If you’re lucky enough to find a way out of the bilious bog of capitalist realism, it’s easy enough to see that in its current sorry state it isn’t of the people, by the people nor for the people. Let’s not forget that democracy begat Mussolini, Hitler, Ferdinand Marcos, Trump and Netanyahu. It bears remembering that more than 70 million souls perished in World War II, an estimated 25-27 million of which were Soviet. Let’s not forget all the crimes of the British Empire that took place under the much lauded British parliamentary system: The Royal African Company and the transatlantic slave trade; An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) of 1848-1852 in Ireland; The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre of 1919 in India; The Great Famine of 1876–1878 in India; The British concentration camps in the Second Boer War. Then there’s the US. Let’s never forget their apartheid and slave trading; as well as their unhinged bombing campaigns across Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, North Korea and, worst of all, dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. Those all occurred under the watchful eye of the holier-than-thou democratic states that are so lauded (by themselves) as being morally superior.

The rosy picture of great states and statesmen of the West fades away with a little digging into history. From the day we’re born until the day we die, we’re collectively gaslit to believe certain narratives. North Korea can be taken as a prime example, it’s relentlessly portrayed as an evil dictatorship while in mainstream circles it’s conveniently forgotten that the US dropped 600,000 tonnes of bombs on it. The truth gets drowned out by the total noise of normie culture. In that world, Iran and Venezuela deserve what they get because the Anglo-Americans are the good guys, they have democracies. For a lot of people, the ongoing Gaza genocide has opened their eyes to the almost total moral bankruptcy in the Western corridors of power.

Moving beyond their depraved acts, what about the calibre and class of the elected leaders? The electorate is guaranteed someone that works in the interests of the establishment. They’re glorified bank managers, stiffs in suits always ready to do the serious business of protecting the state. Of 58 British PMs, 20 went to the ultra-exclusive Eton College and over half attended Oxbridge!

If someone outside of elite circles manages to slip through the cracks, like Jeremy Corbyn, then the media mechanism goes into overdrive, slamming them every day, shoving the bourgeois opinion down the electorate’s throat. Then, if that doesn’t do the trick, they’ll find another way. If Corbyn had managed to get into power they would have continued to make his life hell. The media play a pivotal role in managing democracy, and in the UK securing the blessing of Rupert Murdoch is treated as a political prerequisite.

Waiting in the wings as a last resort are the military, police and intelligence services. Although there haven’t been any coup d’états in the UK or USA, both states possess extensive coercive apparatuses designed to neutralise threats to the established order. They have, however, been more than willing to deploy these tools abroad — most notably in Iran (1953) and Chile (1973), among many others.

There’s nothing noble about Western democracies. It’s all nothing more than a façade of legitimacy in order to maintain power and control while keeping up the pretence of democracy in order to placate the masses.

So if you ever feel like something isn’t quite working right about the system as you see them shouting and jeering in parliament (on a basic salary of £99,000), remember that it’s not meant to!

“An illusion shared by everyone becomes a reality”
- Eric Fromm

“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”
- William J. Casey (CIA Director 1981–1987)

Roughly fifty percent of global internet traffic is now estimated to be automated bot activity, and the proportion is growing. This article explores how increasingly sophisticated bots threaten the social, political, and informational foundations of modern society.

What exactly is a bot anyway?

Simply put, a bot is a piece of software designed to perform automated tasks at a high speed with vast amounts of data. It’s nothing new, mechanical automation underpinned the industrial revolution and in theory it’s just something that should make our lives easier. Unfortunately, as we know and as Marx exposed in detail, a potentially useful advancement can be used as a tool for exploitation and control. There are numerous types of bots. For example, Google is powered by a web crawler bot, Googlebot. There are scalper bots which buy up products like concert tickets as soon as they go on sale in order to sell them at a high price later. Then in recent years we have seen the emergence of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok.

The significance of bots becomes clear only when we consider the digital terrain they inhabit. Social media platforms, built around engagement maximisation and data harvesting, have provided the perfect environment for automated systems to amplify narratives, distort consensus, and influence behaviour on a broad scale.

(Anti-) Social Media

The initial emergence of the internet and, in particular, social media brought with it the feeling that this could lead to some real social change. Although that promise didn’t materialise, at least it can be said that the early years of social media were more people-centred. Things changed as Big Tech scrambled to work out ways to profiteer from it. Emerging social media platforms quickly established themselves as part of the Big Tech ecosystem, with a singular priority: maximising user engagement at all costs. Higher engagement translates directly into increased advertising revenue and the extraction of ever more user data - described by some as the new gold. Now we are seeing the construction of vast data farms in order to accommodate the future Internet of Things (IoT) where Big Tech will finally infiltrate every aspect of our lives.

Beyond the endless stream of algorithmically curated videos designed to keep users hooked, there are more serious consequences with tangible effects on societies worldwide. Polarising content consistently generates higher engagement, reinforcing echo chambers that spill over into real‑world attitudes and behaviour. It’s fitting that rage bait was named Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2025. The apps that are so integrated into our lives are designed to thrive off anger, frustration, offense and provocation. While the internet and social media have undoubtedly expanded access to information and helped raise awareness around social and political issues, this constant cycle of outrage raises questions about their capacity to translate reaction into sustained political action. In practice, social media often channels dissent into fleeting moments of visibility rather than durable forms of collective organisation, limiting its effectiveness as a tool for long‑term organising. Why does it feel like we live in a world bereft of ideas and a way forward despite being, in theory, more connected than ever?

It shouldn’t be controversial to say that the political direction of these platforms is less a product of neutral design than of who owns and governs them. Social media spaces central to public discourse are controlled by a small, unaccountable billionaire class whose economic interests are fundamentally opposed to any movement seeking structural redistribution of power or wealth. This dynamic is reinforced by a mainstream media landscape that embraces right wing ideas and routinely excludes credible socialist voices, further narrowing the boundaries of acceptable political debate - a form of Neo-McCarthyism. At the same time, right‑wing parties have demonstrated a clear strategic focus on social media, recognising its influence and investing heavily in its use. When both digital platforms and mass media are aligned with entrenched economic power, it becomes difficult to view the global drift toward authoritarian and exclusionary politics as coincidental. The notion that these privately owned platforms can function as fair, democratic arenas for political organising, particularly for socialist movements, is clearly untenable in the absence of meaningful accountability.

Manufacturing Consensus

Social media bots are designed to disseminate specific narratives, either to manufacture support or to disrupt discussion through trolling. Samuel Woolley, an expert on computational propaganda, describes this process as “manufacturing consensus.” The internet has become a propagandist’s ideal environment: those with sufficient resources can deploy vast networks of automated accounts to simulate popular support and create the illusion of widespread agreement, whether for political or commercial purposes. Data is central to this process, which helps explain why technology companies remain so focused on maximising user engagement despite the documented social harm. Their objective is not simply to keep users online, but to expose them to more advertising and to harvest data that can be monetised or sold.

