Techno-oligarchy aims to supersede the human species – through AI that renders human intelligence obsolete, through biological enhancement available only to techno-oligarchic elites, through brain-computer interfaces, through the technological singularity as horizon. Techno-oligarchy is the first political formation in history whose implicit endpoint is the obsolescence of humanity itself.

BY Anton Shekhovtsov ON SUBSTACK / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO Towers of Europa, by Anton Shekhovtsov ON SUBNSTACK

And yet the term is misleading, and its inadequacy matters. The phenomenon I prefer to call “techno-oligarchy” is neither merely, nor so much, a variant of fascism dressed in Silicon Valley aesthetics. It represents a radical rupture from virtually all modern political traditions – and a threat that, in its anti-humanism, transcends even the murderous anti-humanism to which the label “techno-fascism” gestures. To call it fascism is not only imprecise; it may cause us to misunderstand what we are facing and therefore to resist it less effectively.

Hence: eight points on how techno-oligarchy differs from fascism – and why it is more dangerous.

Before proceeding, three caveats are necessary.

1. This comparison does not aim to whitewash or normalise fascism, nor to diminish the immense suffering that fascist movements inflicted on people around the world, both in power and on their way to it. None of the fascist crimes are forgivable – neither the genocides of Jews and Roma, nor Fascist invasions of African countries, nor the mass euthanasia programmes, nor the postwar neo-fascist terrorist violence, among countless others.
2. The argument is not that techno-oligarchy has already committed crimes against humanity on the scale of historical fascism. The claim is more specific: that the underlying logic of techno-oligarchy points toward a socio-political configuration that even fascism, by design, could not and, arguably, cannot reach.
3. Framing this as “worse than fascism” does not imply that fascism was/is the only or, indeed, the worst totalitarianism. The comparison is chosen as a direct response to the term “techno-fascism” – and several of the eight points that follow apply, with appropriate modification, to other totalitarian traditions as well.

Resistance to techno-oligarchy is harder to build than resistance to fascism. Persecuted groups under fascism can develop solidarity because their enemy status is stable and shared. Techno-oligarchy’s ever-shifting targeting prevents the formation of durable coalitions – each group is isolated, often before others recognise what is happening to them.

The most coherent basis for resistance is humanism: the insistence that humanity, in its diversity and collectivity, is not obsolete. Techno-oligarchy knows this, and works systematically to prevent it – amplifying division, deepening antagonism, and often deploying fascism’s own methods to fragment any potential united front.

The defence of humanity is not a metaphor. It is the political task of our time – and democracy remains the only framework in which that defence can be meaningfully mounted.

The Techno-Oligarchy’s First “Holocaust”:

Government Efficiency and Death by Indifference

A conventional story tells us that, after the Third Reich lost the Second World War, the Western allies made a convincing case about the Shoah – the Nazi programme aimed at eradicating the Jews from across its empire – and yet many so-called “ordinary Germans”, including “ordinary soldiers”, would not believe it.

Logically, of course, connecting the dots was not intellectually too straining: from the antisemitic legislation that the Hitler regime began to enact in 1933, to the pivotal Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, to the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938, to the rhetoric of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, and, finally, to the extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. But at some point in this logical chain – at the “Final Solution” rhetoric – many “ordinary Germans” would adopt the “innocent” interpretation of the phrase, breaking the exterminatory sequence of references.

A psychological defence mechanism, protecting “national consciousness” from the devastating humiliation of being linked to the villainy of the Shoah, would send their thoughts off into safer mental acrobatics. Neither Sobibor nor Treblinka nor the other camps were about extermination – they were only about “special treatment” and “resettlement”. That millions were killed in those camps had no connection to the genocidal interpretation of the “Final Solution” – they died for other reasons.

Perhaps the “innocent” interpretations of “solution”, “treatment”, “resettlement”, “evacuation” and other words appeared more rational, more in keeping with the traditions of German idealism, than the eliminatory ones, but they were not. Once the Nazi belief system had established that the Jews represented an existential threat to the Aryan race, the “Final Solution” became a managerial problem: resettlement would not neutralise the threat – it had to be eradicated. Or, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor, it became a gardening problem: to keep a garden in its planned shape and to take care of the cultured plants, the weeds had to be exterminated.

