There aren't a lot of things I agree with Mark Carney about, but there's one area where he and I are in total accord: the old, US-dominated, "rules-based international order" was total bullshit.

Unlike Carney, I never pretended to like that old order, and indeed I spent my entire life fighting against it – literally, all the way back to childhood, organising other children to march against Canada's participation in America's nuclear weapons programmes.

All of which means that my experience of the Trump years is decidedly weird. On the one hand, I exist in a near-perpetual state of anxious misery, as Trump and his chud army of Christian nationalists and degenerate gamblers pursue a programme of gleeful genocide. But at the very same time, I'm living in a world in which Trump is (inadvertently) dismantling many of the worst aspects of the old order in favour of something decidedly better.

Take Trump's tariff policy. Back during Trump I, he decided that Americans couldn't buy Chinese solar any more, which had the double benefit of allowing him to pursue the twin goals of throwing red meat to sinophobic Cold War 2.0 freaks and delivering a giant gift to the planet-wrecking oil companies that had helped him buy his way into office.

Author, tech activist and Nerve columnist Cory Doctorow

This was really bad for America, of course, but those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarised virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from TikTok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid any more. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery.

This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first, and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves. Think of vaccine apartheid, in which monsters like Howard Dean insisted that we had to prevent countries in the global south from making their own Covid vaccines, because poor brown people are too stupid and primitive to run a pharma manufacturing operation.

But, thanks to Comrade Trump, Pakistan was first in line to become the world's solar capital. The country's LNG terminal – built with Chinese Belt-and-Road money – is now a stranded asset, because no one there needs gas.

That's gas whose supply has been choked off in the Strait of Epstein … which brings me to Trump's foreign policy and its impact on the global energy shift. Transitory energy shortages have small effects: when your energy bill goes up for a while (because of extreme weather, say), it makes you angry and sad and might result in an electoral loss for whatever politician presided over the price hike. But when you get genuine, prolonged shortages – the sort that are accompanied by rationing – you make permanent changes.

Rationing is so psychologically scarring that it induces people to make long-delayed investments that result in permanent changes to their consumption habits. Maybe you've known for a long time that an induction top would be better for your indoor air quality and your cooking than the gas range you have now, but you don't want to buy a whole new appliance and pay for an electrician to run a high-wattage line, in expensive conduit, from your breaker panel to your kitchen.

But if you're an Indian restaurateur who can no longer get any cooking gas – because it's being rationed for household use – then you are going out to buy whatever induction top you can lay hands on. Maybe it's a cheap, low-powered single burner one that plugs into your existing electrics, or maybe you're splashing out and swapping out your whole gas appliance. Whichever it is, you are no longer interested in your chef's insistence that real cooking gets done over gas. If your chef can't cook on an induction top, your chef will need to find employment elsewhere.

This is going on all over the world right now, as people buy EVs (and pay to have chargers installed at home – maybe getting a twofer on their conduit runs with two high-power lines run through the same conduit infrastructure). In Australia – where possibly the last shipment of oil for the foreseeable came into port recently – people are calling their local EV dealers and offering to buy whatever car is on the lot, sight unseen.

Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, a series of dollar-related crises caused the country to ban imports of internal combustion engines altogether (oil and gas are denominated in dollars, which means you can only get oil if you first sell stuff to Americans or others who'll pay in dollars). The country's fleet of noisy, dirty motorbikes is being swiftly replaced by e-bikes that get eight miles to the penny.

E-bikes are insanely great technology. Cheap, rugged and reliable, they're basically bicycles that abolish hills. Once you've gotten accustomed to an e-bike – maybe you've invested in a folding helmet and a raincoat – you'll never go back. The advantages of an e-bike commute over a car commute are legion, but my favourite little pleasure is the ability to easily make a stop at a nice coffee shop halfway between home and work, rather than being stuck buying shitty chain coffee near the office.