Aza Raskin, who helped develop the concept of infinite scrolling, has since warned that “behind every screen on your phone, there are … a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting.” This logic extends beyond social media into broader technological trends such as the IoT. Often presented as progress, this expansion offers little in the way of material benefit while dramatically increasing opportunities for data extraction. The result is a dystopian yet likely (or inevitable) future in which targeted advertising and surveillance are embedded into the most mundane aspects of daily life.

The political use of harvested data was most visibly exposed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where personal information was exploited for targeted political advertising. It would be naïve to assume such practices have ceased. On the contrary, the rise of AI‑driven platforms and chatbots suggests that new and even more intrusive methods of data collection are being normalised, further entrenching the power of those who control digital infrastructure.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

Human nature doesn’t change. Long before the internet, there were bluffers, celebrities, and snake‑oil salesmen. What the internet has done is repackage these practices in a sleek, authoritative form, which we have come to trust almost instinctively. A clear example is Google and Google Maps. It is rarely questioned that these platforms possess detailed knowledge of where we live and how we move through the world. Reviews, in particular, have become a default source of trust, especially when navigating unfamiliar cities or countries. At first glance, this appeared to be a democratic improvement: a collective system for evaluating businesses and services. Yet this trust has proven misplaced. As Yasha Levine argues in Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (2018), the internet’s foundations lie not in openness or democracy, but in state‑sponsored surveillance and counterinsurgency.

If this was indeed the original intention, it has been executed with remarkable success. Trust has been carefully cultivated, allowing platforms to embed themselves into everyday life. But there is little reason to assume that corporations such as Google deserve this trust. Minimal investigation reveals services such as buyreviewz.com, where Google Maps reviews can be purchased with ease. Google is far from unique in this regard; a 2021 Which? investigation exposed an entire industry dedicated to producing fake reviews on Amazon.

The HBO documentary Fake Famous (2021) illustrates how easily online credibility can be manufactured. The filmmakers attempt to turn three ordinary individuals into social media influencers using a single primary tactic: bots. By purchasing automated followers, likes, and comments through services such as famoid.com, they demonstrate how visibility and perceived popularity can be artificially constructed. While bots were once relatively easy to identify, advances in AI have made them increasingly indistinguishable from real users. These systems can now convincingly mimic human behaviour, turning them into powerful tools for political manipulation and commercial deception alike.

What emerges is a digital environment in which trust, popularity, and consensus are no longer organic but engineered - Manufactured Consensus. As technological sophistication increases, so too does the capacity to manipulate public perception, raising serious questions about the reliability of online spaces that increasingly shape political opinion, consumer behaviour, and social reality itself.

Computational Propaganda and The Rise of Political Chatbots

The Cambridge Analytica scandal marked a turning point in public awareness of how personal data can be weaponised to influence electoral behaviour. The common, dismissive response is that data harvesting is largely harmless, yet the concentration of vast amounts of personal information in the hands of governments and private corporations is deeply concerning, whether for commercial or political ends. As digital technologies become more and more ubiquitous, this intrusion into private life is only set to intensify. It would be absurd to assume that, following Cambridge Analytica, political parties and social media companies have abandoned the use of data‑driven persuasion. Rather, these practices have become more discreet, embedded behind layers of intermediaries and technical complexity.

Communications researcher Philip N. Howard describes this opacity in Lie Machines (2020), noting how firms such as Imitacja Consulting (a pseudonym used for privacy reasons) are contracted to manage online political messaging. These companies often operate as subcontractors to other subcontractors, providing “social media optimisation” to political strategy firms that themselves answer to large public relations agencies. The result is a fragmented chain of responsibility that makes it extremely difficult to trace propaganda efforts back to their original source.

Samuel Woolley reaches a similar conclusion in Manufacturing Consensus (2023), challenging the tendency to attribute computational propaganda primarily to foreign actors. His research suggests that mainstream political campaigns and their domestic subcontractors routinely rely on digital propaganda tools. As Woolley explains, such content often originates online, spreads through ordinary users across their social networks, and eventually filters into traditional media channels. In this way, automated accounts and coordinated messaging campaigns plant narratives that gain legitimacy through repetition and visibility.

This process creates a powerful bandwagon effect, where manufactured stories appear organic and widely supported. One of the most pressing concerns today is that advances in artificial intelligence have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between human users and automated agents. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California demonstrated that participants were unable to reliably differentiate between humans and ChatGPT‑powered bots in online political discussions. In a simulated election debate, the bots not only blended in seamlessly but were also able to adapt their arguments in response to others.

The implications are profound. Beyond the spread of disinformation, political discourse now faces the challenge of highly sophisticated AI systems capable of engaging in nuanced, persuasive debate at scale. These developments raise urgent questions about the integrity of online political spaces and how long such technologies have already been shaping public opinion beyond meaningful scrutiny.

Documented Cases of Bot‑Driven Electoral Interference

Recent elections across multiple regions demonstrate that bot‑driven disinformation and AI‑assisted political manipulation are no longer speculative threats but established campaign tactics.

Chile: General Election 2025

Controversy surrounded the lead‑up to Chile’s 2025 general election, the first round of which took place on 16 November. A Chilevisión investigation identified the operators behind two prominent X accounts, Patito Verde and Neuroc, accused of coordinating disinformation and harassment campaigns via bot networks targeting presidential candidates Jeannette Jara and Evelyn Matthei. Investigative reporting outlet CIPER revealed deep political and media connections. The operator of Neuroc, Ricardo Inaiman Barrios, admitted to maintaining contact with the campaign team of José Antonio Kast, the candidate of the Chilean Republican Party. Meanwhile, Patito Verde was traced to Patricio Góngora, a senior director at Canal 13, a major television network owned by Iris Fontbona, Chile’s wealthiest individual. Góngora denied involvement until users identified his reflection in a photograph posted by the account alongside former president Sebastián Piñera. He subsequently resigned while continuing to deny wrongdoing.

This case illustrates how coordinated online manipulation can involve actors embedded within both political campaigns and mainstream media institutions, blurring the boundary between digital disinformation and legacy power structures.

India: General Election 2024

During India’s 2024 general election, WIRED reported widespread use of AI‑generated propaganda, including audio deepfakes, manipulated images, and parody content. Of particular concern was the deployment of AI‑generated voice clones in political robocalls. These systems allowed campaign messaging to be translated and personalised across India’s 22 official languages and thousands of regional dialects.

