totally dependent on the technologies owned, controlled and maintained by the 
tech-oligarchy, which establishes an unprecedentedly lucrative profit extraction 
scheme while also concentrating power and eliminating accountability. This 
reduction of state capabilities and the inevitably worse functioning state institu-
tions insidiously also serve the ideological goal of further delegitimising the state 
as the agent of public interest and position the private sector, the tech-oligarchy 
responsible for the degradation, as the saviours (Dell Valle 2025; Merchant 2025).
 AGI, GENOCIDE, AND THE RE-IMAGINING OF THE NEO-IMPERIAL 
AND REPRESSIVE DIMENSION OF THE STATE
The re-imaginings that focus on the economic and social welfare dimension 
of the state are inextricably connected with the re-imagining of the repressive 
and neo-imperial geopolitical dimension of the US state. Initially, we must stress 
that these re-imaginings never subscribe to the logic and imperatives of austerity 
but the logic of expansion and imperatives of increased accumulation via extend-
ing the neo-imperial and repressive reach of the US state.
Silicon Valley has since the outset been a testing ground of US neo-imperi-
alism and its engineers and corporations have been in the vanguard of the US 
state’s rising global influence. Especially during and after the Second Worl War, 
the US state massively supported the nascent computer industry, which it per-
ceived as central to the expansion of its power. Most of technologies related to the 
Internet and computers were developed for the purposes of the military in fight-
ing foreign wars and specifically for counter-insurgency (surveillance, control, 
discipline, punishment, elimination) in the third world and at home, for fighting 
resistance to the global capitalist neo-imperial (biopolitical) order. The US state 
understood that technological supremacy in the novel ICT field is crucial (milit-
arily, geopolitically, economically, ideologically) for consolidating and deepening 
the USA’s global hegemony in the post-Cold War era (Harris 2023; Levine 2019). 
With the rise of Chinese technological companies that began to directly compete 
with the USA and to endanger the global dominant position of the US tech-ol-
igarchy, the latter started to re-imagine the neo-imperial dimension of the state 
in its relationship with the tech-oligarchy. The notions of (Internet) freedom and 
global competition as the foundation of US hegemony were replaced or re-artic-
ulated with a novel explicit neo-imperial twist. And the primary ideological tool 
was the discourse around (generative) AI (Morozov 2023).
The tech-oligarchy has re-framed the development of (generative) AI sys-
tems as the fundamental geopolitical issue, as an issue with the highest national 
security priority, as an existential issue for the continuation of the USA’s global 
hegemony (see Vance 2025). In this context, the AI systems are framed as unpre-
cedentedly capable technologies that will revolutionise the military and will 
confer unimaginable powers on whoever controls them. The most extreme, and 

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from the point of view of the existing and potential capabilities of LLM
21
 AI sys-
tems ludicrous, idea promoted and utilised by the tech-oligarchy to rationalise 
neo-imperial policies is the idea of the nascent AGI (artificial general intelli-
gence) (Bender et al. 2021). A truly autonomous, thinking, self-reflecting sys-
tem with its own agency capable of immediately solving any type of issue con-
cerning humanity and hence being ultimately superior to humans. This idea is 
thoroughly eschatological and eugenic in nature and combines both the founda-
tions of the techno-oligarch’s claim to their superior societal position nationally 
and globally, while also perfectly aligning with the ideological bedrock of US 
imperialism, the belief in US exceptionalism as either an instrument of God or 
of historical forces of social and biological evolution as the chosen and globally 
superior entity (Harris 2023; McQuillan 2024).
The coming of AGI is framed in a eugenic manner as the final stage of the 
evolutionary development of intelligence that mirrors the historical eugenic 
quasi-scientific ‘measurements’ and hierarchisations and reduction of human 
intelligence to numerical values (McQuillan 2024). The US tech-oligarchy ima-
gines their striving for developing AGI as an existential battle for the future of 
human civilisation with China, where the former is framed contrary to facts and 
hypocritically as a force of divine good, freedom and democracy, of moral and 
intellectual and biological superiority and the latter as a force of evil, author-
itarianism, unfreedom and moral, intellectual and biological degradation and 
inferiority (see Vance 2025). 
