Basilisk, Bestiary, London, British Library, Royal 12 C XIX, f. 63, circa 1200-1225.
Between 2016 and 2019, I wrote several essays about the ideology of what was at the time known as the alt-right. “Capitalism with a Transhuman Face” uses Roko’s Basilisk—a thought experiment about a future AI that punishes those who didn’t help create it—as a lens to discuss how Silicon Valley’s tech culture incubated neoreactionary and alt-right movements, with tech workers and investors providing early financial support and ideological breeding grounds for a new fascist ideological formation.
The Basilisk was an allegory for a process that is now fully coming into view: When labor is no longer the main source of value, the majority of the population, no longer relevant to the primary mode of accumulation, can be disposed of. This, I would contend, is what underlies the ongoing assault on political and civil rights: without incentives to sustain their populations as members of a political community, states will seek to suspend the rights they had previously granted—and this is the stage we are now in.
The classic social contract assumed wage labor as the primary distribution mechanism for productivity gains. The political enfranchisement of non-property-owners occurred because their labor became systemically critical. AI allows companies to break complex roles into smaller, commoditized micro-tasks—fragmented, remote, or platform-mediated work makes collective action difficult, while also affording AI-driven performance monitoring, algorithmic management, and real-time productivity scoring. When new jobs are created, they may require skills that displaced workers do not have. The horizon of a middle-class life—college degree, entry-level job, steady promotion, retirement—was already fraying; AI may well sever it entirely.
The Basilisk is a ‘Darwinian Filter’—hinging on a process of violent sorting that separates the worthy from the unworthy—that institutes a fundamental division between the tech-savvy gentry (who devote their lives to the Basilisk) and a vast underclass of the underemployed or precariously employed (who are further degraded by it). This filter is also at work through tech IPOs, the ultimate conduit for spreading private AI losses to public, passively held retirement accounts. Early venture investors who funded the AI labs get to cash out at inflated valuations. When the bubble bursts, pensioners—who have no choice but to hold index funds containing these overvalued stocks—bear the downside. They will thus be tortured by the Basilisk for the remainder of their biological lives, not through digital simulation but through the very real liquidation of their material security.
Contrary to what proponents of terms like “cyber-feudalism” suggest, current techno-political architectures have not altered the economy in ways that resemble Europe’s medieval feudal system, but in ways that are closer to the system of 176th-century chartered companies—a system where private entities receive state-like powers while operating as profit-seeking corporations. You can call it crypto-mercantilism, but the most important point is this: the stablecoin-AI convergence does not produce digital serfs. It produces “human residue”: humanity as a maintenance cost rather than a productive force. What happens to the redundant is not an economic question. It is an ideological one.
Trump’s murderous alacrity, his use of maximum brute force with a minimum of justification, violence that is technically precise yet morally illegible, open contempt for international law, and absolute impunity—these are the epiphenomena of this transition. The cruelty is not the point; the cruelty is the affect. The point is to unmake citizens and govern the rightless as wards.
This is why racial capitalism, rather than cyberfeudalism, is the more useful framework. It forces us to recognize that capitalism does not require homogenizing labor. It can and does maintain differentiated, coerced, and super-exploited labor forms within its global circuits of accumulation. The prison labor camp, the gig economy “independent contractor,” the data-generating “user”—all are forms of value extraction without a wage contract. Even as unemployment rises, the state can allocate scarcity—housing vouchers, food assistance, healthcare, disability benefits. AI-powered welfare administration can automate this discrimination at scale, with policing becoming the primary interface with the state. And it is race that stabilizes this stratification by producing differentiable populations within the same economic system. In the wage-labor era, race served to segment the working class. In the post-wage era, race allocates access to the remaining scarce goods, and—most critically—the distribution of state violence.
When states abdicate the work of sustaining populations, they leave a void—not only in material provision but in meaning. That void, I argue, must be filled by an ideology capable of naturalizing the notion that neglect is not a breakdown but a restoration of order. Masculinity—understood as an ideological formation—is what performs this ideological work and supplies the moral grammar for the transition. This is where fascism comes in: capitalism can and often does destroy value, but fascism alone knows how to endow this uneconomic dimension with meaning. Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw invites us to visualize this transition as a heightened, almost rapturous frenzy while also unseeing the slow, methodical, infrastructural work of cutting the social body to pieces.
Taken together, cruelty as affect, masculinity as grammar, the unmaking of citizens as project, and artificial intelligence as infrastructure constitute the ideological and material apparatus of an emerging new mode of governance ––whose coordinates we need to map out.
The essay “Capitalism with a Transhuman Face: The Afterlife of Fascism and the Digital Frontier,” published in 2019 in Third Text 33 (3), 315–335, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1625638, is hereby made available for free reading.