According to industry sources cited by WIRED, more than 50 million AI‑generated voice clone calls were made in the two months preceding the election, with millions more during the voting period. Unlike traditional robocalls, recipients were often unaware they were interacting with synthetic voices, raising serious concerns about deception and informed consent. Generative AI enables mass‑produced, personalised political messaging on large scale, making micro‑targeting both efficient and difficult to detect. In an environment saturated with information, such personalised content is more likely to capture attention and build trust.

India’s political technology ecosystem is characterised by a layered network of consulting agencies, subcontractors, and data specialists, many operating under strict non‑disclosure agreements. Graduates from elite institutions are frequently employed by firms contracted during election periods to monitor public sentiment and influence online discourse.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been particularly effective in leveraging digital infrastructure through its IT cells, using data‑driven strategies to promote Hindu nationalist narratives and marginalise opponents. Similar approaches have been adopted by right‑wing movements elsewhere, reflecting a broader understanding among certain political actors of how modern propaganda warfare operates in digital environments.

United States: Election Interference and AI Robocalls

Robocalls have long been a feature of U.S. elections, but recent advances in AI‑generated audio can no longer be ignored. During the 2024 election period, a robocall using a synthetic voice resembling President Joe Biden urged voters not to participate in the election. The call was traced to political consultant Steve Kramer, prompting regulatory action. In response, U.S. authorities moved to ban the use of AI‑generated voices in unsolicited political calls, acknowledging the threat posed by such technologies to electoral integrity.

United Kingdom: Social Media Amplification and Media Disparity

In the UK, multiple investigations have highlighted the disproportionate media visibility of Reform UK relative to its parliamentary representation. Data reported by UnHerd, drawing on analysis from BeBroadcast and Cast from Clay, showed that between January and September, Reform UK received significantly more broadcast mentions per MP than either Labour or the Conservatives. This imbalance extends to social media. Nigel Farage has amassed a TikTok following exceeding that of all other British MPs combined, underscoring the party’s strategic focus on digital platforms. Further analysis by journalist Don McGowan found that Reform UK was vastly overrepresented in mentions by major UK news outlets on X, while parties such as the Greens and Liberal Democrats received minimal coverage. Longer‑term studies by PR consultancy BeBroadcast reached similar conclusions.

These patterns suggest a feedback loop between social media amplification and legacy media exposure, reinforcing the visibility of right‑wing actors while marginalising alternative political voices. One plausible mechanism within this loop is the role of automated and coordinated account activity on social platforms. Bots and semi‑automated networks do not need to originate political narratives to exert influence; their primary function is to inflate engagement signals with likes, reposts, replies, and follower counts that platforms and journalists increasingly treat as indicators of public salience. Where such activity disproportionately amplifies Reform UK content, it can artificially elevate the party’s perceived prominence, increasing the likelihood that journalists and broadcasters identify it as “trending” or newsworthy.

This dynamic is reinforced by asymmetries in platform strategy and message design. Reform UK’s highly personalised, emotive, and leader‑centric communications are well suited to algorithmic amplification and easier to boost through automation than the more policy‑driven messaging of parties such as the Greens or Liberal Democrats. In this context, bot amplification does not create bias so much as magnify existing structural incentives within digital and broadcast media ecosystems, feeding a cycle in which inflated online visibility translates into disproportionate legacy media exposure, which in turn further legitimises and amplifies the original signals.

The Philippines: Digital Autocratisation

The Philippines has emerged as a significant testing ground for digital political manipulation. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie has described the country as an ideal environment for experimentation due to high social media usage and comparatively weak regulatory oversight.

AI disinformation analysis firm Cyabra reported that up to 45% of online discussions surrounding recent Philippine elections were driven by inauthentic accounts, including bots and sock puppets. In 2025, OpenAI disclosed that it had banned accounts linked to marketing firm Comm&Sense for using ChatGPT to generate large volumes of pro‑government content. Subsequent updates revealed further coordinated campaigns targeting political opponents.

Academic researcher Dr Tetiana Schipper characterises these developments as “digital autocratisation,” noting how successive administrations have used online manipulation to suppress dissent and control political narratives. Responsibility for countering disinformation has largely fallen to civil society, academia, and independent media, with limited institutional support.

The use of bots and AI‑driven systems as political weapons is now widespread, and ongoing technological advances threaten to further degrade online discourse. The erosion of trust, combined with the scale and sophistication of digital manipulation, has profound implications for democratic participation. As economic and political instability intensifies globally, digital platforms increasingly serve as battlegrounds for ideological influence. The convergence of legacy media, social media, and data‑driven propaganda raises urgent questions about power, accountability, and the future of political agency in the digital age.

Controlling the Narrative

Gaza and Western Political Panic

The widespread circulation of images and testimony from Gaza has provoked visible anxiety among political elites in Western states. Rather than engaging with the substance of the allegations, the response has often focused on controlling the narrative. In an interview with Sean Hannity, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio framed public sympathy for Palestinians not as a reaction to material conditions on the ground, but as the result of online manipulation:

“I think places like TikTok have become cesspools of this kind of misinformation and indoctrination. It’s actually brainwashing. It’s reflected in the polling, where Americans under a certain age… are amazingly pro‑Palestinian — pro‑Hamas in their views of what’s happening in the region.”

This framing shifts attention away from state violence and toward a perceived failure of information control. The issue is not the reality of civilian suffering, but the effectiveness of Palestinian and anti‑war narratives in reaching a global audience. By reducing the situation to a binary of “Israel versus Hamas” or “pro‑Israel versus pro‑Palestine,” political discourse obscures the asymmetry of power and responsibility involved. Anti‑war and anti‑genocide protesters are frequently dismissed as naïve, extremist, or ideologically driven, while those responsible for large‑scale violence are recast as victims of misinformation.

In highly polarised information environments, this inversion of reality becomes normalised. Evidence of atrocities is dismissed as fabrication, with terms such as “Gazawood” deployed to discredit journalists and eyewitnesses. Social media platforms, particularly TikTok, have been singled out as threats precisely because they bypass traditional gatekeepers. Israeli officials have openly acknowledged the strategic importance of controlling platforms such as TikTok and X, as well as the role of influencers in shaping public opinion. Reports that influencers have been offered financial incentives to promote pro‑Israeli messaging further illustrate how narrative dominance is pursued through both state and market mechanisms.

Criminalising Dissent and Targeting Journalists

The desire to control public perception also helps explain the systematic targeting of journalists in Gaza, where at least 248 media workers had been killed by September 2025. Beyond the conflict zone, journalists and critics of Israeli policy have faced increasing repression in Western countries. In the UK, figures such as and have been arrested under terrorism legislation, while others have been subjected to surveillance, harassment, or professional sanctions.

A widely circulated incident involved journalist Gabriel Nunziati, who was dismissed after asking a European Commission spokesperson whether Israel should be held financially responsible for rebuilding Gaza. Similar cases have emerged in both the UK and the United States, involving journalists and activists including Sarah Wilkinson, Dr Rahmeh Aladwan @Dr Rahmeh Aladwan, , , and George Galloway. Galloway’s account of being detained under the UK Terrorism Act highlights the erosion of basic civil liberties, where individuals are compelled to answer questions under threat of criminal sanction despite not being formally arrested.

