All antagonism, all resistance, all criticism, all dissent, and all seditious attempts can now be predicted based on the automatic detection of data patterns. Hence, algorithmic domination can anticipate the next move and “put the band-aid before the wound appears”. However, we continue to await the arrival of a dystopian future without realizing that the massive processing of data for the purposes of social control, hand in hand with the accelerated technological revolution, has already established that dystopia here and now. While many comrades remain lost, engrossed in a futile struggle against outdated windmills, absolute social control has been established with the help of new technologies. These are prediction machines, “whose goal—according to Pariser—is to constantly create and refine a theory about who you are, what you will do, and what you will desire next”.i

Through this machinic process, power has invaded the most intimate corners of existence, including the horizon of the imaginable. Domination, through information and communication technologies, has effectively penetrated every pore of the collective unconscious. Thus, it expands and strengthens, second by second, quantifying “likes”, “searches”, “visits”, and “content”. In this way, it extracts a vast amount of information that allows it to know not only our tastes and desires but also the slightest hint of unease in hundreds of millions of interconnections, optimizing decision-making in response to even the slightest discontent without needing to resort to forceful action. In other words, without altering the perception of “freedom” and “autonomy” of the digital servitude. This contains a clear irony: since power does not materialize in its traditional form, freedom and power end up being synonymous. Thus, the concepts of oppression, exploitation, and alienation vanish. Just when more exploitation, more alienation, and greater oppression are on the horizon.
In the prison without walls of algorithmic power, everyone oppresses and exploits themselves to the point of burnout. But no one —except the self-proclaimed victims— admits to being exploited or oppressed. And, as a rule, those who follow this trend have always been more concerned with getting likes —emphasizing their role as martyrs awaiting the populist messiah— than with sparking an insurrection. The like, as Byung-Chul Hanii asserts, “prevents any thought of revolution”.iii Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that the anti-authoritarian revolution was already a corpse long before the “like” delivered the coup de grace.

Since 1875, Mikhail Bakunin had perceived the ventricular fibrillation of the anti-authoritarian revolution. In a letter addressed to his fellow fighter Elisée Reclus, the tireless insurgent recorded his diagnosis: “The revolution has, for the moment, gone to bed; we are once again falling into the period of evolutions, that is, of underground, invisible, and often even unfeeling revolutions. The evolution taking place today is very dangerous, if not for all of humanity, then at least for some nations […] the hour of revolution has passed, not because of the appalling disasters we have witnessed and the terrible defeats of which we have been more or less culpable victims, but because, to my great despair, I have observed and observe anew every day that revolutionary thought, hope, and passion are not to be found among the masses, and when this is the case, no matter how much one fights on the flanks, nothing at all will be accomplished”.iv

One hundred and fifty years later, Bakunin’s analysis continues to unsettle both his staunchest supporters and his detractors. Unfortunately, Bakunin died “too disappointed in many respects”,v  unable to give his diagnosis a more complete theoretical formulation. However, events proved him right: the anti-authoritarian revolution not only went to bed, it died of a sudden death. The Paris Commune would be the last attempt at an anti-authoritarian revolution. From then until now, all revolutions have been driven by technology, with their well-known authoritarian outcome.vi

In the 1970s, Günter Anders asserted with absolute conviction that “the only authentic global revolution that has taken place in our time and which, unlike any other, is still actually taking place as a permanent revolution, that of technology, which is neutral with respect to the system, that is, it has established its dictatorship equally everywhere, and also remains constant even after sudden political changes, as if nothing had happened, that is, it continues its feverish pace development […] Perhaps the well-known revolutions of our time, which as political revolution advertised themselves as acts of salvation, were only travesties and, in the best cases, they were only misinterpreted as salvation. Actually, these changes obeyed technical imperatives”.vii

The (“very dangerous”) evolution that Bakunin foresaw at the turn of the 20th century was nothing other than the incubation of the national-populist ideal that came to fruition in the early decades of the 20th century, giving rise to the fascist revolutions (red, black, and brown).viii  It was then, amid the tensions between socialism and barbarism, that “revolutionary thought, hope, and passion” once again took hold of the multitudes of miserable, resentful, and indignant folk, who euphorically joined the pandemic of barracks socialism. Amid this backdrop, the cult of the future and technological modernity gave shape to the barbaric socialism of totalitarian regimes, the progenitors of Auschwitz and the Gulag Archipelago.

