11.1.1 Speaking Up Against Fascism? ‘I Prefer Not To’

It is always a risk (yet never the same) to speak up and write critically against the many forms and expressions fascist desire takes at a particular point in time. ‘Never talk about politics in public, everything can turn in just a second’, my grandmother warned. Words matter – and are criminalized. In 1943, my grandfather was incarcerated as a political prisoner in the KZ Dachau, the first concentration camp, liberated by US troops in 1945.Footnote ²⁵ With five others from my hometown,Footnote ²⁶ of which only two (including my grandfather) survived, he was charged with ‘high treason’ according to § 83 of the Penal Code that had been altered 1934 in a series of changes installing and legitimizing the Nazis’ fascist regime. The accused had joined the communist party (KPÖ) and, according to the indictment, attempted to organize resistance against the Nazi-regime by collecting KPÖ member fees and distributing print flyers. All were found guilty of ‘conspiracy to commit high treason’ and ‘the establishment or re-establishment of an organisation conspiring to commit high treason’.Footnote ²⁷ One was found guilty also of ‘attempts to influence the masses through writings, records, pictorial images, and radio broadcasts’,Footnote ²⁸ violations punishable by death. Said flyer, intended for affixing to my hometown walls, reads:

My grandmother escaped prosecution by a mere hair’s breadth. Not yet married to my grandfather, he did not reveal their relationship, portraying her as merely the chef of the restaurant where the accused regularly met. Born in 1920 in Carinthia, a rural Austrian state bordering Italy and Slovenia, fascism, although most atrociously expressed in the 1930s and 1940s, had always been present for her – even decades after the official fall of the Nazi-regime – in micro- and macro-fascisms. Her sensory apparatus was attuned to – and (physically) appalled by – the workings of fascist desire, also in spaces widely celebrated for their political progressiveness, moral guidance, and radical commitments: the slight hesitation to shake her hand by an alleged like-minded neighbour and the extreme right wing Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) xenophobic slogans. ‘How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?’Footnote ³⁰

What makes fascism dangerous, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘is its molecular or micropolitical power, for it is a mass movement: a cancerous body rather than a totalitarian organism’.Footnote ³¹ Building on Wilhelm Reich’s claim that the masses were not tricked into fascism but rather desired it, they caution that ‘desire devotes itself to operations that are not failures of recognition, but rather perfectly reactionary unconscious investments?’Footnote ³² Desire, per Deleuze and Guattari, is not lack, structure, or prohibition but productive – ‘its product is real’. Put differently, desire is ‘productive only in the real world and can produce only reality’.Footnote ³³ Desire thus operates ‘before any socially defined “reality principle” supervenes to draw the distinction between them’.Footnote ³⁴ While desiring-production, inspired by Spinoza’s conatus (life force), is ‘by nature indeterminate’, it is ‘at the same time subject to determination by social institutions and representations, which impose order, objects and aims on it’.Footnote ³⁵ Consequently, desire ‘stretches far: desiring one’s own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire’.Footnote ³⁶ Fascist desire, Deleuze and Guattari add, is thus not simply a problem of ideology, but ‘of pure matter, a phenomenon of physical, biological, psychic, social, or cosmic matter’.Footnote ³⁷ This is why representational modes of thoughtFootnote ³⁸ might decipher its traces after the fact – even become attracted to and engage fascist desire – but are incapable of constructing non-fascist concepts, thoughts, and ways of living. I will return to this point.

Deleuze and Guattari’s practice of concepting is helpful for working towards non-fascist modes of thought in the current moment when new digital technologies facilitate fundamental shifts in law and governance.Footnote ³⁹ However, not Deleuze and Guattari but my grandmother taught me – before I could speak, let alone read – that fascist desire is real. It is present, sense-able, and operative long before naked corpses are stacked in railway wagons, bodies are worked to death, and masses are ragingly moving against evermore declared enemies; long before nuclei are fissioned, books are burned, windows are shattered, phenomena are termed, and blood and soil are poisoned. Fascist desire permeates all scales, from the subatomic to the interplanetary, from the molecular to the molar: Words resonate uncannily, oxygen being sucked out of a room, lips bit, breaths held in, painful laughter, packs of intensity turning the stomach, closed doors fracturing relations, the amygdala nervously signalling before the law, warm greetings triggering cold sweat, screaming silences. Words cannot grasp it, but fascist desire can capture all words.