The tech-oligarchy believes the primary existential threat to human civilisa-
tion is not the climate crisis, not global warming, the destruction of biodiversity, 
unsustainable natural resource use, climate and the natural environment 
harming fossil fuel emissions and industrial pollution. It frames these issues 
as non-existential because not all of humanity will be destroyed by the climate 
crisis (Andreesen, 2023; Kissinger et al., 2022). In an eschatological manner, they 
claim that the central existential risk is the development of AGI, of a malevolent 
God that could destroy the whole humanity if it were to be developed and con-
trolled by the wrong people, the wrong corporations, the wrong nation state(s), 
and aligned with the wrong values.
The techno-oligarchy claims for itself the authority to define what the cru-
cial existential risks are and the superior intellectual and moral capability and 
authority in developing responses to this primary existential risk for human 
civilisation and for the US-led neo-imperial order. This ideological framework 
legitimises the existing power, influence and wealth of the US tech-oligarchy 
nationally and globally and its further expansion in the name of developing the 
AI God, the ultimate solution to human problems.
22
 It rationalises the US state’s 
21 
LLM stands for large language models.
22 
All future visions of humanity promoted by the US techno-oligarch follow the same logic of the 
eternal nature of capitalism and the logic of their continuous central position in it, where their power, 
wealth and influence is consolidated or even expanded.

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unconditional support for and active defence of the supremacy of US tech-ol-
igarchy by waging a technologically-focused trade war against the USA’s only 
serious competitor – China and its technological corporations – in the form of 
sanctions, restrictions and through threats of potential military escalation for as 
long as China does not submit to the supremacy of the US tech-oligarchy.
On the other hand, the framework legitimises and rationalises the exist-
ing environmentally and socially/politico-economically unsustainable model 
of development and functioning of generative AI systems since this is framed 
as the only and inevitable path to developing AGI, to the future of abundance 
and prosperity and sustainability. This gives the tech-oligarchy carte blanche to 
expand their domination of the development of AI systems as it establishes the 
predominant model of authoritarian hyper-exploitative, resource, energy and 
data hyper-intensive development as universal, neutral and without alternatives 
(the “bigger is always better” doctrine). The predominant model of development 
and implementation is already based on disregarding existing laws and regula-
tions, and actively limiting and fighting against any form of democratic over-
sight and state regulation that would limit what the tech-oligarchy can do in the 
development of AI (Williams et al. 2022).
Considering the already worsening climate and broader ecological crisis and 
the vast amount of research establishing a scientific consensus on the need to 
limit emissions of greenhouse gases, phase out fossil fuels, reduce our energy and 
resource use for the planet to remain liveable for the majority of the population, 
this neo-imperial singular focus on the AI system and specifically developing 
AGI is completely detrimental to establishing an environmentally sustainable 
system. It is slowing down the already slow transition from fossil fuels due to 
their immense energy needs, and by their expansive natural resource use, which 
includes precious clear water for cooling the data centres, thereby helping to 
worsen the ecological crisis (Brevini 2022). The insatiable need for energy is 
also silently re-legitimising the fossil fuel industry as the techno-oligarchy has 
entered into close cooperation with it while simultaneously silencing and break-
ing their once explicit commitments to the green transition and sustainability. 
The re-imagining of the neo-imperial dimension of the US state is intimately 
and inextricably connected with the re-imagining of its repressive dimension, espe-
cially as concerns the development and implementation of AI systems and their 
rationalisation in surveilling, identifying, analysing, managing, regulating, discip-
lining, punishing, segregating, oppressing and ultimately removing unruly, resist-
ing, non-docile, not-quite-normal and abnormal, historically marginalised, dis-
criminated, oppressed and harmed populations and individuals as their members.
