fascism
Dear friends,
As I walked through the city today I noticed some interesting terraforming occurring. What I saw was groups of people crowding to access an experience something that performed real life while they engaged deeply in their glowing rectangles. They took endless selfies, reenacted organic reactions ‘for the reel’, and facial expressions dropped the moment the camera did. Like a dystopian sci-fi scene, buildings have transformed into containers for paid experiences, people have subscribed to a life where social media drives reality and Zucc’s monetisation fuels ‘interaction’. Monetisation of leisure and life. Not wanting to jump to assign blame, I’ve decided to refer to this as the Instagramification of everyday life.
I grew up on sci-fi. And my family has a particular pull towards dystopia. So I’ll acknowledge my bias here, seeing people interact with each other as a performance for Instagram is a strong assignment of value(s) from my own positionality. But, the novelty, here, is the use of physical spaces for capturing ‘experience’ the same way that Instagram, Facebook and others provide lifeless boxes around human expression for consumption – interspersed with an unhealthy number of ads. But let’s get back to urban planning, because what else is this blog about?
We are fortunate to be guided, in Adelaide, by a small elite group of groups, amongst them is the creatively named Committee for Adelaide, who are “think tanks” (they wish) committed to “big” business and who frequently make decrees about the pain and suffering of business in our state. Creative naming isn’t their memberships’ only strength. Indeed, another of these groups’ great fortitudes is casting misanthropic assertions about the lack of us plebians’ spending in the CBD. But belittling has not sufficed in stirring the denizens of the suburban sprawl, and our city’s capitalist overlords have moved towards honing exploitative experiences which might attract “influencers” (its Adelaide, for goodness sake), instead of resorting to whips and chains to drive up nascent foot traffic.
Since COVID this cityscape transformation has intensified rapidly. While echoed across other Australian cities, it is particularly the case in Tarndanya (Adelaide), where our small population, remaining relative diversity of employment opportunities beyond office work, and (somewhat) low socioeconomic lead to “ingenuity” by the capitalists. Extraction, of course, remains the name of the game but in smaller cities like ours where CBD foot traffic is akin to suburbia interstate, there are specific manifestations of that extraction which may only be beginning elsewhere. So as I walked, I saw on one street more than five locations which offer boxed ‘experiences’. Cramped buildings which were former home to artisanal craft spaces, coffee shops, and florists. Don’t get me wrong, these were the old capitalism, rife with its own performativity and exploitation. Now transformed – and bustling with wannabe influencers – donning bridal gowns for fake wedding shoots, setting up tripods for heavily staged TikToks, and manga kids reenacting fight moves from their favourite zine.
Once upon a time I wondered how long it would take for the rectangles that governed our access to information – and increasingly more services and interactions – to begin to influence our physical world. I caught myself thinking how long it might be until the epistemology offered in consumptive technology and modern capitalism began to shape the way we sought interaction in the physical world – reconfiguring the ontologies of place once more. God I’m a nerd. Yet, we’ve arrived. After a few quick searches, I learned that these spaces are available for anything from 30 minutes, to multiple days, and that a bespoke team configures furnishings, lighting, you name it. One space even offers paid actors to complement your performance. Literally rent-a-crowd to in-fill your modelling of a paid product placement.
I’m quite sure these spaces exist elsewhere. And I’m sure this isn’t an entirely novel idea. The transformation of living, breathing, speaking place into sterile rooms for meaningless experiences is fundamental to capitalism time immemorial, but it remains one which concerns me deeply. Particularly because this transformation is intensified by digital ‘cultures’ and epistemologies of individualism and preposterously alleged meritocracy. Moreover, I grow increasingly concerned for our shared future, what does this reconfiguration of experience mean for what we are becoming as we look to the future?
