THE US TECHNOFEUDAL IMPETUS
June 18, 2025
By EDNEI DE GENARO
Originally published in: Genaro, E. de. (2025, 18 de junho). O ímpeto tecnofeudal dos EUA. A Terra é Redonda. https://aterraeredonda.com.br/o-impeto-tecnofeudal-dos-eua
While technofeudalism consolidates its power in the shadows of digital capital, democracy resists—not as a ghost of the past, but as a project yet to be reinvented.
Introduction
In his 1819 speech at the Royal Athenaeum in Paris, Benjamin Constant, one of the founders of liberalism, declared in The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns: “commerce replaces war” (Constant, 1819/2010, p. 15). Conquest by violence belonged to the ancients; to the moderns belonged “the milder and surer means of inducing the adversary to consent to what suits their cause” (Idem., p. 13), which is commerce.
This thesis of classical liberalism, confident in the progress of mercantilism at the dawn of capitalism, has become—much like the radicalized distortions of Stuart Mill’s notion of freedom of expression—deplorably unsustainable, leading to today’s levels of political violence and dehumanization. In other words, the opposite, ‘war substitutes for commerce,‘ has always been among us moderns. This was profoundly true in the totalitarian experiences of the 20th century—experiences that are being continuously and radically restored and orchestrated in the West by the degenerate triple consortium between the State, corporations, and cultural conservative radicals.
In reality, the purported non-dialectic between commerce and war lacks historical foundation. Liberal ideological orders and their imperial states are the result of continuous ‘commercial wars.’ We merely observe the collapse and birth of new orders and empires. This time, it seems, the main historical novelties are based on two dialectical processes: the generalized symptomatology of crisis in the post-World War II democratic projects, and the promotion of corporations as the ideological hegemon in structuring and commanding societies, thereby challenging the republican view of the State, where government is based on representatives elected by citizens to promote public interest.
The current phase of brutalization—of political violence and dehumanization—arrives like a tidal wave after a brief ripple of political hope in the 2000s, created by the decentralization and sociability of the Internet. In fact, it is cybernetic chaos (Cesarino, 2022) and accelerationist volition (Genaro, 2020)—produced by the Big Techs with their systems, architectures, and platforms—that decompose and short-circuit previous media models and the public sphere. It is in this unprecedented power of social modulation that we see the emergence of the current and pernicious triple consortium between the State, corporations, and conservatisms (especially Christofascist ones), fostering the degradation of democratic and human rights structures based on “freedom of expression” as a vehicle for hate speech, lies, and denialist, conspiratorial, and supremacist theories.
Considering the prospect of decline for US ideological and economic imperialism, the potential dynamic of brutalization is breathtakingly reactionary. In the vortex of accelerating historical processes, incited by Trump’s executive orders, we might ask, paraphrasing Constant: Have we reached another era? A hypothetical affirmative answer would lead us to ponder the various reasons why the oxymoron capitalist democracy is no longer viewed favorably by a significant portion of the new elites in Democracy in America. A window of history is thus being opened, letting in unknown winds—and this essay seeks to capture them.
Genealogy of Reactionary Liberalism
As Perry Anderson (2025) recently wrote, “the neoliberal universe over which the hegemon of the period still presides has amply met both requirements” for a mobilizing ideology: the capacity to generate consent and coercion. However, despite the signs of its decline, “yet there remains no consistent alternative to neoliberalism, as a governing system of ideas of planetary reach.” The end of neoliberalism, now spearheaded by the same country that initiated it—the bellicose US—represents, as many authors have diagnosed, its own success: the fall of public man and the corrosion of character (Sennett, 1977; 1998), which disintegrated community solidarities, knowledge, and associations, creating a unique socio-historical ferment: the contraction of the human into the individualistic, entrepreneurial anarcho-capitalist type.