The way the repressive dimension of the state is re-imagined can most clearly 
be discerned from the vision articulated by the tech-oligarch Larry Ellison 
(Oracle).
23
 His dystopian vision is a vision of an AI-driven surveillance state 
23 
See https://fortune.com/2024/09/17/oracle-larry-ellison-surveillance-state-police-ai/.

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449 • let. 62, 2/2025
where there is continuous (from work to leisure) surveillance of individuals util-
ising advanced facial-recognition software where all their actions are recorded, 
analysed and judged by AI systems ensuring that we are all on our best beha-
viour. As we will demonstrate, the actions of the tech-oligarchy imply that “best 
behaviour” is determined by people not resisting the wealth, power and influence 
of the tech-oligarchy, not resisting the status quo. As the repressive dimension 
of the state in techno-oligarchic ideology is never burdened by the imperatives 
of austerity but operates on the logic of the continuous expansion of resources 
to secure the functioning of the capitalist, hypermasculine, racist, eugenic, het-
eronormative ecologically destructive system (preventing and cracking down on 
resistance), hence providing an almost unlimited source of profit accumulation 
for the tech-oligarchy.
Reminiscent of past historical examples of imperial outposts influencing the 
imperial centre, the techno-oligarchic re-imagining of the repressive state is 
inextricably connected with the neo-imperial outpost of the US state namely the 
Zionist Israeli settler colonial apartheid regime and its technological capabilities 
and specifically with its recent genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza that 
relies on genocidal AI systems (Khallil 2021; Loewenstein 2024). As concerns the 
development and implementation of technologies and their legitimisation, the 
relationship between the US centre and its neocolonial outpost is symbiotic and 
interdependent where the US tech-oligarchy (e.g., Microsoft, Google) provides 
Israel and it corporations with crucial technological infrastructure and financial 
resources, while Israeli corporations develop the most advanced and ethically 
reprehensible, dehumanising, repressive technologies (e.g., CCTV, facial recog-
nition, location tracking, web surveillance technologies), including automated 
decision-making AI technologies. The Palestinians are ideal test subjects as they 
live in a state of permanent exception that enables Israeli tech-companies to 
develop and implement these technologies without legal limits. These technolo-
gies are then procured, adapted and implemented by other authoritarian regimes 
and forces, including the USA’s repressive apparatus for tackling domestic polit-
ical resistance (Loewenstein 2024). 
A brutal implication of the above vision of the repressive state can be 
observed in the full commitment of techno-oligarchy to the unlimited US state 
support for the total destruction of the lived environment and the genocide of 
the Palestinian people who are designated as expendable, less-than-human, 
unworthy, and opposed to US geopolitical interests, which legitimises the most 
reprehensible actions (from the mass slaughter of civilians, to the use of human 
shields, to the cutting off of water and humanitarian supplies, to systemic sexual 
assault) without accountability.
The genocide has revealed the actual lethal risk of AI automated decision-mak-
ing systems, not the ‘existential’ risk promoted by the tech-oligarchy. AI sys-
tems (e.g., Habsora) utilised by the Israeli army for perpetrating the genocide 
were developed to rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate massive 

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amounts of targets for military strikes in wartime operations. Their explicit 
rationality was to prevent human bottlenecks in both locating and decision-mak-
ing to approve targets. To prevent a kill matrix from operating at the maximum 
of its efficiency and to establish a “mass assassination factory” with no review 
of targets and no oversight, no moral or legal obstacles (Abraham 2023). This 
brutally illustrates the central ethical issues of automating decision-making pro-
cesses whereby reprehensible actions are objectified, normalised, sanitised and 
accelerated to an extreme via these systems, while the developers and users of 
these technologies are obfuscating their accountability for how these systems 
operate, on which grounds, with which biased data, with which central pur-
pose that is directly predicated on the wanton slaughtering of civilians including 
children that the Zionist racist ideology deems inhuman monsters, collectively 
responsible for every action of individuals or groups. It is essential to stress that 
the Palestinians are the test object as the most marginalised populations are 
always the first to be subjected to abusive, destructive technologies that never 
remain confined to them (McQuillan 2023). This can clearly be observed in the 
US domestic context where the genocide plays a crucial role in developing and 
legitimising a brutal response by the repressive state to those resisting the geno-
cide, which illustrates how the above re-imagining of the state in the tech-olig-
archic ideology is gradually taking shape. It can be seen as a template of how the 
response of the state and the tech-oligarchy will look when faced with organised 
domestic opposition and the critique of its policies, practices, technologies and 
ideologies that will increase due to the intensifying polycrisis.