I fear we may already be reaching those dystopian futures forecast in sci-fi. Right now we’re battling fascism on many sides. Elites so wealthy on the blood of the worker that they have made space a plaything. Despotic regimes triumphant in Israel. European capitulation to Trumpian politics, even while the Scots put up an admirable fight. Albanese affirming Australia’s ongoing support of the US, in holding to developing submarines, which will likely result in more war crimes. We’re surrounded by a climate catastrophe which is killing the oceans, with dolphins washing ashore, while mega trawlers continue to decimate the ocean floor for the few remaining fish not poisoned by human activity on the surface. There have been multiple regressive regimes installed in nations across the globe, with our neighbour Aotearoa New Zealand speed running back to the Stone Age with a conservative government akin to Trump on social policy, and so many travesties of human rights recorded globally. The writers of science fiction are in a race for extremism against our reality.
If I cast my mind forward, trained on dystopia, I can envisage a planet covered in artificial constructions, surrounded by wild seas, dead oceans, where massive galvanised structures harbour the dregs of human life. Within their boxes of extreme wealth inequality, the very worst jobs are reserved for the human worker – with world-killing AI and psychopathic trillionaires at the helm of the creative. Everything has become monetised, surveilled, and examined. The middle class attend performative experiences of recordings of nature – from when it still existed – for half an hour a week, afforded by hours of hard labour building spaceships for the mega-wealthy. As the planet slowly runs out of oxygen, cartels run by trillionaire sycophants deal out the last canisters of ‘real air’ stored in an age where the planet’s lungs were functionally breathing life into our world.
So, a bleak vibe, ey. But if we’re not careful, the erosion of our planet, the disruption and destruction of social cohesion, and the axes of inequality (particularly of wealth) will bring an end to us all. And in a more gruesome destruction, may even bring an end to life on this planet as we know it. Yet to relate, to collaborate, and to be a decent person are fundamentally human nature. Capitalism may still claim to be the only way – but its contemporary form has barely existed for 150 years. There are ways of life which value humanity, that teach us about the virtues of connecting to and working in relation with place. These are not something we need to wait to be taught, or which are distant relics. Within every person is the capability for care, compassion, and meaningful reciprocity. These are not things we need to be told – because unlike colonial capitalism, these values are human.
Finding each other, finding Country, and finding care remains possible, and a hopeful world is on the horizon. I just hope we realise and act on it, before our collective torture ontology is made irreversible.
With love,
Aidan
Dear friends,
This morning’s headlines included an article titled: “Australia has ‘no alternative’ but to embrace AI and seek to be a world leader in the field, industry and science minister says” [1]. The chief scientist has never been an appointment of visionaries; indeed, the office’s entire raison d’être has been capitalist reproduction, but nationally we’re being guided to skate to where the puck was. Who needs leadership when you have both the chief scientist and the LLM regurgitating an algometric reconfiguration of hegemonic narratives. Is there a thread here?
If we were to embrace, nationally, an agenda which promoted (re)training to better understand and develop applications of artificial ‘intelligence’ we might offer some students an opportunity to become very wealthy. But, by and large, to expect any kind of systematic or publicly beneficial economic growth as a result of Australians taking to the AI “science” space would be lunacy. Though, this is far from new, the chief scientist has always been a mouthpiece for the hegemony: eurocentric, bourgeois, and anti-ecological. We know the dangers of unfettered, unregulated, and ‘wild’ AI [2]. And we know that neoliberal market policies love those very things. So, here, we have a dangerous combination of factors: promotion of engagement with AI, a neoliberal anti-human “market”, and a bourgeois mouthpiece suggesting further engagement with ever more anti-humanist praxes. Let’s backtrack for a second.
Artificial intelligence technologies are not inherently evil, bad, or problematic. However, as we’ve discussed here on mind reader, their application and their use are currently extremely dangerous. From water usage that accelerates us even faster toward ecological collapse, to regurgitation of appropriate knowledges and hegemonic narratives, through the undermining of human artistic talent the current AI technology set does far more harm than good. More recent exposés have shown a decline in worker productivity (if you believe such things) and growing concerns over impaired cognitive functions. Naturally, all of these things could be countered by an ecological-forward ontology: valuing the role of nature, environment, animals and people in ecological harmony. But that’s not the values of the political economy under which we live.