On the global stage, navigating the metamorphoses of capitalism, led by techno-informational inventions and geopolitical chess moves, a certain “social liberalism” is glimpsed in transposition toward China, while in the US, techno-corporate elites, alongside their oligarchic leader-representatives and influencers, are increasingly and through daily reactive and barbaric assaults, appropriating what we once called the public sphere, the rule of law, and the republic. In light of this, we intend to focus on the mobilizing ideology that has become salient in the US today as the far-right alternative to neoliberalism. It is still little-known outside the US due to the outsider intellectual form in which it is disseminated and the extravagant, revisionist ideas it exhibits, whose techno-libertarian or techno-anarcho-capitalist aspirations for the refoundation of the American empire are subsumed, as we will clarify, into a Dark Enlightenment.
The correlation between anarcho-capitalism and medievalism is strange and contradictory. It results in a kind of reactionary vanguardism proposing technofeudalism as a preceding and limiting structure to globalization and the free market. The impulses for this are varied, notably: the dominance of the services and finance sectors by algorithmic world barons, prolonged economic stagnation, upward redistribution of income, and the loss of US (and European) control over economic globalization. As Varoufakis (2024) argues—one of the authors considering the technofeudal arrangements that are transforming capitalism—”The combination of socialism for financiers, collapsing prospects for the bottom 50%, and the surrender of our minds to Big Tech’s cloud capital gave birth to a Brave New West, whose overweening elites have little use for the last century’s value system. Free trade, anti-trust rules, net zero, democracy, openness to migration, diversity, human rights, and the International Court of Justice were treated with the same contempt with which the US treated friendly dictators – its ‘own bastards’ – after their usefulness ended.”
On a strictly economic level, the multipolar world and the shrinking influence of the US lead the far-right to identify an exit to confront the now problematic “invisible hand of the market” based on a techno-feudal-capitalist combination: the (re)centralization of economic expropriation through extra-economic means of coercion and servitude, with the predominance of arbitrary markets (protected, colonizing, or mafioso), managed by a “normal” under a state of exception, thus revealing that the oxymoron democracy and liberalism was never an ideological prerequisite nor a feasible reality.
However, the foundational philosophical-political meanings that fuel the liberal-reactionary mobilizing ideology in the US, attempting to absorb and demolish the democratic and republican State for a refoundation valuing a technofeudal power structure, need to be better clarified and debated.
In the genealogy of liberalism, the two preceding reactionary inflections, which lowered the processes of democratization and wealth redistribution, enjoyed quite peculiar characteristics. Let’s briefly recall them: the first, constituted by the doctrine of the Nazi and Fascist totalitarian States, conceived between the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, was in collusion with capitalist corporations, formalizing a legal regimentation under a state of exception, in accordance with the political-theological innovations of Carl Schmitt, which guaranteed a dual state (Fraenkel, 2010)—that is, both preserving certain rules of law and controlling, ignoring, or disrespecting fundamental laws and rights. This was accompanied by a movement of massification and ideological and cultural controls of populations through a state propaganda machine, using radio and newspapers, especially. The second liberal-reactionary inflection, constituted by the doctrine of the neoliberal States, gestated since the early 1970s in England and the US, was based on reconfiguring the State’s role in the economy and lowering social welfare guarantees, according to right-wing libertarian ideologies (Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek), architected by think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 in Washington (US), with the goal of promoting public policies that would limit or privatize public spaces and the State’s roles, giving greater participation to corporations in the control of all spheres of life, including education and health.
The consequences, sequelae, or ruins after half a century of the neoliberal States doctrine are now profoundly appreciated following the re-election of Trump, the leader-messenger of the specter haunting the decadent American empire—the third reactionary inflection. This inflection disrupted Biden’s liberal-progressive plan, with its kind of revival of the New Deal project, the Build Back Better Plan, which projected repelling the myth of the State as a bad entrepreneur or antagonist of the private sector (Mazzucato, 2013).