A gardener’s motives are always rational – his hand moves in a calculated manner. The bureaucracy of the gardening state “is programmed to seek the optimal solution. It is programmed to measure the optimum in such terms as would not distinguish between one human object and another, or between human and inhuman objects. What matters is the efficiency and lowering of costs of their processing” (Bauman).

The language of optimisation and efficiency is inherent to all bureaucracy, but the removal of the fundamental difference between human and inhuman objects, and their consequent treatment on a par, is a step towards the dehumanisation of people. And the larger the scale of required optimisation of the processes involving human beings, the higher the cost in human lives, in a cold pursuit of efficiency as the greater good.

It is precisely this language of efficiency, formulated by the US techno-oligarchy and followed in 2025 by action to achieve it, that laid the foundation of what I am calling the techno-oligarchy’s first “holocaust”.

I use the word “holocaust” with reference to the ancient Greek sacrificial practice in which animals were wholly burnt (“holókaustos”) as an offering to the gods. Importantly for my use of the term, the sacrificed animals were consigned to the fire not out of hatred or any animus directed at them. On the contrary, while their lives were appreciated within the logic of sacrifice – the ritual implied giving up something of real value – it was ultimately indifference to their lives that governed how they were treated.

And it was indifference, rather than hatred, towards people who would potentially be affected by the White House’s decision to pause yet effectively cancel US foreign development assistance following Donald Trump’s return to presidency in early 2025.

Framed as an action against the alleged misalignment between the existing US foreign aid apparatus and American interests and values, Trump’s Executive Order 14169, which set in motion the dismantling of USAID, was, to a certain extent, inspired by the US techno-oligarchy’s managerial approach to efficiency.

Writing in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in November 2024 – just two weeks after Trump was elected US president – US entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy claimed that Trump had asked them to lead “a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size”. The op-ed promised that DOGE would “help end federal overspending”, and, as would become evident later, “overspending” included funding for USAID.

DOGE was officially launched by Trump’s Executive Order 14158 on 20 January 2025, the same day that the White House “paused” foreign development assistance. The order’s stated purpose was to transform federal spending by ensuring transparency in government contracts, grants, and loans, and accountability among federal employees to the American public. While USAID was neither the only nor the primary target of DOGE, Musk seemed exceptionally obsessed with dismantling it. He called it “a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, and eventually declared, in early February 2026, that he and his team had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.

Sending USAID, which had been running numerous missions across the world, to the “wood chipper” implied stopping its programmes in areas ranging from education to democracy promotion, from environmental protection to global health. And it is precisely with regard to global health – the health programmes were hit by DOGE first and hardest – that the actions of the techno-oligarchy amounted to a “holocaust”.

In July 2025, The Lancet, one of the world’s highest-impact academic journals, published the first study evaluating the impact of USAID funding on mortality across the globe over the previous two decades. The study found that “USAID-funded programmes [had] helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children”. At the same time, the forecasting models developed by the authors of the study established that the cuts in USAID funding – unless they were reversed – “could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2.4 million deaths per year”. These deaths would “include 4.5 million among children younger than 5 years, or more than 700,000 deaths annually”.

These shocking figures assumed the total defunding of global aid programmes, which, fortunately, has not occurred. Actual US spending fell far less in 2025 than the wholesale dismantling implied, as money kept flowing on existing commitments. Even so, at the end of 2025 the Center for Global Development, reconciling its numbers with The Lancet’s as “broadly congruent”, estimated that the cuts already realised implied between 500,000 and a million deaths over the year, with credible projections of up to 1.6 million a year if the cuts deepened.

It was bureaucratic inertia, not mercy, that deterred the larger toll – yet the cost in human lives of the techno-oligarchy’s pursuit of “efficiency” already exceeds most of the atrocities to which the twentieth century gave names.