A beginning must never claim to start from scratch. History shows that its conditions of possibility are the negation of modes of existence through acts of erasure, annihilation, and colonialization: Terra nullius, clean slate, the illusion of ‘something new without historical constraint’ as desired by tech-libertarian Balaji Srinivasan in The Network State.Footnote ⁴⁰ The latter is a privatized, blockchain-based, digital miniature-sovereign-state held together by an ideology – governed by decentralized technologies. In line with anarcho-capitalist desires to replace state power with market dynamisms, the network state attempts to mobilize blockchain concepts and applications to ‘start a new country’.Footnote ⁴¹ Its founder Srinivasen recognizes the power of erasure, the desire that historically sought ‘a bare plot of earth, a blank sheet of paper, an empty text buffer, a fresh start-up, or a clean slate’.Footnote ⁴² While the desire to erase history and historicity is not inherently fascist, the absence of safeguards can enable fascism to create powerful concepts for emerging tech-informed governance. This is unfortunate as the field of tech governance, if approached carefully and with awareness of past mistakes, holds significant potential to redistribute power and financial resources.

We must seek a different kind of beginning, where there is no address, and the word is neither shared nor distributed (das Wort erteilen); in which speaking is speaking up against, from below – not to be confused with speaking against the state or the police, but rather speaking in the face of lethal power and under the condition that everything (every belief, every knowledge, every law, every relation, every gesture) can turn in the blink of an eye, with a signature under a decree, a red ‘x’ at an airport’s electronic border entrance machine, the judgement of an algorithm. Resistance might become isolated, but fascism is always already a mass. Beginning can thus only ever mean speaking from the middle, striking the delicate balance between political alliances and Bartleby’s ‘I prefer not to’, between resistance and complicity, between the sayable and the ineffable, between existence and non-existence.Footnote ⁴³

11.1.2 Speaking About Fascism? The Fascist in You

Second, deciding on whether to begin speaking about fascism problematizes the question of complicity, and relatedly, debunks the myth of exteriority. Even without a stable definition of fascism – a fact that speaks to its functioning – scholarship tends to speak about fascism, implying it refers to a recognizable and identifiable object of analysis, pre-existing independently from scholarly engagement. Such scholarship might be helpful for creating discourses on contemporary fascist movements. Yet, it reiterates modes of thinking (or: reasoning) – and the limits of language, per Derrida above – that feminist (science) scholarship critiques for its representationalism and transcendence, as the ‘god trick’ of ‘seeing everything from nowhere’, the ‘eye that fucks the world’, the scientific experiment that cannot accept particle-waves and wave-particles, and the world as ‘composed of individuals presumed to exist before the law’.Footnote ⁴⁴ It reiterates modes of thinking that describe, classify, and determine work from a position of power, and eventually rely on exclusion (either/or) as a mode of sense-making.

While it is important to invent analytic tools to grasp the workings of fascist desire, posing it as object of analysis without first questioning the very modes of thinking and analysis already inherently present bears the risk of turning a blind eye to how multi-scalar complicity functions. When Brian Massumi cautions that complicity is ‘an ontological condition under neoliberal capitalism’, meaning that there is no outside and ‘no position of purity from which to oppose it’,Footnote ⁴⁵ the same is true for fascism: there is no outside. ‘It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level’, and not even ‘see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective’, Deleuze and Guattari state.Footnote ⁴⁶ As Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture) argues, fascism is about ‘moments of proximity’. It is impossible, he states, to draw a clear line separating theory from fascism; there is no theory and no thought that is not ‘already in the world, already in friction with other forces – and continuously so’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Donna Haraway similarly calls out Bruno Latour’s admiration for Carl Schmitt’s undeniably fascist concepts and cautions that ‘[i]t matters which thoughts think thoughts’, precisely because ‘[t]he question of whom to think-with is immensely material’. It is no coincidence that she refers in this context to Adolf Eichmann’s ‘thoughtlessness’.Footnote ⁴⁸

Both arguments – that thought (and modes of meaning making) is complicit and that sense-making practices (sensing, thinking, analysing, interpreting) are material practices that cannot be assumed to remain ‘untouched by physical forces, molecular bonds, and other matter(s) of real alliances’ – are crucial for creating non-fascist modes of thinking and living. As Barad reminds us, ‘[r]eflexivity, like reflection, still holds the world at a distance’,Footnote ⁴⁹ an approach that not only proves unconstructive, but effectively impossible when the world is (actually) on fire. Although not yet in relation to global warming but articulated as a reminder of how fascism takes root in the banality of everyday life through complicity and a lack of sense-ability, the firefighter chorus in Max Frisch’s play, The Fire Raisers, from 1958 asks reproachfully: ‘Knowing full well how inflammable the world is, what did you think?’Footnote ⁵⁰ Everything has burned down. The chorus’ warning conclusion resonates into the present: ‘There is much that is senseless, and nothing more non-sensical than this story: A story once sparked, killed many, oh, but not all, and changed nothing.’Footnote ⁵¹