In the unfolding of an accelerationist technopolitical eschatology implemented by the Big Techs, the doctrine excited by Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) intellectually challenges and haunts, both by its illiberal and Christofascist ideological injunctions and by the deliberate acts that seek to implode the republican machinery of the tripartite division of powers. The magnitude and seriousness of the processes are observed in Trump’s outsider “government program,” Project 2025, conceived (again) by The Heritage Foundation, with flagrant encouragement for the executive power to assume maximum authority, aiming to confront the checks and balances of powers, the rule of law, and secularism.
Trump 2.0
The third reactionary inflection of liberalism, in populist gestation in the US, marching violently and decadently, is gaining dystopian features as a Techno-Feudal State. Facts pointing in this direction are already abundant there. In an incomplete list, limited to the first months of Trump’s second term, we would highlight: the anarcho-libertarian valorization of cryptocurrencies for anonymous, speculative negotiations outside the State’s financial control sphere; the disregard and breaking of international agreements and protocols across all orders (military, economic, human rights, public health, etc.); attacks and threats to the free press and the promotion of influencers (“Trumpist youth”) as spokespersons for a Christofascist populism; the purchase of media conglomerates by the ascendant and sectarian techno-corporate elite (Bezos’s Washington Post; Musk’s Twitter, the most deranged techno-oligarchic representative, now expelled from the White House); the creation of an official social network for Trumpist worship (Truth Social); the executive power’s exercise, support, and incentive of media deregulation and abuses of freedom of expression against enemies; the prohibition in any public department of the use of words related to environmental policies, minority rights, and class struggles (“clean energy,” “marginalized,” “social justice,” “transgender,” “feminism,” “diversity,” “cultural heritage”—nearly 200 words); the persecution of Latino immigrants and the attempt to create concentration camps in territories outside the US (Guantánamo; El Salvador); the destruction of state agencies and services and their expert workforce, through liquidations and summary dismissals; the harassment and funding cuts to American universities to try to ensure political-ideological alignment; and, finally, but no less importantly, chaotic and generalized taxation on countries, as the initial stage of geopolitical bargaining and brutality to obtain unilateral and exclusive agreements with economically dependent countries, thus de-globalizing the economy.
Obviously, given its imperial dimension, the attempted technofeudal refoundation of the US is not limited to being a medievalist cultural and political reordering, as seen in right-wing autocratic populist countries like Hungary. Nor is it reduced to a reincarnation of the architecture of destruction that animated the totalitarian States, as historical-social imagination often makes us initially think. It is also clearly not merely an upgrade of the neoliberal States model. History does not repeat itself. Based on its ideological principles, the refoundation aims, first and foremost, to be an unveiled destruction of democratic and humanist pillars, in favor of a “Hobbesian world”—monarchical, neocameralist, and conservative. To grasp this, it will be useful to briefly present some ideas contained in a key book, The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land (2012).
Nick Land & Co.
The English philosopher Nick Land is the main exponent of the controversial Deleuzian-reactionary interpretation, which is productive for anarcho-capitalist and accelerationist volitions. For him, capitalist deterritorialization, which distills cybernetic chaos and technological acceleration, is an opening for new appetites, being the exit for the liberation of hyper-liberal desires, especially for the ambitions of transmuting the structure of power and the Enlightenment consensus, with the aim of suppressing the democratic form of government and, more profoundly, universalist and multiculturalist ideals.
Unlike Mark Fisher and Sadie Plant, renowned left-wing authors who also participated in the famous Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) collective at the University of Warwick (England) in the 1990s, Land inverts the problematic causation of the oxymoron capitalist democracy: the barrier is democracy, not capitalism. The work The Dark Enlightenment, disseminated online since 2012, is a kind of compendium of alt-right ideas in cybernetic times, sown and nurtured on American soil, primarily satisfying the political-ideological aspirations of the new techno-corporate elites of Silicon Valley, California. In it, Land summarizes, comments on, and unfolds the ideas of authors such as academic Hans-Hermann Hoppe, known for the book Democracy—The God That Failed (2001), the anarcho-capitalist economist Murray Newton Rothbard, the neo-reactionary and denialist thinker Curtis Yarvin (initially identified in the blogosphere by the pseudonym Mencius Moldbug), and business personalities such as billionaire Peter Andreas Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and Patri Friedman, founder of the Seasteading Institute, an organization created to facilitate the establishment of autonomous and mobile communities on maritime platforms, operating in international waters.