You might see an opportunity here to subvert the hegemonic narrative – in which case, well done. As an educator, these kinds of narratives about what ‘should’ be done have dominated the field in western thought for as long as there was ‘education’ (in a hegemony’s civil society mode). As a supporter of building counter-hegemonies, I might suggest that we use this new narrative to teach young people and students about how LLMs and other AI technologies work – including coverage of the ecological dangers inherent in their current formulation. We might also use this as an opportunity to challenge hegemonic forms, relating with students over sources of training data and asking them to (re)imagine these toward more equitable outputs. But that’s not how this will be done broadly. Indeed, there is unlikely to be any serious education in the AI space done in public education due to the economic landscape which created the current raft of popular technologies.
AI scientists on the ‘bleeding edge’ have, for many decades now, been employed privately, even secretively. Once they ‘make a name for themselves’ (are wealthy, male and somewhere in the ballpark of knowing one or two things) they are paid lucratively, and their outputs are nondisclosure’d and locked up by corporate giants. While arXiv papers [3] from corpos pepper the scene of AI and Data Science, these are frequently a partial picture, describing abstract techniques or ‘proving’ what we already knew about these ‘sciences’ [4]. Of course, there are some who are involved with the development of AI technologies who have left the corporate scene, with an even smaller handful of these committing to public discourse about AI technologies and participation in teaching through higher education institutions (even if such an audience remains an extremely narrow slice of ‘publics’). However, the vast majority of AI technology remains stunningly locked up [5].
Regardless the landscape of current AI technologies, there are growing calls to rethink how AI is currently working [6], and ever more papers about the environmental, social, and human cost of AI. As corporations increasingly dominate narratives about embracing AI futurism, the public (worker) excitement about these technologies dies. This is not subaltern cultural repression directly, rather a hegemonic subsumption of technology and a more public embrace of the despotic “leadership” ever on display under capitalism. Any initial excitement from workers about the possibilities of AI technologies in their personal or work lives has surely been replaced by distain, disinterest or complacency. As more hegemons gesture towards futures of replacing workers with algorithms, worker disinterest or resistance grows. This is an indicator of the trajectory of our culture more broadly, not about the specific technologies used in AI.
What might a future which re-centres ecology and humanism actually look like? If we were to continue honing the underlying technologies such that environmental destruction was not requisite to technological growth we might have a start. Unfortunately, while some AI and Data Scientists work towards this kind of thinking, the majority of the corporate world has jumped on technologies which consume gigalitres of water and hundreds of kilowatts of (unclean) energy daily. The race to embrace AI as a core part of the modern workplace has meant that rather than spending time on perfecting the underlying technology (i.e., the approach to AI, not the models) we have seen exponential growth of hardware (and, therefore, water, power, etc.) requirements. The call from the chief scientist is one to supply corporations and despotic leadership with ever more resource intensive models – not to innovate for the future. Moreover, while some ‘change management’ professionals with an AI focus may be employed, increasingly we are seeing workers literally phased out in favour of quantitatively worse AI deployment.
While it is not uncommon to see neoliberal corporate subservience in STEM areas [7], blatant calls to engage further with skating to where the puck was will only set back our learners and young people – not to mention gut knowledge workers. If we had a vision for the future that demanded ecological and human justice we might find an application of novel forms of AI technologies which are fundamentally different than the current destructive forms. We lack, in this country, a unifying vision for the future. Instead, we’re seeing corporate bootlicking and hegemonic capitulation across every sector.
I’m not particularly interested in detouring through all the evidence of the despotic shift in our governments, governance, corporate arena, and anti-everybody sentiment. But look no further than: Labor’s continuing approval of new coal and gas projects which have impact reports suggesting massive contributions toward >3º warming; or to the stark Trump fascism in California; Greta’s deportation after attempting to bring aid to those being genocidally murdered by Israel in Gaza. I’ve seen bandied about a saying: “if you ever wondered what you would have done during Hitler’s genocide, think about your actions during globally rising fascism and genocides today”. It’s a bleak picture. LLMs have been trained on an ontological corpus which normalises this anti-human and anti-environment sentiment, and all it can do is regurgitate the same narratives it has been fed. There is no creativity under current AI technologies, only rabid fanatical hallucinations.