Four years ago, another mad emperor, Vladimir Putin, invaded Ukraine – and in so doing catapulted Europe's energy transition into the Gretacene, with unimaginable defeats for the fossil fuel lobby. Not just subsidies for the clean energy transition, but also policy shifts in areas that had been deadlocked for a decade, like approvals for balcony solar, which is transforming the continent. Even the UK, one of the oil industry's most reliable vassal states, is now greenlighting balcony solar.

This may not sound like much, but the UK is a country whose politics is composed of 50% hatred of migrants and trans people and 50% incredibly stupid planning battles. Great Britain is a magical land where your neighbours can ask the government to prevent you from installing double-glazing on the grounds that it will change the "historic character" of their neighbourhood of terraced Victorian homes.

I once lost a fight to get permission to put a little glass greenhouse on my balcony on the grounds that it would "alter the facade" of the undistinguished low-rise 1960s industrial building I live on top of. The fact that HMG is going to tell your facade-obsessed neighbours to fuck off all the way into the sun so that you can hang solar panels off your balcony is nothing short of a miracle.

Comrade Putin's contribution to oil-soaked Britain's energy transition can't be overstated. Thanks to "free market" policies that sent energy prices soaring after the Ukraine invasion, Brits installed so much solar (despite the existing impediments to solarisation) that now the government is begging us to use more energy this summer, because the grid can't absorb all those lovely free electrons.

The UK is on a glide-path to adopting the Australian plan. Australia also benefited from Trump I's solar embargo, receiving a ton of cheap solar that would otherwise have ended up in America. Now Australia has so much solar that they're giving away electricity, with three free hours of unlimited energy every day. Stick your dishwasher, clothes dryer and EV charger on a timer, invest in a battery or two, and fill your boots.

(Maybe at this point you're thinking dark thoughts about critical minerals and such. That's not the problem you think it is and it's getting better every day. To take just one example, lithium batteries are about to be replaced with sodium batteries. Sodium is the world's sixth most abundant element.)

The Strait of Epstein crisis is going to do more to accelerate permanent, unidirectional migration away from fossil fuels to cleantech than decades of environmental activism. Cleantech is so much better than fossil fuels – cheaper, more reliable, cleaner – that anyone who tries it becomes an instant convert. That's why the fossil fuel industry has been so insistent that no one get to try it!

To take just one example here: Texas ranchers have been solarising, thanks to the state's bizarre "free market" energy system that sees energy prices spiking so high during cold snaps that you literally have to choose between freezing to death and going bankrupt. Solar is great for agriculture, especially in climate-ravaged Texas, where it provides crucial shade for crops and livestock, while substantially reducing soil evaporation, resulting in substantial irrigation savings.

When the oil-captured Texas legislature introduced a bill to force electric companies to add one watt of fossil power for every watt of solar that their customers installed, furious ranchers from blood-red Republican rural districts flooded their town hall meetings, decrying a plan that was branded "DEI for fossil fuels". The bill died.

This is the template for the long-foreseeable future. Thanks to Trump's stupid, bloody, unforgivable war of choice in the Gulf, the world is going to install unimaginable amounts of cleantech. They are going to throw away their water heaters, motorbikes, furnaces and cars and replace them with all-electric versions. They're going to cover their roofs and balconies with panels. The battery industry will experience a sustained boom. The fortunes that fossil fuel companies are reaping from the current shortage is their last windfall.

The writing is on the wall. Trump opened Alaska for drilling and the oil companies noped out because they couldn't find a bank that would loan them the money needed to get started. Then it happened again in Venezuela. This de-fossilising was already the direction of travel: the only question was the pace at which the transition would proceed – and Comrade Trump has just stomped all over the (liquefied natural) gas pedal.

Energy is just one realm where Trump is doing praxis. One of the most exciting developments that Trumpismo's incontinent belligerence has induced is the global technology transition.