The extravagances, contradictions, and philosophical and politico-economic fallacies found in the discourses, especially the eugenic and segregationist ideas that these authors and personalities bring to the fore, would be more than enough to condemn and mark the excrescence and irrelevance of their thoughts. Despite this, the forces of such thoughts are enormous today as a technopolitical eschatology and a mobilizing ideology for the fermentation of strategies and political-ideological imaginaries aimed at the techno-feudal refoundation of the US, and it is no surprise that they are revered as gurus by the political mentors of the MAGA fascist populism.
Let’s see: the “mysterious cult of power,” preached in universities and disseminated by the media, is universalism, with its multiculturalist applications and ethical-political stances (“politically correct”) in social life. These are nothing more than “sentimental lies” and “sanctimonious dishonesty,” Land objects, since, in fact, mass emancipation or the fullness of citizenship has never been fulfilled. In reality, the degenerative dynamic of representative democracies prevails, governed both by private vices, resentments, corruption, and urban criminality, and by a political circus of usurpation by those in power who do not want it to fall into the hands of enemies.
The analysis and prognosis from Land then follow: the degeneration of the “Rousseauian strain”—of the voice emitted by “the politically awakened masses as a howling irrational mob” and conforming the tyranny of the majority—is in a harmful parasitic relationship with capitalism, generating a social zombie state, always nullifying progress and heading towards the apocalypse. It is therefore preferable to implement the “flinty realism” of authoritarian capitalism rather than continue cultivating the “sanctimonious dishonesty” of social democracy (Land, Ibid.). For this purpose, the monarchical, neocameralist, and conservative “Hobbesian strain” is the indicated counterpoint.
The cameralist form of government, which arose within the enlightened despotic ideas of Germany from the 18th century, had notable experiences in 19th-century Prussia, combining utilitarianism and absolutist enlightenment, in order to enable the public administration of the State’s finances, its properties, and finances to be centrally commanded, with decision-making powers given to the monarch and the country’s oligarchs.
Obviously, for the new techno-corporate elites, a cameralist upgrade for the 21st century is appealing in the sense of corporate governance, provided the monarch behaves like a CEO of the “general corporation,” the State, working on behalf of a board of directors composed of the country’s most “efficient and effective” individuals—namely, its major property owners or shareholders. The CEO-monarch with total power, elected by the board, must, in fact, follow the wishes of the major property owners as sovereign joint-stock companies. Land points out that Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai are contemporary examples that approach the neocameralist “private law society,” offering a high quality of life to the population by rejecting representative democracy, which is considered inefficient and wasteful.
But is the proposition of a Gov-Corp as a form of government for the techno-feudal-capitalist and populist refoundation of the US not an outrage to the foundational and constitutional ideals of Democracy in America? For the revisionists Nick Land & Co., the answer is no, pointing out that “Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the word ‘democracy’ does not appear in the Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Constitution of the United States of America (1789).” (Steve H. Hanke apud Land, Ibid.), further complementing that passages written by Founding Fathers of the United States such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams contain criticisms of the democratic form of government.
Nevertheless, apart from the latent case of denialist revisionism above—since, in truth, popular participation and citizens’ votes were always defended by the Founding Fathers, based on a republic with elected representatives, proposing mechanisms precisely to prevent democracy from being reduced to a tyranny of the majority—it is essential to emphasize, finally and above all, that the a-universalist and a-democratic philosophical-political resolutions embark on eugenic and segregationist ideas. This is the most disastrous and exposed moment of the dark enlightenment theses, especially considering the place where they are disseminated, namely, a territory of the New World, the United States of America, with its absolute and copious history of social formation from countless waves of immigrants and slaves from all over the world, as well as native peoples.