Yet nearly all programmatic mass atrocities of the last century carried an ideological load that suggested hatred towards their victims. Often the hatred was ethnic, religious, or both: Armenians, Jews, Roma, Tutsis, Bosniaks, and others were targeted, murdered, or lethally abandoned because their mere existence – their perceived culture, skin colour, way of life – provoked hatred or revulsion in their persecutors.

Even the atrocities emanating from twentieth-century collectivisation efforts, such as the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine or the Khmer Rouge purges in Cambodia, were not purely matters of indifference. Whatever part ill-conceived quests for agricultural efficiency played in them, the victims were not a neutral, invisible side effect: they were marked out – as class enemies, as ideological obstacles, as bearers of the wrong nationality – and destroyed as such.

The victims of the techno-oligarchic “holocaust” constitute a radical departure from the murderous experience of the twentieth century. While their deaths result from a programme driven by ideology, they themselves are not treated as enemies – exactly as the animals wholly burnt in ancient holocausts drew no animus from those who offered them.

The meaning of such a sacrifice is not to kill or abandon someone or something; it is to achieve an objective – to win the favour of the gods, or to secure government efficiency. The victims are therefore programmatically invisible; they are neither named nor categorised. And this programmatic invisibility – the absence of any reason for which they are singled out – is mirrored in the physical invisibility of their demise. Those deaths are recorded only as “excess” or “additional”; they are statistical and geographically dispersed, so that no single body can ever be registered as part of the “holocaust”.

But is this epistemic uncertainty not one of the defining characteristics of techno-oligarchic control over the flow of information – control that goes beyond anything the fascist or communist regimes of the twentieth century imposed?

Fascists burned undesirable books, communists pulped them; the techno-oligarchy lauds “freedom of speech” yet employs opaque algorithms to demote and down-rank unwanted information. For the former, the damage to information was visible and often violent; for the latter, it is covert, deniable, and leaves no ash. Likewise, one could excavate and identify the dead at Auschwitz, Sandarmokh, or Choeung Ek as victims of ideological mass murder – yet the techno-oligarchic “holocaust” leaves no such place for anyone to mourn.

The “ordinary Germans” of today will have little trouble denying how lethal a pursuit of efficiency indifferent to human life can be. Just as the Shoah was hidden behind euphemisms such as “special treatment” or “resettlement”, the techno-oligarchic “holocaust” hides behind “optimisation”, “reevaluation”, and “sound industrial logic”.

Yet here, too, it is not intellectually too straining to foresee the consequences of the dehumanisation inherent in techno-oligarchy. This technocratic dehumanisation differs from the kinds that psychologically facilitated the mass atrocities of the twentieth century. The practice of the Shoah or the Porajmos suggested that Jews or Roma were of lesser human worth than their tormentors. Techno-oligarchic dehumanisation proceeds from a different point of departure: people are placed on a par with inhuman objects. This does not mean they are held to have no value. Rather, it means they are evaluated in terms of function – exactly as inhuman objects are – by those for whom “government efficiency” and “technological progress” are the greater good.

Reduced to function, like any other component, human beings lose all cultural protection from the not-so-invisible hand of the techno-oligarchic gardener – protection rooted in classical antiquity and crystallised in the humanistic traditions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Reduction of this kind does not stop at a single “holocaust”. Its natural endpoint is a global human tragedy of a magnitude we have not yet seen.

Techno-Oligarchy and the Theft of Tomorrow:

How the collapse of time into the never-ending present is monetised, then turned into a weapon of political control

In a now-famous behavioural experiment of 1953, the neuroscientists James Olds and Peter Milner implanted electrodes in specific areas of rats’ brains, giving the animals the ability to stimulate those areas themselves by pressing a lever. Every time they did so, the mechanism would deliver a small electrical charge, triggering the release of an organic chemical that would later be given the name “dopamine”.

This release would produce a pleasant effect, signalling to the rats that their actions were meaningful and that they would be rewarded again if they continued. Unrestrained by anything, they would press the lever over and over, neglecting food, water, and rest – until they collapsed from exhaustion. In later experiments, they would even cross electrified grids that caused them pain, just to reach the lever and feel the “pleasure” again.

But the fact that their actions would eventually lead to exhaustion implied that those actions had never been meaningful in the longer term – either for their own well-being or for the survival of their species – but only the brain’s signal for it, which the lever directly triggered.