At the moment, in the third decade of the 21st century, with 99% of people living in the West relying on Google Maps or Waze to plot a route to escape the traffic of megacities, or on Spotify to “give” them something to listen to in order to survive the daily grind, it is clear to me that any attempt to resurrect the anti-authoritarian revolution will require the technological gadgets necessary to “inhabit” two realities: the concrete and the digital.  In this science-fiction scenario, the new “revolutionary subject” will be the “incarnation” of Gaige, the young iconoclast from Borderlands equipped with “Anarchy” and other “skills” from “Ordered Chaos”.ix A fantasy worthy of Xbox games. In tangible reality, however, “revolutionary thought, hope, and passion” have been remastered: the fascist revolution has already begun, driven by the “permanent revolution” of technology.

This already happened in the first two decades of the last century, and there is no guarantee that it cannot happen in an overloaded version. Now that the cult of the future, nationalist fetishism, leader worship, the fascistization of resentful masses, and technological accelerationism are converging once again, everything points to the fact that the only possible revolution is a techno-fascist one, and that its resulting potential will be the recreation of a regime of terror.

Anders foresaw this scenario. That is why he suggested identifying “those roots that have not died following the collapse of Hitler’s system of terror […] roots that, being deeper than any other specific historical root, may not have disappeared with that collapse. In other words: we must scrutinize those roots whose existence and persistence make the recurrence of the monstrous possible—and even probable”.x

Adorno also warned against the recurrence of the monstrous. In a lecture delivered in 1967, this other Marxian member of the Frankfurt School reflected on the nature of National Socialism with an eye toward the future: “The conditions that give rise to fascist movements, despite their failure, remain alive in society at all times […] the specter of technological unemployment haunts the world to such an extent that, in the age of automation […] people involved in the production process already feel potentially surplus to requirements […] they already feel, in reality, potentially unemployed”.xi

Half a century later, this perception was reinforced by the whiff of totalitarianism that permeated the atmosphere during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. With the imposition of the “new normal,” the latest technological revolution—undoubtedly the most rapidly accelerating in the history of revolutions—took concrete form, and with it, “the specter of technological unemployment” gained momentum. In the process, in the pursuit of “optimization” and “efficiency”, algorithmic surveillance tools multiplied, controlling our movements under the pretext of “preventing infections”. As if that weren’t enough, dataists succeeded in severing pleasure from desire. Everything was subjected to the unfolding technofascism.

We warned of this in early 2020. In an essay written in response to the pandemic, I pointed out that the global spread of the disease was being perversely exploited to change the rules of the game. “Capitalist realism” —post-industrial and postmodern—was facing an accelerated phase of technological mutation, consolidating a new hyper-digital domination whose main foundation was Smart Cities and the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems. Even then, we could already glimpse the consolidation of “the cyber-Leviathan with a multitude of subjects much more submissive than the Minions”.xii

In the same vein, we observe the imminent disappearance of the world as we knew it. The rapid geographical spread of the famous virus was “triggering a multifactorial crisis of terrifying proportions, caused by the abrupt disruption in the continuity of the flow of goods —including inputs and raw materials— and the resulting paralysis of the ‘moments’ —Marx dixit— of production”. xiii Similarly, we foresaw the arrival of a “perfect storm at the heart of the global economy with immediate effects on the dynamics of capital expansion and accumulation”.xiv

We had detected a shift in our lives brought about by remote work, education outside the spatio-temporal confines of educational institutions, the rise of e-commerce, the proliferation of service platforms, and the accumulation of vast amounts of data. It wasn’t that we were clairvoyant: we were simply seeing the obvious. Many people, from various chapels and multiple ideological perspectives, sensed the shift and warned of the disproportionate advance of power through algorithmic control. This was not the usual “turn of the screw” of traditional capitalism. Nor were we facing yet another process of restructuring designed to weather the crisis and continue expanding. No! We were facing the unthinkable. Faced with “something” that disrupted the normal course of events. We were witnessing the collapse of “actually existing capitalism”. The old Marxian prophecy was coming true: capitalism was self-destructing. Only its funeral wasn’t made public.

Bifo —one of the most revered gurus of the autonomist sect, become proto-populist of the “left”— also foresaw the “catastrophic collapse of capitalism” during the health crisis, anticipating “a horizon of chaos, exhaustion, and a tendency toward extinction”.xv   Indeed, the pandemic triggered a schismatic mutation that led to the collapse of the capitalist system. But it was not the revolution that Marx and the nineteenth-century revolutionary forces had envisioned. The intrinsic organic development of history, prophesied by Marxians, anarcho-communists, and anarcho-syndicalists, never materialized. Nor did the “proletariat” emerge as a revolutionary subject. Nor did the longed-for communist society —the fruit of the conflict between capitalist relations of production and the productive forces— see the light of day. Instead, a revolution without a subject came to life, establishing, without warning, something different. Something undisclosed that consigned “the unnameable thing” (Deleuze and Guattari dixit) to the dustbin of history.

