“Trump 2.0.” This coinage is often used to distinguish the current Trump administration from the first. The phrase is telling: it underscores that we’re in a new era and that behind the scenes, the people and forces driving this iteration of the Trump administration are different from those that came before. The second Trump administration is being driven to a greater degree by tech billionaires and their interests: self-dealing on public contracts; privatizing public services; expanding corporate power while crushing human rights; promoting crypto; removing guardrails against fraud, waste, and abuse; and pursuing personal vendettas.
The cadre of people driving today’s agenda is leveraging a set of interlocking ideologies related to technology to rhetorically justify and propel these changes. In this series, “Ideologies of Control: A Series on Tech Power and Democratic Crisis,” we asked expert contributors to name and dispel the myths and ideologies that animate their actions. A number of ideological projects prepared the ground for today’s assault on American institutions; we will focus on those that run through data, AI, and the tech sector.
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The ideological agenda behind the headlines positions technology and its architects as power brokers in an increasingly illiberal environment. Their changes are bolstered by the narrative that AI is a force that will inevitably reshape society. To make informed choices about how to respond to this aggressive reshaping of the US government, we must examine these animating ideas. We approached authors for this series who have deep knowledge about the unusual views of reactionaries in the tech industry: whether it be fantasies of libertarian paradises built on defunct sea-based oil rigs, the vision of company towns in Texas and eventually Mars, enthusiasm for debunked 19th Century ideas about race science and eugenics, or the goal of replacing the US dollar as the global reserve currency, these more esoteric backstories can be disorienting to non-specialists. But, seemingly overnight, understanding the ties that bind these projects together—however strange they may seem—has become essential information for all of us to understand and grapple with.
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Kennedy exploits the language of the "wellness" industry, with its misleading emphasis on "natural" health care and "letting" your body heal itself. What's ironic is that's what vaccines do. Vaccines work by stimulating the body's natural immune response, so that it prevents infection using the body's own resources. All these "treatments" Kennedy touts aren't just ineffective, they're not "natural." They're blitzing a child with often overwhelming amounts of medication, which won't work but could make the kid even sicker.
Fascist movements, formal or otherwise, operate much like cults. When one joins them, they are at first overwhelmed with the appearance of validation and support. This is called "love bombing" and it's meant to endear you to them, to become dependent on them to meet your emotional needs. Then that validation and support is gradually withheld in order to pressure the target into severing ties with the "normie" world. They drive away anyone outside of their hateful little bubble. So their entire network of social support depends on how useful they can be to the cause. It's the only way they can feel part of something anymore because nobody else wants anything to do with them at this point.
C’était il y a 24 ans. Le 15 Janvier 2001 naissait Wikipédia. dans un monde numérique où Google était lui-même né en 1998 et le web encore quelques années avant (disons vers 1991 pour faire simple même si sa date de naissance officielle est plutôt en Mars 1989).
A l’image d’une chanson de Cabrel, elle a en effet dû faire toutes les guerres pour être si forte aujourd’hui. Et aujourd’hui encore elle est la cible d’une offensive coordonnée qui va des USA jusqu’à la France. Une offensive d’une violence et d’une portée rarement atteinte. Avec en tête un Musk qui rêve de sonner l’Hallali de l’encyclopédie.
For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.
Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram followers.
Ce type d’intervention politique sur les archives n’a rien d’anodin. L’histoire regorge d’exemples où la manipulation ou la destruction d’archives a servi des régimes autoritaires. De l’Allemagne nazie à l’Union soviétique, en passant par la Révolution culturelle chinoise et le régime des Khmers rouges, les archives ont toujours représenté un enjeu de pouvoir majeur. L’accès à une information libre, fiable et contextualisée est une menace pour ceux qui cherchent à réécrire l’histoire à leur avantage.
Likewise, it takes willful blindness to Trump’s own history of explicit racism to treat his crusade against diversity and integration as an embrace of meritocracy (please ignore the people he has chosen to lead the government) rather than a function of the same bigotries that drove him to attack Barack Obama as illegitimate and unfit to be president.
There is no evidence that Trump is a figure of deep thought or serious insight. There is no evidence that Trump is anything other than what he’s been for his entire time in the public eye: an ego-driven creature of boundless envy and vicious, overlapping resentments. Those resentments have led him on a grand tour of retribution against the public.
Entretien avec l'historien Johann Chapoutot, spécialiste du nazisme.
Au moment où le centre et les conservateurs se rapprochent de l’extrême droite dans de nombreux pays d’Europe, dont la France, je rappelle que l’arrivée d’Hitler au pouvoir est liée, non à un vote populaire mais à une décision politique cynique des libéraux autoritaires – Franz von Papen en l’occurrence. Ce dernier a pensé que la meilleure manière de se maintenir au pouvoir, c’était de s’allier avec les nazis. Or cette décision a été prise dans un contexte d’effondrement du parti nazi qui aurait pu conduire à sa disparition.
Cette histoire montre que l’arrivée des nazis au pouvoir n’était pas inéluctable, pas plus que le « retour » de l’extrême droite aujourd’hui n’est inéluctable. Il n’y a pas de phénomènes géologiques ou tectoniques ou hydrographiques à l’œuvre, il y a des acteurs politiques avec leurs intérêts, leurs décisions, leurs responsabilités.