Surveillance Technologies and the Suppression of Activism

These developments coincide with an expanding use of AI‑driven surveillance technologies to monitor and suppress political activism. During the spring 2024 student protests in the United States, more than 3,000 arrests were recorded. Following the return of Donald Trump to office, executive orders were introduced enabling the revocation of visas and deportation of non‑citizens deemed “Hamas sympathisers.” In the UK, the proscription of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation has resulted in over 2,300 arrests, including that of Greta Thunberg.

At the technological level, governments increasingly rely on private firms to conduct mass surveillance. Platforms such as Palantir are used across multiple agencies in both the US and UK, alongside tools provided by companies including Clearview AI, Zignal Labs, and Paragon Solutions. Amnesty International has documented how systems such as Babel X, used by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, can aggregate vast quantities of personal data from a single identifier, including social media activity, location data, and advertising IDs. Live facial recognition has also been deployed at pro‑Palestinian demonstrations in the UK.

If such practices were associated with non‑Western states, they would likely provoke widespread condemnation. Instead, they are normalised under the language of security and counter‑terrorism. The result is a political environment in which dissent is increasingly surveilled, criminalised, and delegitimised, while the mechanisms of narrative control remain largely unaccountable.

Increasing Censorship and the Collapse of Due Process Online

One of the least discussed consequences of platform consolidation is the absence of due process in digital censorship. Practices such as shadow‑banning, deplatforming, and demonetisation operate without transparency, explanation, or meaningful avenues for appeal. Decisions that shape public visibility and economic survival are made unilaterally by private corporations, often through opaque algorithmic systems. Increasingly, these sanctions are no longer limited to online behaviour. There are now documented cases of individuals being removed from platforms for actions that occurred entirely offline, signalling a shift from content moderation toward behavioural governance. In effect, private companies are asserting the authority to police real‑world conduct and impose digital exclusion without legal standards, oversight, or accountability.

In the UK, the introduction of the Online Safety Act 2023 has further expanded the scope for content moderation and surveillance, while proposals to restrict or ban VPN usage signal an increasing willingness to regulate not just speech, but access itself. These measures are routinely justified in the language of safety and security, yet they concentrate extraordinary power in the hands of platforms and the state, blurring the boundary between public authority and private control.

Cyberspace vs Meatspace: When Reality Is Rewritten

The distinction between online and offline life has effectively collapsed. Algorithmic propaganda no longer merely reflects reality; it actively reshapes it. Narratives seeded online migrate into mainstream media, political discourse, and everyday social interaction, often detached from material conditions.

This inversion of reality is particularly visible in the rise of far‑right narratives, which are disproportionately amplified through bot networks, coordinated campaigns, and sympathetic media coverage. Figures such as Nigel Farage have demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of this ecosystem, leveraging social media virality alongside legacy media complicity. Farage’s long‑standing association with Steve Bannon, central to Cambridge Analytica’s operations, underscores how these strategies are neither accidental nor isolated.

Underground Truth in a Post‑Truth Landscape

As mainstream platforms become increasingly polluted by automation, manipulation, and censorship, credible information is pushed to the margins. Private Eye journalist Helen Lewis captured this shift succinctly when she suggested that the internet increasingly resembles a privatised sewer system, while truth retreats into smaller, human‑curated spaces. Her observation that we may be heading toward a future where people circulate underground publications simply to access reliable information is a warning that should be heeded.

This sentiment echoes a broader nostalgia for the pre‑platform internet, articulated by Reddit user Vipich in response to the question: ‘what was the greatest thing we almost had?’

“The ‘Old’ Internet.

Before everything consolidated into 4 or 5 giant corporate platforms (Facebook, Google, X, etc.), the web felt like the Wild West. It was personal blogs, weird niche forums, and creativity. Now it feels like everything is just a screenshot of a Tweet reposted to Instagram or TikTok. We traded community for an algorithm.”

Digital Colonisation and the Botland Empire

What emerges from this analysis is a form of digital colonisation: populations mapped, profiled, nudged, and pacified through data extraction and narrative engineering. The Philippines being used as a testing ground for online propaganda, exemplifies how entire societies can be treated as laboratories for behavioural manipulation. This Botland Empire is not governed by democratic consent, but by corporate interests, political expediency, and technological asymmetry.

Defending Reality

There is a battle underway for perception itself. While propaganda and psychological warfare are not new, the fusion of big data, generative AI, and corporate media has created an unprecedented capacity to manufacture consensus and invert truth. Across the Western world, fascist ideologies are resurging, scapegoating migrants and minorities while shielding the economic structures responsible for social collapse.

Political figures such as Trump or Netanyahu function less as architects than as avatars, useful faces for a system maintained by tech executives, media conglomerates, asset managers, and billionaires whose interests run fundamentally against the public good. Their presence at centres of power is not symbolic; it is structural.

When war narratives resurface, recycled myths of liberation, humanitarian bombing, and moral necessity activate the machinery with chilling efficiency. Dissent is marginalised, scepticism pathologised, and alternative interpretations erased. In such an environment, refusing the narrative becomes an act of resistance.

Final Word: Digital Colonisation and the Botland Empire

What is often described as a crisis of misinformation is better understood as the maturation of a system whose original purpose was never democratic. As Yasha Levine argues in Surveillance Valley, the internet did not emerge as a neutral space for free expression, but as a product of Cold War military research, designed for surveillance, counterinsurgency, and information warfare. It has become clear that its architecture was built to monitor populations, manage behaviour, and maintain strategic advantage. Seen in this light, the contemporary digital landscape is not a corruption of an otherwise emancipatory technology, but its logical evolution.

The privatisation of this infrastructure did not diminish its strategic function; it merely obscured it. Surveillance, behavioural profiling, and narrative control have been sold to to us as convenience, connectivity, and engagement. Social media platforms now sit atop an underlying system that continues to operate in alignment with Western geopolitical and economic interests. This is the foundation of what can be described as the Botland Empire: a form of digital colonisation in which attention replaces territory, data replaces resources, and consent is manufactured rather than secured.

Recent coverage of Iran illustrates how this system functions in practice. Across Western media and digital platforms, narratives rapidly converged around calls for intervention, often without serious scrutiny of the veracity of claims or the ethical implications of external involvement. Emotional framing has dominated, dissenting perspectives have been marginalised, and social media has amplified a sense of inevitability. This convergence does not require central coordination. Shared infrastructure, aligned incentives, and algorithmic amplification are sufficient to produce uniformity. The propaganda machine no longer needs a command centre when the architecture itself rewards conformity and suppresses deviation.