The dark enlightenment advocate the defense of “human bio-diversity” and relativize hate crimes as, in fact, a legitimate right-wing political action against the order that oppresses it. All of this signifies, in the order of the day, pseudo-intellectual arguments that fuel the MAGA fascist ideology. The critique of constructivism and the exaltation of genetics and hereditary traits complete the discourse, providing an opportunity for the creation of “a new ethno-geographical core, liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor” — in the order of the day: the persecution of Latinos and other groups considered inconvenient.
Counter-Winds
Are we reaching an era of premeditated and cynical usurpation of the Enlightenment? Or, in strictly political terms: are we reaching an era of systematic and extreme assaults on democracy? The dark enlightenment exit, for the liberation of hyper-liberal desires and the transmutation of the power structure and the Enlightenment consensus, wants to be both techno-futurist and libertarian, as well as monarchical and reactionary. It does not seek consensus, but consent; if possible, undertaken at muzzle velocity (as enunciated by Trumpist strategist Steven Bannon), employing fallacies and pseudo-scientism and featuring the burlesque (as in Trump’s publications featuring him as king and pope and implying that his term will continue after 2028, even with constitutional impossibility).
As Adorno and Horkheimer (1985, p. 48) predicted, “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.” The arrival is, in fact, a regression. The far-right accelerationism is a decadentist rebirth. Its techno-feudal impetus seeks to cast a third reactionary inflection of liberalism, bringing forward the paradoxical and the contradictory as appetites for the pernicious, the violent, and the inhuman. Unfortunately, such a reactionary vanguard order is mobilizing populations in increasing modes of consent and coercion, augmenting its power of adhesion through Christofascist salvational and supremacist ideals. Miserably, this is one of the winds howling in the West, in its unavoidable indigence for refoundation.
Despite being still limited and with opposition muzzled in the legislature and judiciary, progressive counter-winds have appeared in the US, on the streets, through recent protests sparked in Los Angeles against the hunting of illegal immigrants, but also through boycotts, organization of strikes, and demonstrations, notably by the Fighting Oligarchy Tour, led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which has been achieving large mobilizations in different US capitals.
Democracies will prevail, renegotiating new socioeconomic contracts to supplant neoliberalism. Against the cybernetic darkness, which desires democracy in vertigo to decorate the barbarians, three foundational meanings for the US seem basic and urgent: a deepened and renegotiated understanding of freedom of expression, democracy, and commerce, subtracted from the bellicose imperial-oligarchic impetus. The very authors of the liberal pantheon—Mill, Tocqueville, and Constant—are under intense depredation.
References
Adorno, T. W., & Horkheimer, M. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (E. Jephcott, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cesarino, L. (2022). O mundo do avesso: verdade e política na era digital. Ubu Editora.
Constant, B. (1819/2010). The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns (J. Bennett, Trans.). Early Modern Texts. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/constant1819.pdf
Fraenkel, E. (1941/2010). The dual state: A contribution to the theory of dictatorship (E. A. Shils, Trans.). Lawbook Exchange.
Hoppe, H.-H. (2001). Democracy: The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. Transaction Publishers.
Genaro, E. de. (2020). Escatologias tecnopolíticas contemporâneas. Cadernos IHU Ideias, 18(297). https://www.ihu.unisinos.br/images/stories/cadernos/ideias/297cadernosihuideias.pdf
Land, N. (2012). The Dark Enlightenment. https://keithanyan.github.io/TheDarkEnlightenment.epub/TheDarkEnlightenment.pdf
Mazzucato, M. (2013). The entrepreneurial state: Debunking public vs. private sector myths. Anthem Press.
Sennett, R. (1977). The fall of public man. W.W. Norton & Company.
Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. W.W. Norton & Company.
Varoufakis, Y. (2024, dezembro 19). The West is not dying, but it is working on it. Project Syndicate. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/west-has-abandoned-western-values-by-yanis-varoufakis-2024-12
Anderson, P. (2025, January–February). Idées-forces. New Left Review, (151). https://doi.org/10.64590/npv
Maelström Life - Ednei de Genaro 