Rats are smart animals who possess the building blocks of futurity – they can imagine a place or a time they are not in, hold that image, and act on what they imagine. Yet given unrestricted access to self-stimulation, and the dopamine release that follows, those imaginative abilities are overridden and the natural instincts lose their hold. Any possible future becomes irrelevant; time itself implodes into a series of impulses to press the lever again and again; and those impulses close into a loop of perpetual present that ends only with the physical inability to press on.

Alongside the experiments on rats, similar work was conducted on humans. In the 1950s-70s, neuroscientists implanted electrodes in people’s brains to find ways of treating mental illnesses – and what was then considered as such – and, later, to understand the nature of addiction, not only to drugs but also to gambling.

And it was not until much later – and after many further scientific investigations – that a clear parallel was drawn between the rat pressing a lever to trigger a release of dopamine and the human pulling a lever of a slot machine to do the same. And though the human is reckoned by far the smarter animal, some of the effects of machine play are scarcely distinguishable from those of the laboratory experiments with rats and electrodes.

In Addiction by Design, an immersive study of the slot machine, Natasha Dow Schüll describes how the machine draws each player into what gamblers themselves call “the zone”: a trancelike state co-produced by player and apparatus in which everyday cares, the claims of other people, and even the sense of one’s own body recede.

What Schüll describes can be understood as a rupture between two orders of time. There is “clock time”, the time we share with others, social time, with a past, a present, and a future. And there is the time of the zone: radically individual and anti-social, an indefinite event of play with neither past nor future, a never-ending present. That never-ending present is sustained visually, by an endless stream of colour and light, and audibly, by a no less endless stream of sound.

Like the neuroscientists in the experiments with rats, the makers of the slot machine and their kin learnt to hack – intuitively, empirically – the nervous system, and to flatten perceived time. Their interest, however, was economic: the flattening of time was the very foundation of the slot machine’s business model, since the gambler’s impulse towards a future was precisely what undermined it. To keep the machine fed, that impulse had to be dissolved.

But if the original makers of the slot machine acted intuitively, with no science of reward behind their monetising assault on the future, the technology companies that came to dominate our online lives knew exactly what they were doing. They placed engagement – and the dissolution of the future – at the heart of their business model; unlike the slot-makers, they had a behavioural science to guide them.

The commercialisation of the internet began as early as the 1990s, and engagement mattered even then – someone had to click on all those banners. But it was not until the mid-2000s that the manufacture of a never-ending present became less a side effect than the central product of the technology companies. What made it impossible in the 1990s was the state of the technology itself: two conditions had to converge before the anti-futural business model could be built. One was the smartphone; the other was cheap mobile bandwidth to feed it.

The smartphone created a readily available personal zone outside social space – one that allowed a deeper dive than reading a newspaper or a book in public ever had. The mobile bandwidth made that zone sustainable and captivating, delivering a continuous stream of sound and image to hold it open.

And the arrival of infinite scroll and the pull-to-refresh gesture – each uncannily echoing the pull of the slot-machine lever in its indefinite event of play – completed the apparatus of a new machine devoted to “optimising user engagement”: which is to say, to collapsing the flow of time into a perpetual present.

The creators of this new machine did so deliberately. As one technology entrepreneur admitted, the thinking behind “optimising user engagement” turned on a single question: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”. The answer was to give the user “a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever”. The technique was “a social-validation feedback loop” that consciously exploited, in his words, “a vulnerability in human psychology”.

While the tricks for flattening time first and most prominently emerged around social networks, their modifications and adaptations have spread across virtually every major domain where the technology companies have established control. Consider the infinite autoplay feeds of audio- and video-streaming services: they are the never-ending present made into a product. But it is not only the future that the swollen present consumes. Search engines are biased towards recency, so they bury the durable beneath the just-published, and the user’s sense of the past thins.

The technology companies exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology for money. They monetise the perpetual present. The techno-oligarchy – the handful of ultra-wealthy technology elites who now own the infrastructures of public life – does something different. Their stake in the never-ending present is no longer only economic. They do not merely monetise the collapse of time – they politicise it.

