THE US TECHNOFEUDAL IMPETUS
June 18, 2025
By EDNEI DE GENARO
Originally published in: Genaro, E. de. (2025, 18 de junho). The Technofeudal Impetus of the United States. 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, The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns, Benjamin Constant—one of the founders of liberalism—declared that “commerce replaces war” (Constant, 1819, p. 4). While conquest through violence belonged to the ancients, to the moderns belonged a “milder and surer means of inducing the adversary to consent to what suits their cause” (ibid.): namely, commerce.
This classical liberal thesis, confident in the progress of mercantilism at the dawn of capitalism, has become—much like the radicalized distortions of John Stuart Mill’s notion of freedom of expression—deplorably unsustainable, culminating in today’s levels of political violence and dehumanization. In other words, the inverse proposition—“war replaces commerce”—has always been among us moderns. This was profoundly evident in the totalitarian experiences of the 20th century—experiences that are now being continuously and radically restored and orchestrated in the West by a degenerate triple consortium of 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 themselves the products of continuous “commercial wars.” We are merely witnessing the collapse of old orders and the birth of new empires. This time, it seems, the principal historical novelties are driven by two dialectical processes: the widespread symptomatology of crisis within post-World War II democratic projects, and the promotion of corporations to the position of ideological hegemon in structuring and commanding societies—thereby challenging the republican conception of the State, according to which government is exercised by representatives elected by citizens to promote the public interest.
The current phase of brutalization—marked by political violence and dehumanization—arrives like a tidal wave after a brief ripple of political hope in the 2000s, which had been fostered by the decentralization and sociability of the internet. In fact, it is cybernetic chaos (Cesarino, 2022) and accelerationist volition (Genaro, 2020)—engineered by Big Tech through its systems, architectures, and platforms—that decompose and short-circuit previous media models and the public sphere. It is within this unprecedented power of social modulation that we witness the emergence of the current, pernicious triple consortium between the State, corporations, and conservatisms (especially Christofascist ones), fostering the degradation of democratic and human rights structures by weaponizing “freedom of expression” as a vehicle for hate speech, lies, and denialist, conspiratorial, and supremacist theories.
Given the prospective decline of 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 compel us to ponder the various reasons why the oxymoron capitalist democracy is no longer viewed favorably by a significant segment 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. Yet, despite the signs of its decline, “there remains no consistent alternative to neoliberalism, as a governing system of ideas of planetary reach.” The end of neoliberalism—steered now by the very country that initiated it, the bellicose United States—represents, as many authors have diagnosed, its own success: namely, the fall of public man and the corrosion of character (Sennett, 1977; 1998), which disintegrated solidarity, knowledge, and community associations, creating a novel socio-historical ferment: the contraction of the human toward the individualistic, entrepreneurial anarcho-capitalist type.
On the global stage, navigating the metamorphoses of capitalism driven by techno-informational inventions and geopolitical chess moves, a certain “social liberalism” can be glimpsed transitioning toward China. Meanwhile, in the US, techno-corporate elites, alongside their oligarchic leader-representatives and influencers, are increasingly seizing ground through daily, reactive, and barbaric assaults upon 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 remains little known among us due to the fringe intellectual channels through 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 ultimately subsumed, as we shall clarify, within a Dark Enlightenment.
The correlation between anarcho-capitalism and medievalism is strange and contradictory. It results in a kind of reactionary vanguardism that proposes technofeudalism as an antecedent and restrictive structure for globalization and the free market. The impulses behind this are varied, notably: the dominance of the service and financial sectors by barons of the algorithmic worlds, prolonged economic stagnation, the upward redistribution of wealth, and the loss of US (and European) control over economic globalization. As Varoufakis (2024) argues—one of the authors examining the technofeudal arrangements 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 Criminal Court 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: namely, the (re)centralization of economic expropriation through extra-economic means of coercion and servitude, with the predominance of arbitrary markets (protected, colonizing, or mafioso) administered by a “normalcy” operating as a state of exception—openly exposing that the oxymoron of democracy and liberalism was never an ideological prerequisite nor a feasible reality.
