Cybernetic Authoritarianism: On Silicon Valley’s Technofascism

Contemporary diagnoses of the technofascist “turn” in Silicon Valley tend to frame it either as a backlash against increasing regulation or as an opportunistic strategy for capital accumulation by tech billionaires. While both interpretations offer valuable insights, my analysis aims to move beyond these frameworks by examining the deeper continuities that link current right-wing ideologies within the tech sector to the intellectual legacy of first- and second-order cybernetics. From the solutionist belief in technology as a “post-ideological” force standing above conventional political divisions and ideas of the public sphere as an immediate feedback loop between the governors and the governed to conceptions of the state as an autonomous network governed by technocratic entrepreneurs—or even the notion of technology as a substitute for regulatory governance—these ideas can be traced back to the cybernetic paradigms that emerged in the aftermath of World War II and continue to shape today’s technological imaginaries. The aim of my talk is to situate the right-wing dimensions of contemporary technofascism not only in the early internet culture of the 1990s but in the foundational discourses of cybernetics itself, thereby opening a new avenue for understanding its historical and ideological roots. A central focus will be the paradoxical relationship between cybernetics and authoritarianism. Although cybernetics originated within the military-industrial complex and wartime planning systems—structures inherently hierarchical and authoritarian—its proponents in both first- and second-order traditions came to frame it as a “neutral”, transpolitical force that might eventually lead to decentralization, stabilization and individual empowerment. Yet it is precisely this framing—this misrepresentation of technology as apolitical—that, in the digital age, opens the door to a new form of authoritarianism. In positioning technology as neutral or above ideology, contemporary technofascist currents draw legitimacy from cybernetic thought while advancing a deeply political and hierarchical agenda.