Bots and AI‑driven systems play a crucial role in this process. They seed narratives, simulate consensus, and blur the distinction between genuine public opinion and engineered belief. Algorithms elevate what serves power and quietly bury what challenges it. In this environment, reality itself becomes contested terrain, and truth is increasingly forced underground.

Antonio Gramsci’s observation from the Prison Notebooks captures the moment with unsettling precision:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The old order of liberal democracy, a free press, and public accountability is visibly decaying, while no credible alternative has emerged in the West. In the vacuum, morbid symptoms proliferate: computational propaganda, digital authoritarianism, manufactured outrage, and the normalisation of surveillance. Fascist narratives thrive not because they offer solutions, but because the informational terrain is owned by those that support them.

Defending reality requires recognising digital colonisation for what it is: an extension of empire into the realm of perception, mediated through platforms that claim neutrality while exercising immense power. The struggle is not only over information, but over the conditions under which truth can still exist. Whether something new can be born depends on whether this empire of bots, data, and narrative control is confronted or allowed to continue business as usual.

This article explores the power of grassroots resistance in Beit Sahour during that period, showing how cooperation within a close-knit community developed a collective spirit of nonviolent defiance. It also critiques the failure of top-down diplomatic processes, particularly the Oslo Accords, and reflects on how Palestinian communities have long relied on their own agency, solidarity, and imagination in the face of occupation, betrayal, and attempted erasure.

The First Intifada (intifada means “uprising” or “rebellion”) was a mass grassroots movement across the West Bank and Gaza against the brutal Israeli occupation. On 8th December 1987 an Israeli truck ploughed into a car, killing four Palestinians in the Jabalia refugee camp. The incident sparked a nationwide uprising characterised by civil disobedience, well-organised strikes, and the creation of communal cooperatives.

Intifada Milk

Beit Sahour was perhaps an unlikely source of rebellion, given its middle-class demographic i.e. highly educated professionals and merchants. Yet committees were quickly formed to facilitate collective decision-making during the intifada and beyond. It was agreed, first and foremost, that they would boycott Israeli products, no mean feat considering they were almost entirely dependent on their goods and services, even for basic necessities like drinking water.

One day, the agricultural committee came up with a novel idea: buying some cows. Until then, their only source of milk had been Tnuva, a major Israeli food company. They contacted a sympathetic Israeli farmer on a kibbutz who agreed to sell them eighteen cows. Jalal Oumsieh, a Beit Sahourian high school teacher, recalls the first time he saw the animals:

“I felt as if we had started to realise our dream of freedom and independence. The minute the cows were in the truck in the kibbutz and we started moving back to Beit Sahour, we were full of joy and happiness. In fact, also, there was some kind of fear.”

Majed Nasser, a local doctor, explained, “Palestinians were not allowed to develop themselves,” while Jad Ishao, a geology professor, lamented that the only thing Israel didn’t control was “the air that we breathe.”

The idea of the dairy farm was born out of a shift in the community’s collective conscience. People had decided to work together, each doing their bit. Importantly, Beit Sahour had no tradition of cattle farming, so they sent a student, Salim Jaber, to the USA to learn how to care for and manage dairy cows. If they were going to do it, they’d do it properly.

Beit Sahour emerged as a central hub in the nonviolent resistance movement, especially in relation to the tax revolt (covered below). Ehud Zrahiya, a former advisor to the Israeli military, later explained:

“We were concerned that Beit Sahour may become a model for other places.”

Ghasan Andor, a local physics professor, said the army feared losing control:

“Occupation without control doesn’t work.”

So once the milk became a symbol of resistance (nicknamed “Intifada Milk”) the Israeli military moved to shut the whole operation down. Jalal Oumsieh recounts how one day the military governor showed up at the farm with a group of soldiers:

“The first thing they did there was to take a photo for each cow with its number on its body. He told us we had to remove the cows and get rid of them. When I asked him why, he said, ‘These cows are dangerous for the security of Israel.’”

The next day, when the military returned, the barn was empty. Enraged, the military governor launched an absurd door-to-door search campaign to find them. Jad Ishao recalls:

“It became a real joke to see the Israeli army looking for the intifada cows!”

With photos in hand, soldiers knocked on doors asking whether residents had seen any of the cows. At one point, two helicopters were deployed. But Beit Sahourians were defiant. Some of the cows were eventually found in a butcher’s house - he was arrested and jailed for a few days - but the rest remained hidden for years, secretly moved from one location to another by a community unwilling to give them up.

The Tax Revolt

The legacy of the cows lives on but it’s only one part of Beit Sahour’s remarkable story from that period. They played a more significant role in the First Intifada by instigating a tax revolt that provoked an unforgiving response from Israel.

The revolt was based on the slogan “no taxation without representation”, a phrase first coined in the American colonies under British rule. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act without approval from the colonial legislatures. This was a direct tax on all printed materials, introduced to raise funds after the costly French and Indian War (1754–1763). Naturally, the colonies protested. Though the Stamp Act was eventually repealed, the resistance it sparked served as a catalyst for unity and dialogue between the colonies, laying the groundwork for the American Revolution and independence. There is something ironic about the fact that a settler-colonial state established by Britain and now heavily-funded by the USA faced the same grievances that the American colonies once did.

So the people of Beit Sahour decided that they too would reject taxation using the same slogan and based on the same principle. Of course, they understood the grave consequences that might follow. In The Wanted 18, Makram Saad describes how his pharmacy was threatened with closure, his professional license with revocation, and his home with seizure. Still, he stood his ground. He wasn’t the only one. Many had their homes raided and some were even tortured. Ghasan Andor summed it up simply: “They made life hell.”

Beit Sahour was placed under complete lockdown and put under siege. Journalists and diplomats were denied entry, and telephone lines were cut. In fact, there were two sieges: a shorter one in July 1988, which lasted a few days, and a second, longer one in September 1989, which lasted 42 days.

On 15th July 1988, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) received a report on the first day of the first siege from Al-Haq, an independent Palestinian human rights organisation. The report outlines the reasons behind the tax revolt:

“There is no financial accountability, no services are provided in return for them, and they refuse to pay the value-added tax (VAT) because it was introduced after the beginning of the Israeli occupation and is thus in clear contravention of international law. The tax revolt is seen as an integral part of the campaign of civil disobedience/disengagement being waged by Palestinians under occupation, and has by all accounts found near-unanimous support in Beit Sahour.”

The report goes on to describe how homes were broken into by soldiers who confiscated “identification cards, as well as unknown quantities of gold, money, and private cars. All without legal proceedings or a court order.”

In a bold act of defiance, hundreds of residents marched to a municipal building and handed in their Israeli-issued ID cards. The military responded with mass arrests, beatings, and the imposition of a 24-hour curfew.