For decades, the only people pointing out the dangers of using America's cash-grabbing, privacy-invading defective tech exports were digital-rights hippies like me, and our victories were modest and far between. Despite the Snowden revelations, despite the tech industry's prolific snook-cocking at EU privacy regulators and Canadian lawmakers, we all just carried on using these incredibly dangerous, steadily enshittifying Big Tech products. We even run our governments and structurally important companies off Big Tech. We let US tech companies update (that is, downgrade) the software on our cars and tractors, our pacemakers and ventilators, our power plants and telephone switches.

There's lots of reasons for this. For one thing, ripping out and replacing all that software and firmware is a prodigious challenge, as is building the data centres to host it for every "digitally sovereign" country. Add to that the complexity of successfully migrating data, edit histories, archives and identities and you're looking at a very big lift. So long as the American tech bosses kept their enshittificatory gambits to a measured, slow flow, they could keep the pain beneath the threshold where it was worth us boiling frogs leaping out of their pot.

But the most important force defending American internet hegemony was free trade: specifically, the US forced all of its trading partners to adopt "anticircumvention" laws that make it illegal to modify US tech exports. That means that you can't go into business selling your neighbours the tools to use generic printer ink or an independent app store, much less make a fortune exporting those tools to the rest of the world.

Enter Comrade Trump. When Trump started weaponising US tech platforms to take away the working files, email accounts and cloud calendars of judges who pissed him off (by sentencing Bolsonaro to prison and swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu), he put the whole world on notice that he could shut down their governments, judiciaries or companies at the click of a mouse.

And of course, he's whacked the whole world with tariffs that violate the trade agreements that imposed those anticircumvention obligations that protect America's defective tech exports. Now there's no longer any reason to keep those laws on the books. Happy Liberation Day, everyone! The post-American internet is at hand.

Cory Doctorow, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Los Angeles and London, is the Nerve’s tech columnist. His most recent book Enshittification is published by Verso

The recent 22-point post on X by Palantir Technologies outlining the philosophy of its co-founder and CEO Alex Karp – on everything from compulsory national service to a new age of deterrence built in AI – is quite an event. It’s one thing for a government or political party to articulate and compete over a political vision: that’s expected, even mandatory. It’s another for a private company, especially one deeply embedded in state security and surveillance, to do so. This is not just advertisement by a leading global tech arms dealer. It’s a manifesto. And for any friend of democracy, reading it is like opening a food item that you suspected has gone off, but you didn’t know it was that much off.

Palantir, led by Alexander Karp and founded by Peter Thiel, is not a political thinktank. It is not an elected body. It’s not accountable to the public. It’s a contractor: a tech firm that builds powerful software and data infrastructure used by militaries, intelligence agencies and law enforcement around the world. When such a company begins to speak in sweeping ideological terms about the direction society should take, it raises questions, and rightly so.

But it’s the content, tone and subtext of the post – distilled from Karp’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West – that makes it especially unsettling and why we must pay attention. Rather than sticking to product announcements, it advances a worldview. A political ideology, and a very particular one: one that is openly hostile to liberal democracy, rejects pluralism, inclusion, and empathy, instead embracing “hard power” (read: violence) and permanent warfare (ideal if you’re an arms dealer), calling for sacrifices for the nation and drafting people into military service, cracking down on crime, welcoming religion in the realm of power, dismissing the equality of cultures in favour of western supremacy and elitism, deeming interiority and reflection unnecessary when it comes to the masses (that’s reserved for the elite), promoting collaboration between Big Tech and state, endorsing the suppression of dissent by means of a surveillance system that always knows how to find you, demanding the rearmament of Germany and Japan, and arguing for technological dominance over the enemies of the state. 

Not the usual language of tech, not even Big Tech. If this sounds familiar, it should. The glorification of strength, warfare and the nation, the subordination of citizens to the state, and the entanglement of corporate and state power rings a very specific bell: a fascist one. Silicon Valley has been drifting in that direction for some time now – think of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others. But now things are getting more consequential.