The US protest movement against the genocide has faced extreme mater-
ial and ideological repression and an intensive collaboration between various 
private collective, corporate and individual actors, private security forces, the 
state repressive apparatus and political elites. The tech-oligarchy has played a key 
role in the establishment and rationalisation of this novel private-public repress-
ive arrangement that utilises physical and technological repression of resistance 
(enhanced by Israeli tech) tied to a violent crackdown on protest activities by 
private and public security forces and private far-right/Zionist zealots and also 
tied to expansive on- and off-line surveillance of protesters and views that criti-
cise the genocide and technologically (via algorithmic manipulation and shad-
ow-banning) repressing these critiques that they do not reach a wider audience. 
The tech-oligarchy technologically and ideologically supported and amplified 
Zionist and far-right and centrist views that have either denied the genocide 
is happening have blamed the Palestinians themselves, or even legitimised it, 
thereby contributing to the systematic and systemic delegitimisation of anti-gen-
ocide views via technological and ideological means (Goodarzi and Dolinar 2025; 
Marcetic 2025; Whittaker 2024). The US state’s and tech-oligarchy’s censorship 
and propaganda activities have entered an even more unhinged stage as any 
pretext of division of interests was replaced by the notion of a common enemy 
against the order that can be easily identifiable and who should be dealt with in 

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the most decisive, brutal, repressive manner. Constitutional rights including the 
freedom of speech have been further eroded, where in an Orwellian manner his-
tory and the present have been subverted in an insidious way. The Israeli geno-
cide has been legitimised by obfuscating its settler colonial history, the past occu-
pation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and by silencing the racist apartheid 
nature of the Israeli regime and presenting Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians as 
an ex nihilo brutal inhumane attack that legitimises every imaginable brutality. 
This erasure was paired with an ideological discourse that turns “wokeism” into 
its antithesis and is used to delegitimise the opposition, curtail the freedom of 
speech, and breach other constitutional rights (due process). Here antisemitism 
has been invoked in a way that re-frames it as any form of criticism of Israel 
and the genocide. Those protesting against the genocide have been framed as 
those who are truly genocidal, not those who actually perpetrate the horrific, 
dehumanising fascistic acts. These “alternative facts” have framed rationalised 
various repressive actions (firing, imprisonment, revocation of degrees, deport-
ation etc.), various curtailments of constitutional rights (e.g., freedom of speech, 
due process) against all that according to the state and the tech-oligarchy have 
breached the “best behaviour” norm set by them. This has also legitimised the 
further expansion and development of surveillance and AI data analysis systems 
by the tech-oligarchy to identify and brutally tackle global and internal oppos-
ition to the environmentally and socially unsustainable neo-imperial capitalist 
order (Finkelstein 2024; Haskins 2024; Marcetic 2024).