Techno-oligarchy is not an ideological movement, and techno-oligarchs differ on how political power should be wielded; yet several traits, taken together, form a tacit ideological core. In this view, what its adherents call “technological progress” takes precedence over the fate of humankind. Humanity has no value in itself: humans are weighed on the same scale as inanimate objects, by a single measure – their usefulness to “progress”. Humanity, moreover, will not inherit the advanced stages of that progress; that will be the fate of transhumanity, a fusion of human and machine. And it is the interests of that future race that, on this logic, all the political, economic, and technological power of the present is to serve. The techno-oligarch’s role is to steer the “progress” and secure the transhuman outcome – for which he must first secure his own longevity, if not outright immortality, and a permanent hold on economic and political power. But he must also remove the social and political opposition to his project – an opposition broad and various, since few are drawn to the idea of discounting humanity. And one of the pillars of that opposition is the same force that threatens the slot machine’s business model: the natural human impulse towards the future.

Techno-oligarchy is radically futurist; yet not only is the future it imagines inaccessible to “ordinary people” by its own ideological design, the manipulation of time has become one of its major weapons for neutralising opposition. The concept that helps us see how this weapon is configured is what Taina Bucher calls “the kairologic of algorithmic media”.

The Greeks distinguished two kinds of time: chronos (χρόνος), chronological or clock time, and kairos (καιρός), the right or opportune moment. In Bucher’s account, algorithmic media have shifted from chronos to kairos: our feeds are no longer ordered chronologically but arranged so that each item of information surfaces “at the right moment” – where “right” means whatever the system judges most relevant to each user. The making of these individualised feeds of kairos is, as with the zones of the gambling hall, co-produced by machine and – largely unwittingly – by human. The machine’s part is the algorithms that filter, sort, and rank what reaches us. The human’s part is personal data and behaviour: hours of presence, browsing history, search terms. Together they fabricate kairos – a right-time engineered to hold the user as long as possible.

If the kairologic governs the when, the what – the exact content the algorithms feed us – does not matter: this item or that, it is interchangeable. The kind, however, does. The rationale of stretching the present indefinitely for “ordinary people” – armed with scientific knowledge of human psychological vulnerabilities – gives the system its preferences. It favours political polarisation, social anger, cultural oddities and curiosities: whatever reliably generates a strong emotional response, according to what the machine “knows” about a particular user.

The techno-oligarchs have their own socio-cultural preferences, and they often amplify racist and anti-democratic content. But this explains only part of the techno-oligarchy’s campaign against the opposition to its project. The project is, beyond doubt, illiberal – which seems to place it close to what political scientists call “radical right-wing populism”. Yet the resemblance is tactical. Race in the ordinary sense is of little concern to the larger project of transhumanism: in that project’s own terms, the races are still human, and the human as such does not matter. The only race that finally counts for them is the transhuman one – which is precisely why the human races do not. Seen this way, the techno-oligarchy enlists the far right as an instrument of polarisation, and so of the never-ending present – but this fellow-travelling ends the moment the racists, being human, are to be discarded with everyone else.

The genuine political core of the techno-oligarchy’s manipulation of time lies elsewhere. The kairologic locks each of us into an individual time-zone fixed upon the present, and in doing so tears into billions of pieces the shared social time in which humans might engage in the collective production of meaning. At the same time, as it dissolves our impulse towards the future, we lose the continuity between our present and future selves. And a self with no future cannot act for one: it can neither formulate the socio-political interests whose realisation would carry it forward, nor imagine alternatives to the grim, anti-human future the techno-oligarchy intends. That future, the techno-oligarchy’s own, becomes unchallengeable.

The techno-oligarchy’s existential challenge to democracy lies precisely in this cancellation of alternative futures, since democracy is constitutively future-oriented – it is the institutionalised, peaceful contest among alternative tomorrows. The techno-oligarchs reserve the future for themselves and for the transhuman race they mean to manufacture; for everyone else, they collapse time into the never-ending present. In doing so, they do not merely demobilise political participation – they dissolve the temporal space in which it is even possible.