In solidarity,
Aidan
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jun/12/australia-ai-no-alternative-industry-and-science-minister-tim-ayres ↩︎
https://mndrdr.org/2025/at-the-nexus-of-knowledge-appropriation-and-ai https://mndrdr.org/2024/on-forestalled-innovation https://mndrdr.org/2024/the-power-of-ai ↩︎
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/ai-has-environmental-problem-heres-what-world-can-do-about ↩︎
especially because of the widespread belief in “science” as a religious substitute; and adherence to empiricist positivism which disregards human ethics and values for the fallacy of “objective truth”. ↩︎
Has anyone else noticed that Apple’s iOS keyboard/autocorrect recommendations in the latest iOS no longer autocorrect the word fascism? They’ve literally given it the same treatment as low level swears. Fascinating what this very small move signals about corporate views of fascism in the US. We’re living it — and we’re moving towards not being allowed to talk about it. Too few own the means of knowledge sharing and critique. Meta and Twitter are not public goods.
Dear friends,
I am constantly forced to think about Elon Musk and his egomaniacal, loud, and unearned positioning in society and emerging formal role in government in the US. Today I want to talk about consent, particularly in how consent has forged Musk as either a “super genius” or “capitalist success story”. He seems to have been depicted, at least in Australia, as an underdog innovator whose singular fortitude has allowed him to rise to power — this, at least, is Rupert Murdoch’s position on things, and you can bet that he wishes he was Musky, too. Obviously, this is a manufacturing of consent to Musk’s businesses — none of which he has meaningfully contributed anything to — and a demonstration of how consent is built. From “humble beginnings” Musk has “changed the world”, they say, which is a significantly empathetic narrative verging on outright lies. The reality, of course, is that “daddy got rich killing people” and he bought some investments with daddy’s money at a good time at the advice of others. I know which story I’d prefer to be told about me. What interests me, in this, is how even when critiquing Musk, the manufactured complicity and volume of (“quiet”) fascism still forestalls real systemic change.
The reaction to Musk’s Twitter acquisition reveals an interesting contradiction in how social media shapes resistance to oligarchic power. While communities like Reddit’s r/enoughmuskspam and the entirety of first, Threads now, Bluesky, emerged as spaces for critiquing Musk’s growing influence, they ironically seem to be contributing to a form of controlled opposition that ultimately serve his interests. By containing anti-Musk sentiment within echo chambers and focusing on his personal foibles rather than systemic critique, these spaces inadvertently helped normalise his broader accumulation of power. The obsession with Musk as an individual figure — even in opposition — distracted from more substantive analysis of how his ascension represents capital’s broader turn toward direct political control. Or, at least, this is the story I’m telling today. While users shared memes mocking his management of Twitter or cataloguing his numerous failures, his actual consolidation of power through strategic alliances with Trump and other far-right figures continue unchallenged. This phenomenon exemplifies how social media’s tendency to transform political resistance into entertainment and personal grievance can neutralise genuine threats to capital’s interests. Hegemony working as described. Rather than building class consciousness and organised resistance, the energy of critique became contained within platform-managed spaces that posed no threat to Musk’s growing power. If anything, they waited eagerly for the next blunder to fuel new memes. The result was a kind of “safety valve” that allowed people to feel they were opposing oligarchic control while actually participating in structures that enabled its expansion. Eek — but we need to talk about the broader political movements here.
Oligopoly and dictatorship, while seemingly distinct forms of power concentration, share fundamental characteristics in their service to capital accumulation. An oligopoly represents the consolidation of market power among a small number of firms, while dictatorship centralises political power — but both serve to protect and advance ruling class interests. And aspects of both of these power ‘consolidating’ approaches are in effect before our eyes in the US. The blueprint for almost every other western “democracy” the world over due to their amassed imperial power. From a Marxist perspective, these governance forms naturally emerge from capitalism’s inherent interest in monopolisation and the need to maintain class dominance through increasingly direct forms of control. As contradictions within capitalism intensify, the pretence of market competition gives way to oligopolistic domination, just as liberal democracy’s facade crumbles to reveal increasingly authoritarian forms of rule. From indirect manipulation through donations, lobbying and backing favourable candidates to direct filling of government with billionaire capitalists, the future of “democracy” is beyond bleak in the USA.