CONCLUSION
The article analysed the rise of a techno-oligarchic ideology in the USA and 
its grave potential implications for tackling the polycrisis in a democratic, eman-
cipatory and sustainable way, not just in the USA, but globally as well. We first 
interrogated the conditions of possibility of its rise, which was followed by ana-
lysis of its core notions focusing on the centrality of technological development 
and technologies for imagining the past, present and future order, and for legit-
imising the specific societal status of the tech-oligarchy. In the third and fourth 
parts, we considered the way this political ideology re-imagines political institu-
tions and the state in its various dimensions, focusing first on the economic and 
welfare dimension and, finally, on the neo-imperial and repressive dimension of 
the US state and the central role that AI systems and the genocide of Palestinians 
in Gaza and the responses to it play in these re-imaginings. We demonstrated 
that the techno-oligarchic ideology represents a new far-right political ideo-
logy of some of the US capitalist elite who have became central for the US and 
global neo-imperial capitalist order due to their control over crucial technolo-
gical infrastructure on which this order depends. We determined that the rise 
of this ideology must be understood as a highly dangerous political response of 
the tech-oligarchy to the polycrisis and to recent state policies intended to reg-
ulate and limit its power, influence and conditions for ever expansive growth. 

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452 TEORIJA IN PRAKSA
It is an instrument in the class struggle that takes the form of an anti-demo-
cratic, anti-egalitarian and oligarchic political ideology that is hyper-capitalist, 
ecologically unsustainable, anti-welfare, unaccountable, eugenic, neo-imperial, 
repressive and ultimately genocidal. And that is centred on self-serving fantas-
ies of technological development and technologies and their benevolent soci-
etal effects and posits the tech-oligarchy as religious or secular prophet-kings. 
We showed that the radical implication of the techno-oligarchic ideology is the 
establishment of a system that would purge capitalism of its welfare dimension 
and bolster the ability for existing capitalist regimes of exploitation and extrac-
tion, while establishing a techno(AI)-enabled unprecedentedly penetrative 
police and neo-imperial state overseen by the techno-oligarchy that would bru-
tally strive to repress any form of resistance and would exacerbate the polycrisis. 
The intensification of the latter will result in a world where the conditions for 
living of not simply humans but all living beings (animals and plants) in general 
will severely deteriorate, making the world ever more un-nurturing, uninhabit-
able, and deadly for all, not only for certain living beings (see Toplak 2025). To 
prevent this, emancipatory reflections, visions and movements should system-
atically attack and push the centrist forces to euthanise the techno-oligarchic 
ideology and dismantle the basis of the power of the techno-oligarchy itself. This 
should start with the delegitimisation of their authoritarian control over the dir-
ection and nature of technological development, the characteristics of technolo-
gies, and their horrific visions of the future that worsen the unsustainable status 
quo and lock us into paths that are leading to a world that is unliveable.
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 INTENZIVIRANJE POLIKRIZE IN VZPON TEHNOOLIGARHIČNE 
IDEOLOGIJE V ZDA
Povzetek. Članek analizira vzpon tehnooligarhične ideologije v ZDA v kon-
tekstu druge Trumpove administracije ter njen potencialni učinek na reševanje 
ekološke krize. V tem okviru razkrivamo, da gre za novo skrajno desno politično 
ideologijo ameriške tehnooligarhije, ki je povezana z intenziviranjem polikrize. 
Trdimo, da je temeljni namen te ideologije krepitev moči, vpliva in bogastva teh-
nooligarhije ter hkrati zatiranje uporov proti njeni dominaciji in utišanje kritičnih 
pogledov ter zamišljanj, ki problematizirajo obstoječi, ekološko nevzdržen in ne-
trajnosten kapitalistični model rasti in tehnološkega razvoja. Na podlagi analize 
temeljnih značilnosti ideologije ter načina, kako si zamišlja državo in politične 
institucije skozi sistematično vpeljavo umetne inteligence – v kontekstu izraelske-
ga genocida nad Palestinci –, v članku pokažemo, da novost te ideologije tiči v 
osrednji vlogi, ki jo igrata tehnologija in tehnološki razvoj. Slednja namreč pred-
stavljata temelj oligarhične, nedemokratične, represivne, neoimperialne, evgenič-
ne, hiperkapitalistične, ekstrakcijske, destruktivne vizije družbe, ki jo ta ideologija 
zagovarja. 
Ključni pojmi: tehnooligarhija, politična ideologija, polikriza, tehnologija, UI, 
genocid.