In this post, I want to reiterate an argument from my paper on LLMs and disaster ableism and emphasize that philosophers must stop discussing technology in isolation from techno-fascism, the prevailing social order. The Western mode of technological development has allowed techno-fascists like Elon Musk to ascend to a position of unchecked autocratic power, from which they are gleefully destroying the welfare state, filling prisons and immigration detention centers, and separating migrant families like mine. If it was not already clear, it is now undeniable: Technology is not value-neutral science: it can enable fascism.

The time to pontificate about how to punish students for using ChatGPT has long passed – if it was ever there at all (which I doubt). Elon Musk is pillaging America, profiting from child labor in the Congo, dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency, spreading disinformation, and fueling the global rise of techno-fascism. If you are a philosopher writing about technology, you cannot afford to remain neutral. Use whatever platform you have to protest the techno-fascist regime. For some of you, this may be your last chance to speak freely.  

In 2023, I published a paper in a special issue of Critical Humanities titled “Humanities in the Time of ChatGPT.” The paper was called LLMs and Crisis Epistemology: The Business of Making Old Crises Seem New, and it argued that LLMs like ChatGPT are responsible for a range of crises, from climate change to unemployment to automated disinformation campaigns; but, contrary to popular opinion, these crises are not new. Rather, they can be traced back (at least) to the start of the industrial revolution, when Marx observed that the life of even the most privileged factory worker was characterized by “overwork and premature death, decline to a mere machine, a bond servant of capital,” condemned to ceaseless “competition…, starvation or beggary” (1884). At the same time, European colonizers were enslaving, exploiting, and slaughtering African and Indigenous peoples. The inception of industrialized technologies did not liberate workers but instead bound them to machines, forced them to work harder, and concentrated wealth amongst white colonizers.  

What has changed? The average post-industrial worker remains shackled to mechanized labor that exhausts the body and mind while generating unfathomable profits for the machine owners – the techno-fascists. Modern technologies, including so-called green energy, come from modern-day slavery in the Global South. The production of green energy through slave labor, land grabs, and imperialism – that is, the standard methods – is known as “green colonialism.” Those who can’t keep pace with the speed of production are pushed into the “carceral archipelago,” a vast network of prisons, nursing homes, and other segregated facilities designed to exploit marginalized populations for profit (Tremain 2021). All over the world, people are being worked to death, incarcerated, and disabled by techno-fascism. This was how the world worked in 1925 and it’s how the world works in 2025: techno-fascists reign. 

Who can liberate us from technological oppression? According to techno-fascists, only they can. They want us to believe that technologically-facilitated crises – water shortages, job losses, automated disinformation, etc. – are so unprecedented, so urgent, and so complex that only the tech gods can solve them. That’s right: the people whose existence as a class depends on unfettered technological expansion; the same people building rocket ships to escape the scorched Earth they created; the ones you will never see because they live on private island and yachts – these are the benevolent saviors who will rescue the huddled masses from technological catastrophes. Step aside, losers: the tech titans are coming to the rescue!  

Kyle Whye calls this mythical way of thinking “crisis epistemology.” Crisis epistemology frames crises as “unprecedented” in the sense that they have never happened before, so “there are few usable lessons from the past about how to cope with the problems of today” (2021, 4). Often, these crises are also framed as “complex beyond anything previously encountered” (ibid). Put differently, they are ‘too complicated’ to be understood, let alone solved, by the ‘simple minds’ of ordinary folks. Furthermore, crises are framed as “imminent” in the sense that they “must be responded to quickly” (ibid), and at the cost of public consultation, democratic participation, or community consent. According to crisis epistemology, ordinary people have no relevant knowledge about how to deal with crises. 

Crisis epistemology functions to “mask numerous forms of power, including colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, and industrialization” (Whyte 2021: 6). The myth that techno-fascists can save us from their own systems of extraction and production keeps us in chains. It obfuscates and mystifies techno-fascists’ causative roles in economies of exploitation, incarceration, and crisis. These economies are a constitutive part of what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” the process whereby capitalist elites exploit disasters to consolidate wealth and power (2007). Since disasters are profitable, capitalists have a vested interest in perpetuating them. Shelley Tremain coined the term “disaster ableism” to describe the disproportionate impact of disaster capitalism on disabled people (2021). Techno-fascism’s reliance on resource plundering, Indigenous land theft, sweatshop labor, hazardous working conditions, low wages, waste dumping in the Global South, and other crises, has produced a vicious cycle of mass disablement and mass exploitation of disabled people (Chapman 2023). Techno-fascism is a preeminent driver of global disablement, displacement, and dispossession.  

Note that Whyte’s critique of the green energy sector is not an anti-technology argument. Indigenous communities have their own technologies. However, “no Indigenous story says that technology is the solution to [crises like] climate change” (Whyte 2022). Whyte’s point is that technology should not govern society; society, rooted in kinship relationships, should govern technological change. Kinship relationships are moral bonds of mutual respect and responsibility, which “generate the capacity to respond to constant change” (2020: 1). Kinship relationships are also the basis for a “coordination epistemology,” a knowledge system that fosters coordination “without validating harm or violence” (ibid). Whereas crisis epistemology involves “an underlying conception of heroism” (11) – superheroes will save us from disaster! – coordination epistemology eschews hero worship in favor of solidarity, consent, and community-building. The latter allows us to identify tech magnates as colonizers and protect ourselves against their colonial systems of extraction and production.  

I wrote this criticism of Musk’s rising techno-fascist empire in 2023, two years before he assumed his current title of DOGE Master. I was inspired by the long history of disabled, Indigenous, queer, and feminist activism and scholarship about technological autocracy. Our ancestors were protesting the violence of techo-fascistm long before Elon Musk came onto the scene. He is merely the predictable byproduct of centuries of unfettered techno-fascism. 

So, what are you doing about it?  If you write about technology, this is your chance to address the non-accidental, centuries-long connections between the tech sector – its extractive industries, supply chains, labor practices, epistemic violence – and fascism. I don’t even specialize in technology but I have written about the threat of techno-fascism. You can too. 

Recently, Jason Stanley confessed that he’s above the “sociology of US academic philosophy,” and doesn’t “care at all” about who gets cited, hired, or promoted. I disagree. I care a lot about epistemic justice in academia – about whether we are building an epistemology of crisis or an epistemology of coordination, whether we are contributing to a sociology of eugenics or one of solidarity and kinship. As academics, we all have situated epistemic networks and insights. We need to use these resources to fight the techno-fascists. If we don’t, who among us can afford to flee to another country for safety? Not me.