immanence

There’s a clear lesson for us in the mass firings of federal employees, carried out as part of an administrative coup led by the world’s wealthiest tech oligarch, in the country that had up till recently been seen as the paragon of stability and prosperity.

That lesson is that we are all dispensable now.

In the new order that’s being instituted, no one is secure anymore. Just as climate change has been making us all vulnerable in ways that had previously been limited to the victims of colonialism and extractive capitalism, the new tech order makes us all vulnerable to the dispossession of any security we thought we had — of our jobs, our homes, our communities.

The new order is an alliance between the world’s techno-industrial oligarchs and the authoritarian neo-imperialists who now lead the three most militarily powerful countries in the world (Trump, Xi, and Putin). It’s being ushered in, most obviously, by the Trump–Musk axis, with other tech lords playing along, since they have plenty to gain from it and too much to lose if they do not.

The alliance is hardly unified at the global level, and will likely be characterized by rivalry, if not military confrontation. But its goals are unified.

They are, first, to continue the scramble for valuable techno-industrial resources — including remaining fossil fuel reserves, newly critical “green tech” minerals (lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, rare-earth minerals, et al.), control over the rapidly warming Arctic, and the new digital frontiers of artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and whatever will come next.

And, second, to control the masses of humanity using those very technologies, through information warfare, opaque media algorithms, and the same artificial intelligence.

The upshot is that techno-fascism is being instituted on a daily basis. (Other terms, like kleptofascism, also apply.) The critical question for the rest of us is how to resist it while developing a viable, global alternative to it. Resistance at this point is a daily chore, and some may wish to ignore things as much as possible (though it’s ultimately not an option). The alternative is around, and has been for decades, but isn’t making it out into the world.

To change that requires a revolution — not of the means of production (which is pretty impossible these days), or of reproduction (of life in its every dimension), but of the means of information. Information constitutes the leading edge of wealth production, so much so that in an increasingly oligarchic global economy, control over the flow of information means massive wealth which, in turn, means massive political power.

To take control over the means of information means to radically restructure how information is produced, secured, managed, and distributed so that information becomes answerable to people’s real needs, not to the accumulation of profit. It means reviving the public library model — knowledge as a human and public right — for the digital era. Librarians, media reformers, open-source advocates, and independent and community media producers all contribute to the possibility of a more democratic digital public sphere, and the ethical and normative features of such a public sphere have been plentifully discussed (e.g., see Franks 2021, Fuchs 2023, Giannelos 2023, Mazzucato and Valletti, the work being done by SFU’s Digital Democracies Institute, Yale’s Information Society Project, Cardiff’s Data Justice Lab, the Open Future Foundation, as well as various media monitoring projects like McGill’s Media Ecosystem Observatory). This work is central to the repossession of the world by the majority of people, whose interests are currently not represented by the powers that shape things.

Articulating the vision of a better society and working toward reining in the catastrophic failure of “the information society” have to be done in tandem. It will be hard work. But as more and more of us recognize our dispensability to the new order — and our utter precarity in the face of climate change and its human exacerbators — there will be more and more of us to do it.

The good thing about what’s happening now is that we are getting some clarity in our understanding of where things are headed.