A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”
In 2021, U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz compared critical race theory — an academic subfield that examines the role of racism in American institutions, laws, and policies — to the Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious homegrown terrorist organization in U.S. history. In doing so, he opened a playbook that resembles one put into practice by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others: Attack ideas that are unfriendly to a narrow view of the world, and do so by eliminating them from our school curricula and public conversation. The movement against critical race theory has now swallowed up high school Advanced Placement African American Studies in several states and threatens the teaching of basic facts about U.S. history. And this movement has devolved from pundit tough talk into authoritarian policies to ban books, modify curricula, and threaten intellectual freedom across the country (and world).
By now, many realize that these policies are a harbinger of things to come — even for fields ostensibly unrelated to African American studies, like biology. Modern breakthroughs in biology are producing a picture of life that is increasingly incompatible with authoritarian preferences for neat boxes that dictate what people are and how they should behave. Consequently, biologists must shed the naive belief that our work is apolitical and recognize that the recent attacks on how to teach U.S. history are a battle in a larger war on ideas that includes the natural sciences.
He means being an asshole. Full stop.
L’alliance entre Donald Trump et des patrons de plateforme sociale, tels Elon Musk ou Mark Zuckerberg, représente une menace à l’échelle mondiale sur le libre accès à une information fiable. « Le Monde » fait donc le choix d’interrompre le partage de ses contenus sur X et de redoubler de vigilance sur des plateformes comme TikTok et sur celles de Meta.
AI can turn some impressive party tricks, but it's unsuited for solving serious problems in the real world. This is true of predictive AI, whose correlations are data-driven conspiracy theories, and of large language models like ChatGPT, whose plausible waffle is always trying to pull free of the facts. The real issue is not only that AI doesn't work as advertised, but the impact it will have before this becomes painfully obvious to everyone. AI is being used as form of 'shock doctrine', where the sense of urgency generated by an allegedly world-transforming technology is used as an opportunity to transform social systems without democratic debate.
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Real AI isn't sci-fi but the precaritisation of jobs, the continued privatisation of everything and the erasure of actual social relations. AI is Thatcherism in computational form. Like Thatcher herself, real world AI boosts bureaucratic cruelty towards the most vulnerable. Case after case, from Australia to the Netherlands, has proven that unleashing machine learning in welfare systems amplifies injustice and the punishment of the poor. AI doesn't provide insights as it's just a giant statistical guessing game. What it does do is amplify thoughtlessness, a lack of care, and a distancing from actual consequences. The logics of ranking and superiority are buried deep in the make up of artificial intelligence; married to populist politics, it becomes another vector for deciding who is disposable.
Yes, there is an economic incentive to the election of Trump by those at the commanding heights of Silicon Valley power. But to reduce it purely to materialism is missing a strong part of the story, namely about AI's own operation as an ideological apparatus which encourages power consolidation.
What should we call a society in which a prominent Conservative party politician – that is to say, not a fascist oddball or some random talking head – calls for "violence against irregular migration", i.e. for shooting migrants at the EU's borders; in which up to 30% believe that it is perfectly ok to vote for a party that is "in parts certified right-wing extremist", for which, read: fascist; in which "climate protection" means protection against climate activists, and "climate adaptation" does not mean building higher dikes, but building higher walls against migrants; in which migrants who, for completely incomprehensible reasons, want to migrate to the parts of the world that are still inhabitable (whereby of course the vast majority migrate to their home or neighbouring countries), are demonised as "criminal gangs of human traffickers", in order to legitimise a "war on migration/migrants"? A society that Anna Becker sums up brutally and but aptly on Bluesky: "First we exploit countries, then we destroy a large part of global livelihoods, and instead of saving people from the consequences of our actions, we seal ourselves off by force and let them die in the Mediterranean. And the voters love it."
Precisely: an asshole-society.
When the world’s on fire, reporting “some say it’s not that warm” isn’t brave — it’s complicit. If journalists can’t bring themselves to point at a full-blown authoritarian and say “this is some bad shit,” then maybe they should switch to weather forecasting, where at least the stakes are lower.
The time for milquetoast coverage is over. Either tell the truth, naked and ugly, or don’t act surprised when your freedom to write anything at all goes up in smoke.
Voters face an easy but tectonic choice in the race for the White House.
Will they choose the first woman or the oldest man to be the next president?
Will they choose the prosecutor or the convict?
What too many of us don’t know now is that the rise of Nazi Germany and the lead-up to the Holocaust was a slow play fertilized by denialism about what was happening in plain view—not the Final Solution out of the gate. Non-targeted Germans continued their daily lives, even as their kids trained to be hardened and hateful Nazis, and believed the bigoted lies that it was “subhuman” people—which is not a thing—causing all their economic problems.
The behaviour of the British and wider European elite towards migrants is not simple inhumanity. It is strategic inhumanity. It is weaponised inhumanity designed to convince populations fracturing under hammer-blows of austerity and economic chaos that the enemy is out there, that there is an “us” that must be protected from “them”.
Passionnante série de conférences télévisées, par l'historien Henri Guillemin, sur le parcours du Maréchal Pétain.