However, the refoundational philosophical-political underpinnings that fuel this liberal-reactionary mobilizing ideology in the US, which seeks to absorb and demolish the democratic and republican State in favor of 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 brought about the curtailment of democratization and wealth redistribution processes, enjoyed quite peculiar characteristics. To refresh our memory briefly: the first, constituted by the doctrine of the Nazi and Fascist totalitarian States gestated between the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, acted in collusion with capitalist corporations, formalizing a legal regimentation under a regime of a state of exception. This aligned with the political-theological innovations of Carl Schmitt, which guaranteed a dual state (Fraenkel, 1941/2010) – that is, both preserving a certain rule of law and controlling, ignoring, or disrespecting fundamental laws and rights. This was accompanied by a movement of massification and the ideological and cultural control 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 dismantling social welfare guarantees. This followed 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, granting 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 State doctrine are now starkly visible following the re-election of Trump, the leader-messenger of the specter haunting the decadent American empire—that is, 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 aimed to dispel 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 Big Tech, the doctrine driven by Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) intellectually challenges and haunts, both through its illiberal and Christofascist ideological injunctions and by the deliberate acts that seek to implode the republican machinery of the tripartite separation of powers. The magnitude and seriousness of these processes are observable in Trump’s outsider “government program,” Project 2025, conceived (once again) by The Heritage Foundation, with flagrant encouragement for the executive branch to override other branches as the supreme authority, aiming to confront the checks and balances of power, the rule of law, and secularism.
Trump 2.0
The third reactionary inflection of liberalism, currently in a populist gestation in the US and marching forward in a violent and decadent manner, is acquiring dystopian features as a Techno-Feudal State. Facts pointing in this direction are already abundant there. In an incomplete list, restricted to the first months of Trump’s second term, we would highlight: the anarcho-libertarian promotion of cryptocurrencies for anonymous, speculative transactions outside the sphere of state financial control; the defiance and breaking of international agreements and protocols across all domains (military, economic, human rights, public health, etc.); attacks and threats against the free press alongside the elevation of influencers (“Trumpist youth”) as spokespersons for a Christofascist populism; the acquisition 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 branch’s exercise, support, and encouragement of media deregulation and abuses of freedom of expression targeting enemies; the prohibition within any public department 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 establish concentration camps in territories outside the US (Guantánamo; El Salvador); the dismantling of state agencies and services and the liquidation and summary dismissal of their expert workforces; the harassment of and funding cuts to American universities to enforce political-ideological alignment; and, finally, but no less importantly, chaotic and generalized tariffs imposed on other nations as the opening stage of geopolitical bargaining and brutality to extract unilateral and exclusive agreements from economically dependent countries, thereby de-globalizing the economy.
Obviously, given its imperial dimension, the attempted technofeudal refoundation of the US is not restricted to a medievalist cultural and political reordering, such as that found in right-wing autocratic populist countries like Hungary. Nor can it be reduced to a reincarnation of the architecture of destruction that animated totalitarian States, as the socio-historical imagination often initially leads us to believe. Furthermore, it is clearly not a mere upgrade of the neoliberal State model. History does not repeat itself. Rooted in its ideological principles, this refoundation aims, first and foremost, to be an unveiled destruction of democratic and humanist pillars in favor of a monarchical, neocameralist, and conservative “Hobbesian world.” To grasp this, it will be useful to briefly outline some of the ideas contained in a foundational book, The Dark Enlightenment, by Nick Land (2012).
Nick Land & Co.
The English philosopher Nick Land is the primary exponent of the controversial Deleuzian-reactionary interpretation, which feeds anarcho-capitalist and accelerationist volitions. For him, capitalist deterritorialization—which distills cybernetic chaos and technological acceleration—is an opening for new appetites, serving as the exit for the liberation of hyper-liberal desires, especially the ambition to transmute the power structure and the Enlightenment consensus, with the ultimate goal 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 capitalist democracy oxymoron: the barrier is democracy, not capitalism. His work The Dark Enlightenment, disseminated online since 2012, is a kind of compendium of alt-right ideas in the cybernetic age, sown and nurtured on American soil, primarily satisfying the political-ideological anxieties of the new techno-corporate elites of Silicon Valley, California. In it, Land synthesizes, comments upon, and expands the ideas of authors such as the 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 figures such as the 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, mobile communities on maritime platforms operating in international waters.