The second, longer siege in September 1989 garnered greater international attention due to it’s severity and it led to the proposal of UN Security Council draft resolution 20945/Rev.1 on 7th November 1989, which condemned Israeli violence and practices and called for the lifting of the siege.

It was, of course, vetoed by the United States.

The United Nations doing what it does best: being absolutely useless in anything meaningful.

On the day prior to the UNSC vote, a meeting was held to discuss the situation in Beit Sahour and wider Palestine. Kuwait’s Ambassador to the UN, Muhammad Abdulhasan, made reference to the “ransacking of the houses of defenceless civilians, the closure of roads leading to [Beit Sahour⦐, its designation as a closed military area and the confiscation of Palestinian property, including furniture and personal effects valued at approximately $2 million, according to the Israeli press, all expropriated to be auctioned off.”

Following him, the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the UN, Ambassador Zuhdi Labib Terzi, described how tax collectors “seized food stored by families for the approaching winter and dumped it in the streets.” He added that, on the same day, “Israeli army bulldozers were used in order to destroy the water pipes of the city. The city has been left with no water.” Terzi also alleged that Israeli forces broke into a house while a woman was giving birth. They confiscated everything except the mattress and reportedly said, “You must be thankful that we have decided to let you keep that mattress.”

The extent and absurdity of the raids is perhaps best captured by resident Abu Ayta, who told the Los Angeles Times in October 1988, “They even took a washer while the rinse cycle was on.”

Neighbourhood Harmony / Mujawara

“All of a sudden, as if you open a new page in the book. You decide what you want and it comes from your heart. No matter if you are 60 years old or 20 years old or even 10 years old. A man or a woman. So the whole society was in total harmony. In total combination. In a magic formula that brings you to a new era.” - Elias Rishmawi, The Wanted 18

In The Wanted 18, the Intifada is portrayed as the awakening of a collective conscience. It was a period full of hope. Hope for a better future, free from oppression, and a path toward self-determination. Nasim Hilal reflects: “As soon as the Intifada started there was a widespread, well-organised popular movement. We came up with the neighbourhood committee idea to help us feel the pulse of the neighbourhoods.”

As Ghassan Andor explains:

“It wasn’t only the cows and the milk. There were victory gardens, planting tomatoes and potatoes, and raising chickens and rabbits, etc. So, in a way, it was also part of a package in the community that was working. Everybody is giving the little that they can give and nobody is staying at home.”

When Israel shut down all educational institutions, Beit Sahourians responded by creating an underground education network, part of a broader effort to establish a unified system of mutual aid and grassroots support.

Sandi Hilal, a Palestinian architect, writer, and researcher who grew up in Beit Sahour, remembers how the community rallied when the schools were closed. She describes her teenage years during the Intifada, when education became a collective responsibility:

“Every member of the community who had a garage or an empty room in their house cleaned and prepared it to become a classroom. Classrooms of different forms and colours were scattered around the neighbourhood. Mothers and fathers were teachers and worked together with groups of children, teaching them what he or she was best at.”

She describes that time as a form of emancipation. Working together in resistance led her to re-evaluate her previous education, which she realised had never truly liberated her:

“I then understood that education could also be a way to enslave people.”

Hilal later encountered the indigenous practise of Mujawara (or Mujaawarah), taught to her by fellow Palestinian educator Munir Fasheh. He defines it in the most basic terms as:

“A group of people who want and decide to be together, with no authority within the group and no authority from outside.”

Beit Sahour had already been living the principles of mujawaras (from its grassroots organising during the Intifada to its locally-rooted educational practice) long before the term was redefined for a new generation.

Fasheh later reflected on the Intifada as a moment when mujawarahs came into their own:

“Mujaawarahs were again the main factor in energizing and allowing us to do what needed to be done during the first Intifada… When Israel closed all modern institutions (universities, schools, professional societies, social clubs…) it was a blessing in disguise. It helped revitalize rooted social structures Israel could not close: families, neighborhoods, mosques. Most significant was the formation of neighbourhood committee mujaawarahs, especially in relation to learning and communal farming.”

He notes that while Israel tolerated international conferences condemning school closures, it reacted harshly to the neighbourhood committees themselves:

“That awakened me to the difference between ‘free thinking and expression’ and ‘freeing thinking and expression.’ The two freedoms are worlds apart.”

Instead of demanding change, people in Beit Sahour created it together. They didn't wait for permission. They simply got on with the work of building a new way of life.

The Oslo Accords

The Intifada came to an end with the signing of the Oslo Accords on 13th September 1993. In a now iconic political moment, Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands in front of the White House with President Bill Clinton standing behind them with his arms outstretched. For many, this signified the end of hostilities and the beginning of a new era of peace. It was the first time that the PLO and the State of Israel formally recognised each other’s legitimacy. There were scenes of jubilation across occupied Palestine. Saed Andoni remembers how hopeful people were as they “put roses on the guns of the Israelis here in Beit Sahour.” On the front page of the Financial Times, it was reported that Palestinians were dancing in the streets.

But not everyone was pleased with the deal. Saed Andoni says he drove for hours through the desert to get away from the celebratory car horns. He was thinking at the time, “What the hell?! It’s too soon! We’re being fucked and we’re celebrating.” In the same FT article cited above, it is noted that in Gaza there was vocal opposition: people “set tyres ablaze” in protest and “draped black banners of mourning from their homes and mosques.” The reception in Israel was also revealing. Hundreds of pro-peace Israelis were reported to be dancing in celebration while, ominously, “about 50 right-wing opponents of the deal… recited prayers of mourning, burnt the Palestinian flag and called for Mr. Rabin’s head.” Just over two years later, on 4th November 1995, PM Rabin was assassinated at a peace rally by Israeli citizen Yigal Amir, who was vehemently against the Oslo Accords. A few months before, Benjamin Netanyahu had led anti-Rabin protests calling for his death and even holding a mock funeral.

Back in Beit Sahour, the mood soon turned sour. Like Saed, others felt abandoned. One unnamed resident lamented that “outside forces” had brought the Intifada to an end, adding that “the people were abandoned by the leadership.” Jala Oumiseh summed up the general feeling of disappointment: “We were dreaming for more than this. We dreamt that the Intifada would bring freedom and independence to the Palestinian people.”

Over time, the flicker of hope ignited by that September handshake gave way to a growing realisation that Oslo was nothing more than a diplomatic arrangement to institutionalise Palestinian subordination.

In a recent appearance on Danny Haiphong’s YouTube channel, journalist Ali Abunimah (The Electronic Intifada) explains how the Oslo Accords:

“turned the Palestine Liberation Organization from a liberation movement into, essentially, a collaborative force with Israel. And Yasser Arafat… was murdered when he refused to collaborate enough as far as Israel was concerned, and so they replaced him with Mahmoud Abbas, who has been much more willing to collaborate with Israel and is completely an Israeli asset — as is his newly appointed deputy Hussein, which Israeli leaders called, and this is a quote, ‘our man in Ramallah.’”