What or how do we think? Consider, for example, deepfakes. These technologies do not merely undermine trust in audiovisual media; they raise urgent legal and ethical concerns – from misinformation and reputational harm to violations of consent and political manipulation. Yet beyond these dangers, they expose the fragility of a deeper epistemic architecture: one that has long tethered truth to representation, being to visibility, and thinking to recognition. In this sense, they unsettle what Deleuze called the ‘image of thought’, in which recognition serves as the gatekeeper of meaning. ‘[E]very individuality must be personal (I) and every singularity individual (Self)’, he writes – within the representational regime. But deepfakes do not confirm identity; they fracture it.Footnote ⁵² They dislocate the subject from its referent and, in doing so, open thought to what cannot be recognized. ‘Something in the world forces us to think’, Deleuze continues. ‘This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter … it can only be sensed’.Footnote ⁵³

The disquieting power of deepfakes lies less in deception than in their disruption of recognition itself, revealing its historical contingency and ontological fragility. They dramatize the need, as Deleuze proposed, for a ‘thought without image’ – a mode of thinking that begins not with confirmation but with rupture. Like the shift in painting from representation to abstraction, what is required is not a return to referential certainty, but a practice of sensing and thinking attuned to difference without identity.

This is not only a philosophical gesture but a political necessity. For it is precisely at the level of recognition – of what becomes intelligible, desirable, or governable – that fascist and micro-fascist desires take hold. Resisting them requires more than critique; it demands non-fascist modes of sense-making: ones capable of holding ambiguity, of detecting when the very demand for clarity becomes complicit in control. Deepfakes do not create this condition, but they expose it – and in doing so, they offer a generative occasion for rethinking what thought, and resistance, must become.

How to think? Foucault’s preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, elaborating tenets for a non-fascist life, indicates answers to that question. Let me highlight three crucial arguments.Footnote ⁵⁴

First, difference is mediated through the ‘fourfold root of identity, opposition, analogy, and resemblance’. It is predicated on ‘forms of representation which reduce it to the Same’, rendering it legitimate only in the negative (as that which differs from the same and the similar), thus only ‘liveable and thinkable’ as inferior Other.Footnote ⁵⁵

Second, many of the concepts – including desire, assemblage, multiplicities, lines of flight, becomings, and plane of immanence – are specifically constructed to undo what Barad describes as ‘the metaphysics of individualism’: the belief that ‘the world is composed of individual entities with individually determinate boundaries and properties’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Third, thought must be forced to think the unthinkable, the plane of immanence, indeterminacy, which precedes the Cartesian dualism and where an electron crashes into language.Footnote ⁵⁷ Put differently, thought must neither accept ontological separability nor its concomitant representationalism. This matters precisely because the image of thought – the idea of what thinking is and how it works, where its limits are and what rules it has to obey – builds on representation, the unity of the thinking subject posed against the inferiority of the object (and external world), and the reductive understanding of difference as inferior and negative result of (mediated) comparison with, opposition to, and analogy to the power of the Same and homogenous. As such, it is prone to complicity with fascist desire and its mobilizations. For, as Aaron Kuntz pointedly puts it, fascism fractures ‘relational modes of being’ and thrives on ‘individual triumphs of sameness through the violent excision of difference’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This aligns with Foucault’s preface. ‘Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative’, and ‘prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity’, as well as ‘mobile arrangements over systems’. Further, ‘[d]evelop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Also, ‘[d]o not demand of politics that it restores the ‘rights’ of the individual, as philosophy has defined them’, because ‘[t]he individual is the product of power’. From this we learn that to ‘rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism’, we must begin from the middle, by pushing thought to think the unthinkable, encounter difference affirmatively, live with indeterminacy, endure incommensurability and ‘generate becomings that cannot be counted with molar categories (how do you count “someone” who is black AND white, gay AND straight …?), a nondenumerable mass’Footnote ⁶⁰ unmoved and not mobilizable by fascist desire.

11.1.3 Speaking Through. Deindividualize, Not Decentralize!

In 1981 Guattari predicted that ‘the new totalitarian regime … cannot be identified purely and simply with national fascisms of the Hitler or Mussolini type’. Rather, such a regime ‘will be everywhere and nowhere. It will contaminate whole areas of the world, but there will be zones of comparative freedom alongside zones of hyper-repression, and the borderline between the zones will remain fluid.’ This ‘new regime will not act only through the instrumentality of governments’.Footnote ⁶¹

Undoubtedly, power in the twenty-first century mobilizes and moves differently; fractured identities multiply, inhabiting semi-virtual worlds with electrons and pulses of light carrying 1s and 0s through glass and copper cables across the globe; each digit holding the power of sparking a thousand decentralized mass movements, determining with the speed of light what matters, or is excluded from mattering. If fascistic desire travels through time, forming and reforming concepts, successfully hijacking bureaucratic, paper-based state apparatuses, why wouldn’t it also run through cables and wires, record information in digital blocks, be delivered in bytes and little packs of energy, or inform decentralized networks and infrastructures? As Maik Fielitz and Holger Marcks point out, digital fascism ‘differs significantly from classical fascism in organisational terms, thus making adjustments in the dealing with fascist dynamics necessary’. It poses a challenge because it is ‘highly fluid and ambivalent, lacking a clear organisational centre that can serve as a focal point for counter-efforts’.Footnote ⁶²