Admittedly, we still don’t know what this new development is all about. Nevertheless, we sense the presence of an unknowable entity. A terrifying, shapeless creature      —in the Lovecraftian vein— still in its embryonic stage, which has irreversibly supplanted “capitalist realism”. A mutation of the form of property that, as Peter Frase points out, “catalyzes the transformation of society into something that is not recognizable as capitalism, but which is nonetheless as unequal as capitalism itself”. According to the musings of this postmodern Leninist, editor of Jacobin, what is taking shape in total anonymity, as an imminent threat, “is a society that is more rentier than capitalist”.xvi

Gustavo Rodríguez.

Planet Earth, May 15, 2026.

i Pariser’, Eli (2012). The Filter Bubble: How the new personalized web is Changing what we read and how we think. Digital version available at: https://www.academia.edu/34426834/The_Filter_Bubble_Eli_Pariser (Accessed 5/11/2026).

ii Of course, at this point there will be those who stop reading or raise an eyebrow and urge us to avoid identifying with this theorist’s postulates, particularly after he was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize. It should be recalled here that, from the first time we cited him—more than a decade ago—we accused him of having joined the “large cast of starlets of late modernity’s pop philosophy (alongside Agamben, Espósito, Hardt, Negri, Rifkin, Dloterdik, and Zizek, among other lightweight critics of postmodern capitalism)”. In the same article, I stated that he was “an excellent diagnostician of contemporary society [who] refuses to pick up the scalpel and operate”. I reiterate this today. We have always identified his weaknesses and shortcomings, as well as his exaggerated religiosity (which oscillates between professed Catholicism and Buddhism, passing through various forms of Taoism); however, this does not prevent me from once again recommending his work from an anarchist perspective. See Rodríguez, Gustavo (2013). La explosión de la rabia: nueva sedición anárquica en el siglo XXI (The Explosion of Rage: New Anarchist Sedition in the 21st Century). Santiago, Chile: Internacional Negra Ediciones, Note 5, pp. 5–6.

iii Han, Byung-Chul (2022). Infocracia. La digitalización y la crisis de la democracia (Infocracy: Digitalization and the Crisis of Democracy). Buenos Aires: Taurus, trans. Joaquín Chamorro Mielke, p. 17. English digital version available at: https://file.garden/ZRWabDccGFWyKukg/PSYCHOPATHY/Infocracy.pdf (Accessed 5/11/2026).

iv Lehning, Arthur (1999). Conversaciones con Bakunin (Conversations with Bakunin). Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, trans. from the French by Enrique Hegewiez, pp. 332–334.

v Ibid.

vi At this point, some may seek to cite two exceptions: the Spanish revolutionary struggle of 1936–1939 and the cultural revolution of 1968 that began with the French May. However, in both cases, the leadership of technology is evident, as is their authoritarian outcome.

vii Anders, Günther (2011). The Obsolescence of Man: On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution (Volume II). p. 72. Available in digital format at: https://issuu.com/marcbatko/docs/obsolescenceofmanvol_iigunther_anders (Accessed 5/11/2026).

viii The three major waves of revolutionary nationalism swept across Europe in 1820, 1830, and 1848, giving rise to new nation-states. Noteworthy is the emergence of Italy and Germany as nation-states and the dominant role these states played in the subsequent development of new regimes of total domination, such as national-populism (Fascism) in Italy and national-socialism (Nazism) in Germany.

ix For more information, please consult the Borderlands encyclopedia on Wiki. Available at: https://borderlands.fandom.com/es/wiki/Gaige (Accessed 5/11/2026).

x Anders, Günther (2010). Nosotros, los hijos de Eichmann. Carta abierta a Klaus Eichmann (We, the Eichmann Sons) . Barcelona-B.B.A.A.-México: Paidós, trans. Vicente Gómez Ibáñez. The quote was taken from the Spanish translation. Available online at: https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-UXc8fDcEzlVVYCa-/7264144-AndersGunther-…(Accessed 5/11/2026).

xi Adorno, Theodor W. (2020). Rasgos del nuevo radicalismo de derecha. Una conferencia (Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism). Madrid: Taurus, pp. 10–12. The quote was taken from the Spanish translation.

xii See Rodríguez, Gustavo (2020). COVID-19. La anarquía en tiempos de pandemia (COVID-19: Anarchy in Times of Pandemic). México: Conspiración Internacional Anarquista, pp. 3–4.

xiii Ibíd.

xiv Ident.

xv Berardi, Franco. (2022) El tercer inconsciente: la psícoesfera en la época viral. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra, trad: Tadeo Lima, P.11

xvi See Frase, Peter. (2020) Cuatro futuros. Ecología, robótica, trabajo y lucha de clases para después del capitalismo. Barcelona: Blackie Books.