This shows us the financial capture of ostensibly “democratic” political systems by mega-corporations is but a heartbeat away in the rest of the west. Not only does direct control ensure capitalist interests, it also enables the system to quell dissent and analysis — two things we hold dear here, reader. Whether through the Democratic and Republican parties in the US, Labor and Liberal in Australia, or similar “opposing” party binaries in other nations, corporate funding ensures policy outcomes that protect accumulation regardless of electoral results. But the “two party” systems of these nations serves to narrow the window of acceptable political discourse. The illusion of choice between parties masks their shared commitment to maintaining capitalist hegemony. This process has accelerated as wealth becomes increasingly concentrated among a smaller circle of tech oligarchs and corporate behemoths who can directly shape policy through unprecedented financial influence. Now, instead of pretending there’s a choice between two fascist regressives, some countries are moving to a capitalist populism ruled by oligarchs feeding their angered masses misinformation. What a world.
The shift from performative “two-party democracy” to direct oligarchic rule through populist manipulation is yet another capitalist mask-off moment. Where previously the ruling class maintained hegemonic control through the illusion of democratic choice between barely distinguishable parties (Labor/Liberal, Democrat/Republican). Their growing confidence for oligopoly capitalism stems from their unprecedented control over information and their successful fragmentation of working class consciousness through sophisticated deployment of identity politics and algorithm manipulation. Oligarchs like Musk can now openly declare their intention to rule directly while using their platform control to manufacture consent through carefully curated misinformation and manufactured outrage. This represents a more “efficient” form of class domination — rather than maintaining expensive electoral theatrics, the billionaire class can simply channel popular anger toward manufactured enemies while consolidating their own power.
As the masks come off figures like Musk move from behind-the-scenes influence to direct political power through Trump’s promised cabinet positions. While this is more obvious than lobbying or political donations, it still evades genuine media analysis. Due more to complicity by billionaire media magnates who see benefit in supporting their capitalist brethren, rather than any actual ideological position. Indeed, the utter lack of morals, culture, knowledge, or ethics is quite the hallmark in contemporary media which would rather revel in capitalist accumulation than shine any investigative light on the massive challenges of today. And this, in part, reconnects with our /r/enoughmuskspam commentary above — too much time spent in the echo chamber, not enough spent critiquing the status quo. The shift from “democratic processes” to oligarchic rule reflects capital’s growing comfort with authoritarian governance as climate collapse and inequality explode past crisis levels. Rather than maintain the expensive facade of democratic legitimacy, capital increasingly embraces fascist solutions to maintain power — particularly as the contradictions of capitalism become impossible to manage through consent alone. The integration of tech oligarchs into direct state power represents a new phase where the distinction between corporate and political power dissolves entirely. And we continue to allow (social) media to control us in this way.
This whole situation demands both mindful awareness of how these systems operate and critical analysis of the narratives used to justify them. The mythology of “free markets” and “democratic choice” serves to obscure the reality of oligarchic control and growing authoritarianism. We need to carve new frameworks for understanding how these systems specifically harm workers and marginalised groups through intersecting forms of oppression. Rather than accepting, at face value, narratives peddled by mainstream media sources, we need to analyse how capitalism’s rapid movement toward fascism emerges from its fundamental contradictions — and it only serves to cement capitalists, not the “fall of society” which right-wing soothsayers peddle. Only through building class consciousness and solidarity across lines of identity can we hope to resist capital’s increasingly naked grab for totalitarian control. The alternative is accepting a techno-feudal future where even the pretence of democracy gives way to direct rule by billionaire oligarchs.
In solidarity,
Aidan