It’s not a wild claim to suggest that Arafat was assassinated. On the 12th anniversary of his death, his successor and long-time collaborator Mahmoud Abbas publicly stated that he knows who killed him.

Another prominent journalist and activist, Lowkey (Kareem Dennis), argues that the Oslo Accords were part of a broader “psychological warfare that sees us deciding that the limit of what we can do is within international law and is within NGOs.” This fits with the sense many Beit Sahourians (and Palestinians more broadly) had at the time: that Oslo was a betrayal, and the Intifada had been strategically undermined.

History, unfortunately, has proven them right. It was a dream, a fantasy, an oasis used as a political tool by those with nefarious objectives. Lowkey is adamant that the greater Zionist goal was always to eliminate the Palestinian presence by any means necessary:

“It was never meant to be real and it was all a precursor to genocide. The same as you have disarmament, whether it was Sabra and Shatila to now, disarmament has also always been a precursor to massacre. So it's almost as if there's a fork in the road but every direction is leading towards massacre. And if you read Nur Masalha, the fantastic book The Expulsion of the Palestinians, this is in the roots of Zionism from the very, very beginning. It was always the aim. It was either population transfer, displacement or massacre, and so now we've been sort of led to that point.”

Conclusion

“If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears.”
- Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé details how, after the destruction of more than 500 Palestinian villages during the 1948 Nakba, a campaign was launched to erase any trace of their existence. Arabic place names were replaced with Hebrew ones. Forests were planted over razed villages, but not with native olive, fig, or oak trees but with conifers that are alien to the region. It was ecological colonisation.

Pappé recounts one haunting example that is etched on my mind:

“In the new development town of Migdal Ha-Emek… the JNF [Jewish National Fund] did its utmost to cover the ruins of the Palestinian village of Mujaydil... with rows of pine trees… But this particular species failed to adapt to the local soil... some of the pine trees had literally split in two and, in the middle of their broken trunks, olive trees had popped up in defiance...”

It’s a powerful image, isn’t it?

But the assault on olive trees continues. In the West Bank, violent illegal settlers torch ancient groves. In Gaza, the bombs do the work more quickly. The recent destruction of the al-Baqa Café is only one example. One analyst claimed the tonnage of bombs dropped on Gaza now exceeds that of six Hiroshima bombs.

Meanwhile, the international community flounders. Institutions prove toothless. Legal frameworks work overtime to protect colonial interests. While the bombs fall, international law is paraded as theatre. Protesters are arrested. Journalists harassed or smeared. Palestine Action has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation. Journalists like Asa Winstanley and Richard Medhurst face raids and interrogations. When George Galloway won election on a pro-Gaza platform, the Prime Minister responded with condemnation in a speech outside Downing Street. Fans waving Palestinian flags at a women’s football final in Kent caused the match to be cancelled. At Glastonbury, artist Bob Vylan’s anti-IDF chant “Death, death to the IDF” prompted a chorus of accusations of antisemitism. This list goes on and the same antisemitism card is played over and over again.

And yet, amidst this horror and distortion, The Wanted 18 offers something else: a reminder of what solidarity looks like. The story of Beit Sahour shows how grassroots organising, real community, can create dignity in the face of cruelty. Residents remember not only their cows, but the sense of unity, the creativity, and the hope that came from resistance.

Military powers can crush buildings and bodies, but they cannot easily crush shared purpose. They fear it. They fear how people see them. Which is why media control and narrative warfare go hand in hand with military aggression. But Palestinians, and those who stand with them, are breaking that narrative. Not through think tanks or UN speeches, but through footage, testimony, protest, and presence.

In The Wanted 18, residents of Beit Sahour reflect on how their movement was ultimately undermined and sold out by the false promises of diplomacy. They knew Zionism; they live it daily. They didn’t trust the process, and they were right. Since then, the rot at the heart of Western diplomacy has only deepened. What Palestinians have long known is becoming clear to more and more people around the world: integrity will not come from state actors. It must come from ordinary people, acting in good faith.

“Our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” - Nelson Mandela

In a recent appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, economist and ex-stock trader Gary Stevenson was challenged by Morgan to give an example of how “massively punishing rich people by massively taxing them has actually benefited the country.” Disingenuously, Morgan couldn’t think of one single example in history. Stevenson cited the example of his own dad who worked for the Royal Mail for 35 years. He said:

“[My dad] Never once earnt more than the average wage in the country. He was able to buy a house, support a family. My parents are retired now. They own their own property. They’re financially secure. That’s not possible now. He lived in an era when the top rate of tax was much, much, much higher. The fifties, sixties, and seventies in the UK.”

Stevenson’s example will resonate with multiple generations of British people who have endured a significant reduction in living standards due to such things as long-term stagnation in real-terms wage growth and austerity measures. Their parents are likely to have grown up in the post-world war two Fordist period with its affordable housing, stable, long term employment, free university, greater state regulation and welfare provision, industry-focused employment and high union membership. Central to this post-war settlement was a progressive tax system that helped fund public services and reduce inequality; this approach began to be dismantled with the rise of neoliberalism in the late 20th century.

The top rate of tax remained high in the UK until the dawn of neoliberalism under Thatcher when the rate was slashed. The Iron Lady casts a long shadow over 21st century British society as New Labour did little to undo any of her economic policies nor any of her laws against unions. In fact, inequality peaked during Blair’s prime years. The Gini index is one of the most widely-used measures of income inequality and in the following graph it can be seen how income inequality increased as soon as the top rate of tax was reduced.

Make Thatcherism Cool Again

Depressingly in western politics, rather than new ideas, we’ve been seeing a continuation and now even a revival of Thatcher’s ideology; what I am calling Thatcher 2.0. In Argentina, Javier Milei has been professing the benefits of privatisation, cuts to public spending (“shock therapy”), deregulation, and tax reform; The new boss is the same as the old boss. Famously, he wields a chainsaw on stage as a symbol of the cuts he wants to make to public spending.

Trump’s right hand man, Elon Musk, has taken a shine to Milei. At the inauguration for Trump’s second term, Musk was gifted a custom made chainsaw inscribed with the slogan “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” which translates to “Long live freedom, damn it!”

Neoliberals love to profess their love of freedom but freedom for whom and from what exactly? It is supposed that it leads to freedom in terms of choice, competition and government regulation; everybody is free but some are more free than others. None of those freedoms matter if you’re a worker dealing with insecure jobs, personal debt and income inequality. Freedom from pesky government interference only makes sense to those whose objective is aggressive wealth accumulation with no regard for humanity.