New digital technologies – including rapidly advancing AI and blockchain – carry the potential to shape radically different, yet at times strikingly similar, futures. Blockchain technology, often mistakenly conflated with digital assets such as cryptocurrencies or NFTs (non-fungible tokens), is more precisely a decentralized and immutable digital ledger that records transactions using cryptographic techniques. In a broader sense, however, blockchain emerges from a tradition of deep mistrust in centralized authority and a lineage of political experiments in private governance. As argued elsewhere, it has served from its inception as a powerful instrument for radically reimagining the future of law and governance.Footnote ⁶³ Its potential to undermine law and political systems has been flagged by critics. Its proponents emphasize its potential to democratize, decentralize, and redistribute power. Without discrediting the latter, Sarah Manski and Ben Manski caution that both state and corporate actors are ‘well prepared and highly incentivized to take advantage’ of blockchain technology’s potential to construct totalitarian and exploitative orders.Footnote ⁶⁴ In contrast, blockchain-based projects such as LoPh’s ‘Decentralized Right to Breathe’ initiative focuses on community-empowerment and modes of commoning,Footnote ⁶⁵ while anarcho-capitalist projects, such as network states, as imagined by Balaji Srinivasan, or startup societies, mobilize the rhetoric of decentralization and use blockchain as a means to exit governmental control and ‘commercialize sovereignty’.Footnote ⁶⁶ The ‘new Leviathan, the Network’, Srinivasan argues, is an archipelago of privatized states or sovereign businesses, each one created by a founder, based on a common value, ‘moral innovation’, or ideology, and regulated only by free market dynamics and competition;Footnote ⁶⁷ a world in which ‘anyone can create his own blockchain nation and government services’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such view ultimately centres on the power of the individual as opposed to that of the state and on the ‘diffusion of authority, in which the source of legitimacy are the individuals themselves’.Footnote ⁶⁹

Previously discussing the evolution of companies into so-called ‘network states’ – a vision closely aligned with anarcho-capitalist and hyper-individualist ideologies – Srinivasan, drawing heavily on the friend–enemy distinction and invoking concerns over China’s alleged dominance across multiple sectors, used his keynote at Token2049 in Dubai to propose the United Networks of the Internet as the natural successor to the United States of America. As part of this vision, he unveiled a reimagined US flag: the red stripes muted to orange, the navy field lightened to blue, and the stars replaced by icons of Web3-native DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) and digital communities.Footnote ⁷⁰

While DAOs do not readily conform to the structure of firms – and, when true to their roots, reject hierarchical control and central authority – Srinivasan’s framing absorbs them into an ideological architecture grounded in privatized power, entrepreneurial sovereignty, and competitive self-rule. His version of decentralization remains embedded in a vision of fragmented, proprietary governance rather than one of interdependence or collective restructuring. This is far from representative of the broader DAO or Web3 space, yet it echoes a broader ideological convergence that merits critical attention.

Given the proximity of figures like Peter Thiel – an advocate of private cities and post-state governance – to the Trump-aligned US political sphere, the current moment is marked by a dangerous normalization of explicitly fascist tendencies: open contempt for constitutional norms, the undermining of judicial independence, visa revocations and anti-immigrant policies, attacks on higher education, disappearances, and the strategic use of state power against dissent. In such a climate, it becomes imperative to ask: What might fascist desires look like when enacted through decentralized architectures? What new forms of unaccountable violence might emerge when state functions are privatized, fragmented, or cloaked in the language of decentralization? These questions are no longer theoretical – and they demand urgent, critical scrutiny. Put differently, the multiplication of mini-Leviathans is not enough to resist fascist desires, not least because, as Foucault warns, ‘[t]he group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization’.Footnote ⁷¹ Thus, not simply decentralization but de-individuation bears the potential for non-fascist alternatives to current governance structures and processes. Whether or not new digital technologies can, despite their binary and linear conceptual skeleton, assist in such endeavours depends on who and what is included in its development.