The extravagances, contradictions, and philosophical and political-economic fallacies found in these discourses—especially the eugenicist and segregationist ideas brought to the fore by these authors and personalities—would be more than enough to condemn and expose the absurdity and irrelevance of their thought. Despite this, the force of such ideas is immense today as a technopolitical eschatology and a mobilizing ideology fueling strategies and political-ideological imaginaries aimed at the techno-feudal refoundation of the US; it is no surprise, then, that they are revered as gurus by the political mentors of MAGA’s fascist populism.
Let us see: the “mysterious cult of power” preached in universities and disseminated by the media is universalism, with its multiculturalist applications and ethical-political (“politically correct”) stances in social life. These are nothing more than “sentimental lies” and “sanctimonious dishonesty,” Land objects, since, in fact, mass emancipation or full citizenship has never been realized. 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 refuse to let it fall into the hands of their enemies.
Land’s analysis and prognosis then follow: the degeneration of the Rousseauian world—the voice emitted by “ever-compliant and indolent masses” that shapes the tyranny of the majority—stands in a harmful, parasitic relationship with capitalism, generating a social zombie state that continuously neutralizes progress and heads toward the apocalypse. It is therefore preferable to implement the “flinty realism” of authoritarian capitalism rather than to continue cultivating the “sanctimonious dishonesty” of social democracy. For this purpose, a monarchical, neocameralist, and conservative “Hobbesian world” is the prescribed counterpoint.
The cameralist form of government, which arose within the enlightened despotic thought of eighteenth-century Germany, saw notable historical applications in nineteenth-century Prussia, combining utilitarianism with absolutist enlightenment to enable the public administration of state finances and properties to be centrally commanded, vesting decisive decision-making powers in the monarch and the nation’s oligarchs.
Obviously, for the new techno-corporate elites, a cameralist upgrade for the twenty-first century is highly appealing in terms of corporate governance, provided the monarch behaves like the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) 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 will of these major property owners as sovereign joint-stock companies. Land points out that Hong Kong, Singapore, and Dubai are contemporary examples that approach this neocameralist “private law society,” offering a high quality of life to the population by rejecting representative democracy, which is dismissed as 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; they point 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).” They further complement this by noting that various passages written by the Founding Fathers of the United States—such as Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, and John Adams—contain sharp criticisms of the democratic form of government.
Nevertheless, quite apart from the blatant case of denialist revisionism above—since, in truth, popular participation and citizens’ votes were always defended by the Founding Fathers through a republic of elected representatives, designing mechanisms precisely to prevent democracy from devolving into a tyranny of the majority—it is essential to emphasize, above all, that these a-universalist and a-democratic philosophical-political resolutions actively embark upon eugenicist and segregationist ideas. This is the most sinister and unhinged moment of the dark enlightenment theses, especially considering the place where they are being disseminated: a territory of the New World, the United States of America, with its absolute and copious history of social formation built upon countless waves of immigrants and enslaved peoples from all over the world, as well as indigenous peoples.
Proponents of the dark enlightenment advocate for the defense of “human biodiversity” so as not to be seen as “damn racists,” and they relativize hate crimes as a legitimate right-wing political action against the order that oppresses them. In today’s landscape, all of this provides the pseudo-intellectual arguments that fuel the MAGA fascist ideology. The critique of constructivism and the exaltation of genetics and hereditary traits complete the discourse, creating an opportunity for the establishment of ethno-geographical cores liberated from the degenerate structures of its Eurocentric predecessor—which manifests today as the active persecution of Latinos and other groups deemed 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—aspires 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 Steve Bannon), employing fallacies and pseudo-scientism while featuring the burlesque (as seen in Trump’s publications depicting himself as king and pope, implying his term will continue after 2028 despite constitutional impossibility).
As Adorno and Horkheimer (2002, p. 28) predicted, “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.” This destination is, in fact, a regression. Far-right accelerationism is a decadent rebirth. Its techno-feudal impetus seeks to forge 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 through growing modes of consent and coercion, augmenting its power of adhesion through Christofascist salvific and supremacist ideals. Miserably, this is one of the winds howling across the West in its unavoidable indigence for refoundation.
Despite being still limited and facing a muzzled opposition 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 undocumented immigrants, but also through boycotts, organized strikes, and demonstrations, notably by the Fighting Oligarchy Tour led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which has been achieving large-scale mobilizations across different US capitals.
Democracies will prevail, renegotiating new socioeconomic contracts to supplant neoliberalism. Against the cybernetic darkness that desires democracy in vertigo to decorate the barbarians, three foundational pillars 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
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