Stevenson went on to predict that we are heading for Dickensian-levels of inequality. The other guest on the show, conservative-libertarian Dave Rubin,pushed back with his assertion that the solution doesn’t lie in taxation but rather in deregulation and a smaller, more efficient state. DOGE. Trump 2.0. Milei’s chainsaw. It’s the same old story! Austerity. Free market economics. What is this madness? We’ve tried it. It didn’t work and now workers are feeling the repercussions as living costs outstrip wages.

Profiting from Crisis

Later in the discussion on Morgan’s show, Stevenson tried to set out his argument that it isn’t about any individual like Musk as, basically, the extreme wealth of billionaires gives them no choice but “to buy up the assets.”

“How rich is Elon Musk? Let’s say he’s worth $300 billion. What’s his passive income? $15 billion a year. What’s $15 billion per week? We’re talking something like $300 million per week. These guys have no choice but to buy-up all the assets. These guys will buy up all of the assets.”

It’s a systemic problem. Just look how many billionaires there are (see below). If wealth accumulation is left to go on without anyone or anything keeping it in check it’s only going to get worse.

In Technofeudalism (2023), Yannis Varoufakis gives an eye-opening description of the extreme amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of three multinational asset management companies known as “The Big Three”. They are BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. He writes:

“At the time of writing, BlackRock manages nearly $10 trillion in investments, Vanguard $8 trillion and State Street $4 trillion. To make sense of these numbers: they are almost exactly the same as the U.S. national income; or the sum of the national incomes of China and Japan; or the sum of the total income of the eurozone, the UK, Australia, Canada and Switzerland.”

The sheer scale of wealth is staggering. These firms not just investors; They are the dominant shareholders in 90% of the companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, including household names like Apple, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, General Electric and Coca-Cola.

The 2008 financial crash marked a turning point. BlackRock emerged from the crisis stronger than ever, growing by 156% between 2007 and 2009. That surge was fuelled both by its acquisition of Barclays Global Investors and by its close involvement with the U.S. and UK governments. BlackRock was entrusted to manage and advise on toxic assets using public funds. This is what many describe as “socialism for the rich”. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.

A similar pattern repeated during the Covid-19 pandemic. As governments injected vast amounts of stimulus money into the economy, luxury spending collapsed. As Stevenson put it:

What you have is basically a massive cash injection from the government through the poor to the rich. Listen, we saw the biggest and fastest ever transfer of wealth and increase in inequality in the history of our nation. And it was immediately followed by an inflationary crisis and a collapse in the cost of living. This is the clearest proof that you’ll ever need of the absolutely bloody obvious fact that if you massively increase inequality you will decrease living standards for working people.”

What links the crash in 2008 and the pandemic isn’t just crisis management, but a systemic pattern in which governments serve the interests of financial oligarchs. Varoufakis’s term technofeudalism captures this well as we are no longer living under classic capitalism, where capitalists take entrepreneurial risks. Instead, we live in a system where wealth and power are entrenched through control of data, platforms, and assets, with ordinary people rendered dependent and powerless; More like peasants than active participants in a functioning capitalist system.

Our Tech Overlords

Billionaires hang around like vultures ready to take advantage of any situation that presents itself. How do you think they got so rich in the first place?! It was interesting to see who attended Donald Trump’s inauguration on 20th January 2025 this year. Below you can see our tech overlords huddled together.

In attendance were (among others): Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Tim Cook (Apple), Shou Zi Chew (TikTok), Sam Altman (ChatGPT), Dara Khosrowshahi (Uber), Rupert Murdoch (News Corp) and even Joe Rogan. It is during this inauguration that Musk twice gave a Nazi salute.

What do they all want? What drives them to want more and more? Is their ultimate parasitic aim to take it all? It’s hard to fathom how those with so much more than everyone else live with themselves. We have to seriously question their motives. Tony Benn would have described all those hangers-on, those vultures circling the corridors of power as “weathercocks”. Blowing in the wind, devoid of a moral compass. On the left there has been a lot of talk about late-stage capitalism or post-capitalism. In my view that’s much too optimistic as it presupposes an end in sight to all this madness. Call me pessimistic but the UK has been under monarchist rule for more than 1000 years; The norm has always been extreme inequality and war. I can’t help but think that those at the top want a return to those Dickensian days that Stevenson alluded to; Shoe shine boys, chimney sweeps and debtors’ prisons. Has this always been the underlying agenda? After the 2008 market crash, austerity policies were pushed on the British people as a supposed necessity. While David Cameron was Prime Minister, his mask slipped in a speech at the Lord Mayor's Banquet at Guildhall in London in 2013. Dressed to the nines in full evening dress while sitting in a gold plated chair, he declared that the cuts to public spending would be permanent. Many had assumed that once the economy had recovered that the public spending would go back up. Not so, as he said:

“We have a plan – and we are carefully implementing that plan. Already we have cut the deficit by a third. And we are sticking to the task. But that doesn’t just mean making difficult decisions on public spending. It also means something more profound. It means building a leaner, more efficient state. We need to do more with less. Not just now, but permanently.”

Cameron’s masked slipped but it was a moment of ideological clarity. Thatcher and neoliberalism never went away as she significantly decreased the tax burden on the rich and they love it. The income inequality has led to a decrease in living standards. We are seeing the results of this now as we experience the emergence of Thatcher 2.0. The richest man in the world standing alongside the US President implementing aggressive Thatcherite policies. For them it’s simple, the state is bad. The state takes away their money. Let’s just ignore the military budget, shall we? Fuck the peasants!

Conclusion: Who Let the Dogs Out?

This article has explored how the ideology of neoliberalism has relentlessly prioritised private wealth over public good. Austerity, tax cuts for the rich, and the hollowing out of the state are not temporary measures—they’re features, not bugs, of the system. As inequality deepens and the state is increasingly stripped for parts, what remains is a society engineered to serve capital, not citizens. Stevenson rightly argues that the problem is structural, not individual. Billionaires act within a framework that rewards accumulation above all else—and when that behaviour goes unchecked, it becomes not just tolerated, but celebrated.

A few weeks ago on his podcast, Bill Burr made a comment about billionaires that went viral. He said that as people can barely afford to pay their bills, billionaires are out there dividing everybody. They’re, in his words, “rabid dogs that need to be put down.”

Bill is spot on. They are frothing at the mouth for more power, more profit, more control. And they don’t care who or what gets crushed beneath them. As long as the system continues to reward their behaviour, they’ll keep hoarding, buying, and bleeding the world dry.

This isn’t just about greed. It’s about power. It’s about control. And it’s about a system that legitimises the domination of the many by the few. As Jodi Dean puts it in Capital´s Grave (2025):

“Ending the domination of the asset holders and tech lords, eliminating the very existence of a billionaire class, is crucial for the flourishing of people and the planet.”