I end with two guidelines for non-fascist practices of thought and action. The first teaches us that every technology and media, including language and print, bears the potential for countering fascist desire. Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written eight years before my grandfather was incarcerated, attunes to the power of fascistic desire to invent both concepts (i.e. masses) and a particular aesthetics (a mode of sensing and sense-making) through channelling and capturing what technologies can do. This is why Benjamin emphasizes that the concepts he uses differ from those present at his time as ‘they are utterly useless for the purposes of fascism’.Footnote ⁷² Thus, our task when thinking about governmentality and new digital technologies is the construction of concepts that not only resist capture by fascist desire but speak up against fascism. The second cautions not to infer the workings of fascist desire from its products. Deleuze-Guattari states in A Thousand Plateaus that: ‘fascism invented the concept of the totalitarian State, but there is no reason to define fascism by a concept of its own devising’.Footnote ⁷³ Rather than speaking about fascism, it is imperative to develop modes of sensing and sense-making attentive to how (fascist) concepts emerge and what they can do: What is their power and how far will they go? Working collaboratively on alternative and non-fascist modes of governance might indeed be more aligned with blockchain-supported and a-centralized modes of commoning and posthuman(ist) alliances than the global governance structures and national governments dominating the twentieth century. Whether a thousand mini-sovereignties (hyperindividualism) or a thousand modes of commoning and alliances, the last word must always return to the beginning: ‘Do not become enamored of power’.Footnote ⁷⁴

11.2.1 Concrete Computations

An examination of AI’s operations and effects, where AI is understood as a specific form of computation emerging from a specific material and institutional matrix, can act as a means for sensing the increasing flow of fascistic affordances through the circuits of global governance. Making sense of AI in this way compares to Ivan Illich’s proposal for counterfoil research: ‘Counterfoil research also has two major tasks: to provide guidelines for detecting the incipient stages of murderous logic in a tool; and to devise tools and tool-systems that optimize the balance of life, thereby maximizing liberty for all.’Footnote ⁷⁵

These tendencies towards fascistic affordance can be traced by means of resonances between concrete computational operations and structures of social relations. Such alignments provide a different and less dualistic way of conceptualizing relations between technologies and social forms. The parallels we can draw between algorithmic processes and political effects reflect not only the connection between capacities and interests at a molar level, that is, between aspects which are clearly demarcated, bounded and easily represented, but also at the molecular level of incessant movement and becoming which operates below the threshold of perception.Footnote ⁷⁶

Contemporary AI is a particular branch of the broad family of methods which has assembled under the umbrella of artificial intelligence. The technologies of deep learning are forms of ‘connectionist AI’ because, rather than relying on some codification of rules or concepts, their determinations depend on a vast number of weighted connections between different nodes (or artificial neurons) arranged in variously layers.Footnote ⁷⁷ The power of this approach is its generalizability. By virtue of universal approximation theorems, these neural networks can be tuned to closely approach the functional transformation between any input and output. It is this versatility which results in AI that can be trained to recognize faces, play the game of Go, and predict the most likely next word in a sentence.

The training of an AI model proceeds via statistical optimization, where the weighted parameters are iteratively optimized to minimize the loss function – the difference between the model output and desired outcomes. However, the calculative complexity of these operations immediately plunges AI into a flow of downstream social consequences that, by operating at the level of the molecular and micropolitical referred to above, are difficult to fully perceive. The aspects of the world which are datafied as input become irreversibly entangled via billions of variable parameters, making deep learning inherently opaque.

Due process becomes moot when it’s impossible to track the influence of specific input features; even ML engineers have little detailed insight as to why a specific model works as well as it does. Moreover, deep learning has largely dispensed with deliberation; its very generalizability means a more effective model is largely achieved through more training data and additional layers. The prior requirement for domain specific knowledge is surplus to requirements, and AI’s correlationism trumps an understanding of causalities.

This carelessness towards context or causality is also visible in attitudes towards datasets, where size supersedes quality, balance, or ethics, and in model deployment, where success on benchmarks overrides consideration of knock-on consequences. But, as we will see below, the deepest impacts of AI come from the way the molecular ferment of calculative probabilities solidifies as decision boundaries that determine which words or events are predicted and which are not, or which things are classified as ‘this’ and not ‘that’. If AI is indeed captured by fascistic desires it is because of what AI already does. As Daniela has already pointed out, this cut between what matters and what is excluded from mattering becomes complicit with fascist desire and its mobilizations.

11.2.2 Fascistic Operations

Attuning ourselves to AI’s immersion in the world of social relations reveals a consistent drift across the high-dimensional spaces of molecular calculations towards the molar manifestation of fascistic operations. AI’s boundarying produces algorithmic states of exceptionFootnote ^78, Footnote ⁷⁹ through recursive redlining and the force of effective exclusion, acting across scales and domains from Airbnb’s trait analyser,Footnote ⁸⁰ to the workstations of the Amazon warehouse,Footnote ⁸¹ and the risk assessments of the immigration visa system.Footnote ⁸² Embedded within institutions, AI’s abstract optimizations amplify and scaleFootnote ⁸³ reactionary transformations through forms of algorithmic violence and ‘othering’, from the epistemic violence of computational abstractions to the administrative violence of automatized enforcement and the structural violence of intensified social divisions.Footnote ⁸⁴

