The concepts

A concept developed by Asma Mhalla to name the two-headed structure of contemporary power: the state and the great private powers, at once partners, rivals and interdependent. The Dileviathan describes the internal tension of the BigState: two centres of power cooperate because they need one another, while continually seeking to preserve or extend their own sovereignty. Their relationship is therefore unstable, made of alliances, reciprocal dependencies, negotiations and balances of force. A political figure of the Leviathan split in two, the Dileviathan makes it possible to think a power whose apparent unity now conceals a sovereignty that is shared, competitive and conflictual.

Government by speed and by flow. Power no longer emanates from a centre; it circulates through data, networks, algorithms. Legitimacy is no longer institutional: it is attentional.

The coming form of the state: stripped down in its social functions, hyperactive in control. It no longer guarantees, it monitors. It no longer treats, it predicts. It no longer protects, it steers. It is a state of flows, reduced to its panoptic and coercive frame, maximised by hypertechnologies.

A technopolitical system that exceeds its function as a tool and becomes, at once, infrastructure, environment, system of power and architecture of dependence. A technology becomes “total” when it cuts across several dimensions of collective existence — economic, political, military, informational, social, cognitive — and progressively blurs the distinction between its civilian and strategic uses. Its power lies in this capacity for integration: it organises the very conditions under which individuals, institutions and states communicate, produce, decide and act. In Mhalla’s work, total technology thus constitutes an infrastructure of power: whoever owns it, controls it or sets the terms of access to it acquires a structural capacity to organise dependencies and balances of force.

The set of resources that allow an individual to retain an effective capacity for judgement in a saturated informational environment: time, attention, knowledge, command of the tools, the ability to contextualise, to verify, to stand back and to resist constant solicitation. In Asma Mhalla’s work, this capital is unevenly distributed. As digital systems become more complex, more personalised and more pervasive, some individuals have more of the resources needed to understand the mechanisms shaping their perception and to preserve their autonomy. Cognitive liberty therefore has a social dimension: it also depends on the material, intellectual and temporal means to exercise it. Cognitive inequality thus becomes a new form of political inequality.

The capacity of an individual to preserve the conditions under which their judgement is formed autonomously, in an environment that acts directly on attention, perception, information and decision. In Asma Mhalla’s work, cognitive liberty comes before freedom of expression: being able to speak freely still presupposes being able to think, interpret and choose without the very conditions of that thought being wholly captured, saturated or modulated by technical architectures. Power now intervenes in the production of representations, of hierarchies of importance, and of the frames through which reality becomes intelligible. Cognitive liberty thus becomes a political condition of individual autonomy and, more broadly, of democracy.

Through the technologies of hyperspeed a new era opens, that of symbiosis — an organic fusion between entities or notions that adapt, survive and co-evolve. Symbiosis is not a simple crossing; it is more radical, and more dangerous too.

Dual-use technologies, of speed and of symbiosis: AI, implants, quantum, metaverse… They produce the real and the false in the same movement. Civilian and military at once, they turn citizens into agents of a permanent cognitive war.

The body of secondary narratives recycled within the dominant system (populisms, nationalisms, extremisms, wokeism…). They appear to be in conflict, but serve as a smokescreen for the meta-system.

A term already used occasionally in critical writing (notably in the wake of Mumford), it names here the whole body of hypertechnologies designed for mass, integrated and normative use. Under the BigState regime, mass technology does not control head-on: it shapes behaviour through cognitive disruption, repeated use, and the internalisation of protocols.

Born in the cyberpunk literature of the 1980s (notably in William Gibson), the megacorp names a sprawling corporation with quasi-sovereign functions. In the system Mhalla proposes, the megacorp produces the world, configures subjectivities, administers flows of information, and exercises private governance over entire populations. It is a post-state form of sovereignty: opaque, shared and fluid.

A background system that conditions every visible ideology. It proposes nothing and promises nothing, but sets the frames of the thinkable. It operates through cognitive design, not through discourse.

The liquid, total form of capitalism. It no longer has an enemy, no longer has an outside. It absorbs critique, reclaims dissent, turns everything into a product — including opposition itself. It is the default system.

The process by which the capacity to define, build and steer collective futures becomes concentrated in the hands of a small number of private actors. In Asma Mhalla’s work, megacorps no longer control merely existing markets or infrastructures: they invest in and organise the material conditions of the world to come — artificial intelligence, computing power, cloud, semiconductors, space infrastructure, energy, cognitive interfaces. They thereby acquire an exceptional ability to determine which trajectories become possible, desirable or inevitable. The future gradually ceases to be a political horizon open to collective deliberation and becomes a space pre-empted by industrial, financial and technological choices already made. The privatization of the future names this political dispossession and, in Mhalla’s work, the very object of the political struggles to come: the collective capacity to decide what may still happen.

An aesthetic current born in the twentieth century that imagines futures from visions of the past (a future in the manner of the 1950s, for instance) in order to interrogate our imaginaries of progress. Here it becomes a properly political frame of analysis: power recycles narratives of the future, measuring them out alongside a nostalgic and reactionary discourse on values. Retrofuturism is a strategy for mobilising the mass that plays on a double movement: reassuring by projecting

It mimics the codes of the original fascism, caricaturing its symbols and its rhetoric. Unlike the first, having no metanarrative to rise against (communism, socialism), it manufactures internal enemies artificially, and feeds on chaos and on the dissolution of traditional bearings. It rests on an insidious capture of the real, in which power disperses itself through a play of simulacra and techniques of mental disruption. It absorbs and recycles dissent by rendering it harmless. Resistance becomes a product of political consumption. It rests on a certain engineering of consent: it sells entertainment, it distracts in order to subjugate. It is a liquid fascism.

Technopolitics is the study of the forms of power that emerge from the entanglement of political and technological systems. It analyses how technologies redistribute capacities for power, shift the boundaries of sovereignty, and transform the very conditions under which societies are governed.