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What happens when a government is suddenly run like a tech startup?
In their 2011 book, Planning for Empire, historian Janis Mimura defines ‘techno-fascism’:
“As a mode of politics, techno-fascism represented a new form of authoritarian rule in which the “totalist” state is fused with the military and bureaucratic planning agencies and controlled by technocrats.”
Though Mimura bases their definition in the specific context of World War II Japan, techno-fascism is very much associated with present-day United States, where technocrats are the new bureaucrats, and are running the government as they would operate a Tesla (an idea given by Andrea Molle, a professor of political science at Chapman University).
More recently, Mimura was interviewed by
for an insightful piece — ‘Techno-Fascism Comes to America’ – published in The New Yorker. Techno-fascism, Mimura says in the article, is a “technicization of all aspects of government and society.”Chayka adds,
“American techno-fascism is no longer a philosophical abstraction for Silicon Valley to tinker with… It is a policy program whose constitutional limits are being tested right now…”
In a related article, Chayka writes,
“The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology.”
The Guardian, too, published a piece on techno-fascism earlier this year — ‘Headed for technofascism’: the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley’ — that harks back to the American tech industry in the 1990s, and the gendered “entrepreneurial hype” that turned male tech entrepreneurs into stars, while lamenting the “pussification of Silicon Valley.”
The article adds little in terms of the consequences of techno-fascism, instead trying to prove how Silicon Valley’s “reactionary tendencies – celebrating wealth, power and traditional masculinity – have been clear since the dotcom mania of the 1990s.”
But, we must really be on board with techno-fascism as one of the defining concepts of our age if multiple think pieces are trying to find its origins and drawing historical parallels.
I leave you with a question: What happens when you merge state with unbridled technological power concentrated in the hands of a few?
Mimura offers,
“You try to apply technical concepts and rationality to human beings and human society, and then you’re getting into something almost totalitarian.”
Not almost but absolute, I would say.