The blurring of material and algorithmic constraints, whether in predictive policing or in the workplace, universalizes a logic of carcerality, that is, aspects of governance that are prison-like. Carcerality, as I have argued elsewhere, is ‘expanded by AI in both scope and form’. This means that both ‘its pervasiveness and the vast seas of data on which it feeds extend the reach of carceral effects, while the virtual redlining that occurs inside the algorithms reiterates the historical form by fencing people off from services and opportunities’. Moreover, ‘AI contributes to physical carcerality through the algorithmic shackling of bodies in workplaces like Amazon warehouses and through the direct enrollment of predictive policing and other technologies of social control in what the Coalition for Critical Technology calls a “tech to prison pipeline”’. AI, in fact, is ‘carceral not only through its assimilation by the incarcerating agencies of the state but through its operational characteristics’.Footnote ⁸⁵ AI itself would be impossible without the decades-long destruction of the labour movement, a perennial fascist priority, which made available both desperate crowd workers to label data and Uber-ized workplaces where bodies do the bidding of ML. Neural networks feed this forward as anti-workerism at every level of the social factory.Footnote ⁸⁶ For employers, the seductive vision isn’t real AI (whatever that is) but technologies that are good enough to replace human workers or, more importantly, to precaritize and undermine them. In this sense, even generative AI is not really new but simply an iteration of class war.

As previous scholarship has shown the net effect of neural networks acting in the world is necropolitical.Footnote ⁸⁷ AI’s decision boundaries aggregate life preserving pathways for some while subjecting others to iterative neglect. An algorithmic condensation of social conditions results in the acceleration of molar differences such as racialized deprivation or disability into designations of relative disposability. These lifeboat logics were starkly visible during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue at pace at national borders and in the retrenchments of welfare systems. The molecular flux of lived identity is not simply made mathematically tractable by AI but essentialized into a machinic identitarianism that prepares the way for eugenic logics of eliminationism, filtered through systems of ranking and optimization.

The very idea of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – ‘a form of AI that has comparable cognitive abilities as a human being and is able to apply knowledge to solve complex problems in unfamiliar circumstances’ – is predicated on the idea of superior and inferior intellect and the eugenic drive to disentangle them.Footnote ⁸⁸ Hardly surprising, then, that contemporary AI evinces resonances across the psychopolitical. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the nested set of ideologies incubated in Silicon Valley are only too welcoming of AI’s eugenic potential. Transhumanist dreams of uploaded superintelligence unite with ultra-rationalist utilitarianisms based on patriarchy, racial supremacy, and so-called Long Termism, whose commitment to spacefaring future humans enables it to dismiss mass casualties from climate change as a mere blip in meta-Darwinian evolution. Taking as our object of study the co-constitution of the social and the technical allows us to make sense of how the body of operations known as AI can coagulate already-circulating micro-fascisms because it can ‘do’ states of exception, transformative violence, and essentialized othering.

11.2.3 Structural Renewal

The reactionary forces of AI described herein exceed the regulatory potential of liberal law. Algorithmic carcerality can’t be comprehensively countered by reprioritizing legal carcerality. The law is not ‘other’ to AI but a mechanism based on the same conceptual abstractions and molar relations. AI’s accelerationism simply exposes the failure of existing law to address so many kinds of injustice; as has become painfully visible in negotiations over the EU’s AI Act, for example, regulation will enable algorithmic amplification of ongoing injustices towards migrants and minorities. Indeed, there are strong resonances between the promise legal regulation as a form of governance and the claims by the AI field itself that it can ‘fix’ discrimination through statistical rebalancing rather than by addressing its structural causes. More profoundly, law’s claim to regulate AI – such as for example the proposed EU AI Act – is undermined by the lack of reflection on the liberal state’s own incubation of micro-fascisms in numerous forms.Footnote ⁸⁹

Claims that AI is here to stay and that the best we can hope for is regulation embraces AI realism’s hopelessness, meaning the inability to imagine an alternative to AI is embedded within the apparent impossibility of an alternative socio-political system per se.Footnote ⁹⁰ Instead, a line of flight can be opened by dropping the compulsion to show ‘balance’, that is, by always referring to AI’s alleged potential for good, and instead acknowledging that any social benefits are wholly speculative while the fascistic tendencies are being empirically demonstrated. The need to put down all machinery hurtful to the commonality calls for a deeper structural renewal based on socially useful production and the creation of more convivial technologies.