In my book Why AI Undermines Democracy and in my paper on technofascism, I warned against a political trajectory in which digital technologies do not merely support governance but begin to reshape it in authoritarian directions. The danger is not only overt repression and warmongering but also a subtler transformation: the normalisation of surveillance, the delegation of judgment to opaque systems, and the quiet concentration of power in the actors who design and control these infrastructures.

Palantir does not only exist to make money. With its ties to state power, and in particular the Trump regime, the goal is power accumulation. Not so much for the state in question, but for the tech executives themselves. Technological elites begin to function as quasi-political authorities without democratic legitimacy. The engineer, the data scientist, but especially the billionaire, is recast as arbiter of social order. Who needs a parliament?

There is something distinctly authoritarian in the subtext of Palantir’s post. The emphasis on total visibility, on integrating disparate data streams into a single operational picture, on enabling faster and more decisive action. From a business and engineering perspective, all this can be framed as a call for efficiency. But efficiency, what Karp’s beloved Frankfurt School – he studied under Jürgen Habermas – called instrumental rationality, can become a political value that overrides others: deliberation, pluralism, dissent. In such a system, the friction of democratic processes is not a feature but a bug to be engineered away. This belief does not arrive wearing the obvious symbols of 20th-century authoritarianism; it comes dressed as security, innovation, optimisation and progress.

Palantir’s manifesto frames its tech as a response to the lack of order and security: the belief that advanced technology can and should be used to impose order on a complex, unruly world, guided by those who build and understand these systems.

The tech imperium envisaged here is put forward as an answer to a particular framing of the problem: a framing introduced by Hobbes in the 17th century and further developed by German political theorist Carl Schmitt – who provided legal and philosophical cover for the Nazi regime. Hobbes held the pessimistic view that without authoritarian order, humans don’t manage to live together. He justified absolute state authority as the force that could restore order. A Leviathan to rule over people. Palantir’s answer to chaos at the global level is similar. The message to their clients is: make sure you’re the winner, dominate, and order is restored. Forget multilateralism; become the strongest and impose your order on all others.

Tech is the ideal tool for that: you don’t need to talk to people, try to convince them, argue with them. Habermas is passé; Schmitt is back. You just need to make sure you’re the strongest. The aim is to make “software that dominates”, as Palantir puts it on its X account profile. In other words, it aims to build the new Leviathan: the Hobbesian monster that guarantees security, but that comes at the price of freedom and democracy. Karp and Thiel are prepared to pay that price; or rather, they want you to pay it.

The most troubling part is that this vision is not hypothetical. Palantir and its political allies have already partly implemented it. Predictive policing tools shape how law enforcement allocates resources. Immigration systems rely on AI to track and categorise individuals. Military operations increasingly depend on real-time data fusion platforms and AI is used to select targets for air strikes. Palantir’s software is a central part of this ecosystem. It’s used by the US government and Israel, but also by law enforcement in the EU and UK, and in Britain’s NHS. When the company describes a world organised around these capabilities, it is not imagining the future: it is describing the present, just extended and intensified. The contracts are signed. People have been detained. Bombs have fallen. 

This is a gradual, infrastructural shift, not a sudden break into authoritarianism, but a slow recalibration of what feels normal via the entanglement of tech with power. The more these systems are embedded, the more their underlying assumptions – about control, visibility, and power – fade into the background. The problem is structural. Once the violence and technocracy are normalised, the way back to democracy narrows. 

But this is not inevitable. We can and must defend democracy. In a healthy democracy, the direction of society is contested in public, through institutions designed – however imperfectly – to reflect the will of the people. Private tech companies have every right to participate in that conversation. But when their participation takes the form of promoting a model that concentrates power in the very systems they control, scepticism and resistance are not only warranted but necessary. Palantir’s post offers us a glimpse of the technofascist trajectory: not as a distant possibility, but as a world already under construction.

Perhaps that’s why it all sounds so confident. Karp is a happy man.

Mark Coeckelbergh is professor of philosophy at University of Vienna. His new book is called Artificial Religion: On AI, Myth and Power (MIT Press). This is an edited version of a post from his Medium blog