A non-dual approach to understanding AI, also offering a route to conceptualizing an alternative, is through the idea of ‘apparatus’ as described by Barad: a specific arrangement that produces aspects of the world through exclusions (or ‘cuts’) it sets up.Footnote ⁹¹ These exclusions are neither social nor material but productive of particular distinctions between the social and the material. From this perspective, AI is not a way of representing the world but an intervention that helps to produce the world it claims to represent. Setting it up one way or another changes what becomes naturalized and what becomes problematized and therefore subject to social or political intervention. A prefigurative politics that is properly technopolitical can use this concept of apparatus to navigate the alignment of concrete technical operations with preferred relations of social production. This suggests attention to the molecular currents which become sedimented by the apparatus into observable divisions of matter and meaning, or technical and social, and tuning for microsocialities and microsolidarities and their macropolitical manifestations as solidarity and mutual aid. The nature of the Baradian apparatus, as a mechanism that produces both subjectivity and objective conditions, is to tie together observer and observed and to imply that subjectivity itself is foundationally relational.

11.2.4 Alternative Apparatus

The collective subject of an alternative apparatus aimed at inverting the algorithmic state of exception finds a plausible form in people’s councils, self-constituting assemblies that challenge the validity of representation on both political and epistemological grounds, while creating a space for transforming subjectivities. As an aspect of a Baradian apparatus, these assemblies become the non-fascist alternatives to current governance called for by Daniela, inasmuch as they are a mechanism for ‘not simply decentralization but de-individuation’. People’s councils are not essentializing organs of molar authority but processual and relational spaces of collective agency and counter power. One task of the people’s councils is to steer a critical technical practice that combines research with counterfoil research, that prioritizes Langdon Winner’s principles of intelligibility and non-dependency with respect to tools, and pushes for the conviviality that Illich illustrated as the capacity for autonomous and creative activity. Together, people’s councils and convivial technologies aim for a mutually reinforcing coherence of patterns of thought, modes of decision-making and concrete technical systems.

As AI’s exclusions are always at the same time enclosures, the operations of the counter-apparatus should be directed to commoning, not only as the governance of common pool resources but the production and extension of commons as an instantiation of more-than-human solidarities. Commoning is the micro and macro politics of the new apparatus. We need to move from cyberpunk to solarpunkFootnote ⁹² – the latter being the ecological antidote to the former – to radically rework our technopolitical arrangements away from the nihilism of neural networks and towards affirmative, adaptive, and open-ended systems. The lost cybernetics of thinkers like Stafford Beer and his Viable Systems Model, whose underlying ontology is non-representational in a way that aligns with arguments made in the first part of this chapter,Footnote ⁹³ holds promise here as a template for a technical system that valorizes decentralization and autonomy while navigating the interplay between molecular and molar forces. A convivial techno-social system is one that can come into balance with its environment, where recursive coordination starts with local autonomy from below. A system that doesn’t hallucinate a total view of reality, but negotiates respectfully with the different and the unexpected.

11.3.1 A Posthuman Feminist ‘We’

Posthuman feminist alliances are antithetical to ‘sameness through the violent excision of difference’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ and to centripetal modes of governance centralizing decisionism through fascist desires, realized through mass movements, scraping of Big Data, and related forms of sense-lessness. Braidotti envisions such alliances as constitutive of a ‘new people’ inclusive also of those historically ‘de-selected’: women, children, black, indigenous, colonized, plant, and animal lives.Footnote ¹⁰¹ She elaborates:

One does not entrepreneurially ‘start-up’ such alliances. Rather, one enters from the middle/midst (Daniela’s entry) without subjugation of others (or ourselves) to centripetal modes of organizations enabling fascism to connect with its larger network: posthuman feminist transversal alliances are de-territorial, moving along lines of flight, as are Deleuze and Guattarian ‘packs-swarms’. Yet, these are not necessarily ‘bro-packs’, rather they are feminist, sense-active, de-de-selectionary and becoming. And for the microsocialities of solidarity and care involved in the becoming of such posthuman feminist alliances to materialize and prosper, there is need for basic conditions of co-sociality, structures of common governance, and a common ethics to underpin both articulations of microsocialites and society as a whole. What structure could that be?

11.3.2 A Structure Non-hijackable by Fascist Desire?

While moving, explicitly, against historical fascist notions of the centralist state (and its state-appropriation of violence), Braidotti still wants to rescue some sort of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ as part of ‘the future past … their time is still to come’.Footnote ¹⁰³ But what kind of democracy of ‘non-human agents, technologically mediated elements, Earth-others … and non-human inorganic agents’ would that be?Footnote ¹⁰⁴ And, to (critical) lawyers the question becomes acute of ‘how we insist on legal configurations of responsibility which privilege “humans” (as responsible for others) while persisting as legal scholars in trying to be, as Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos puts it, “in sync with [our] nonhuman extensions and mediations”?’Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Would this posthuman feminist transversal alternative hold amidst the fluid and molecular articulations of fascism’s part of AI/blockchains? Is this the ‘transversal alliance’ of a collective subject that inhabits and extends the Commons? While there is no guarantee, more of the same – more and better laws, or more and better AI – surely is no answer for the question of non-fascist living.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Foucault cautions against making law an allay in non-fascist living – as law conventionally tends towards uniformity rather than difference and multitude, and to unity rather than flow. However, (with others) I find potential of flow and difference in law – yet not the marketized intense-capitalist ‘flow’ of neoliberalism.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The crux is to move beyond dualism – order-conserving and binary-decisionistic heteronormativity, gender-binarism, racism, sexism, ableism, speciesism, and colonialism, and to do so without being lured by the neoliberal marketization and transhuman desires. In all those modes of governance fascist desires thrive, hijack, and connect with its larger network. Rather than looking for singular discriminatory incidents – or to intervene post-hoc – legal scholarship and practice should be attendant to the ‘legal-ontological work’ of, what Angela Harris calls, de-colonial legal subjectivities, rejecting ‘the hegemony of hegemony rather than imagining a single lever or change or a revolutionary vanguard’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This involves ‘hijacking’ law’s capacity for concrete response-ability, adaptability, and its working through abstract figurations. Rather than towards fascistic desires and centripetal/centralizing powers, posthuman feminist legal structuring works dispersedly, non-hierarchically, and non-exclusionary – transversively local rather than either/or-national/international.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This hijacking invokes feminist methods neither new nor destined to arrive at its destination. Doing is the destination.

Emily Jones points to the ‘inherent tension between wanting to work within … law’ and ‘having to accept … law’s constraints when doing so’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This, she continues, emerges through ‘a wider tension’ between theory and the work of ‘bringing theory to practise’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Practising posthuman feminism towards non-fascist living involves doing law while accepting some of its constraints, risking getting captured, becoming complicit, getting a high on power as legal experts, lawyers, (star) academics, and (success-driven) tech-scholar-practitioners. Sense it: the hesitation in shaking hands with an alleged like-minded expert/lawyer/academic/tech-bro: ‘How does one keep from being fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant?’Footnote ¹¹²

Let’s pause: Are not posthuman feminist alliances similar to governance through AI and blockchain-ecologies? Well, they differ in the power articulated by techno-social media: posthuman feminist alliances do not operate by AI/blockchain as governance (compare: The Network State, see Daniela’s entry). Technologies are not overarching structures. If AI and similar technologies can operate through violent extractionism, excess, and appropriation, they cannot be part of a posthuman feminist response to inequality, violence, exclusion, extractionism, and not the least climate crisis and ecological collapse. The technologies discussed in this chapter are exceptionally resource intensive, profit-driven, partly materially unsustainable. Socio-technical devices – including AI-powered entities – and infrastructures can be part of posthuman feminist transversal alliances. Yet, only insofar that they are not sourced from or sourcing or furthering destructive forces – including fascistic desires – and are employed towards posthuman feminist practices of non-fascist living. Which is to say: whereas it may be possible to develop techno-social media that do not further the ‘necrotic, predatory imperative of Euro-centric petro-capitalism and rampant industrial consumerism’,Footnote ¹¹³ which do not facilitate micro-fascistic amalgamations, and which act against fascistic eruptions, such endeavours require thorough and continuous work.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Negativity and excitement – be it energy or hate – are defining traits of fascism. As an ‘infectious infatuation with despotic power’, Braidotti explains, ‘fascism feeds and capitalizes on the hateful rejection of the “others”’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Affirmation – as a continuous becoming – is its contrast: Posthuman feminist transversal alliances are not solutions or end but a mode of being constantly ongoing (becoming), always shifting its relations.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The ‘we’ is not a people based on (digital or non-digital) citizenship, which can be rewarded and revoked. It is rather corporeal automatism keeping the body bodying. There are no two bodies – as in the politico-theological The King’s Two Bodies: a people and a sovereign, a human-body embodying the king-body, a State and its demos-citizens.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Instead of an ‘ending’ there is bodying towards non-fascist desires. When worn down and disillusioned – when solutionism, scaling up, moving fast and breaking things (and other buzzwords of the tech-industry) call sirenlike – at the height of ‘democracy fatigue’ (‘let it all burn to ashes!’), affirmation is key.

11.3.3 Moving Forward. Again

Posthuman feminism offers descriptions of problems and potentials – digital tech being part of it. Yet, its analysis and alternative politics towards non-fascist living hinges on our willingness to enter alliances of human-non-human agents, technologically mediated elements, Earth-others and non-human inorganic agents while resisting the love of power and the desire for the very thing that dominates and exploits us. Is it too much to ask of ourselves to sense – hesitating shaking the hand of the fascist-revolutionary (Daniela’s entry), to resist desiring power? Can we resist speaking about fascism – conceptualize, exploring/re-circulating concepts invented/ing fascism – instead speaking up – and to go on and do it already? What are our stakes, what grounds us, fences us in and off, makes us hesitate? What is our power, and how far will we go?