Cyberpunk

In these early years of the twenty-first century, the chaotic alliance of Donald Trump and Elon Musk has brought forth a two-headed technopolitical creature: one orchestrates the show, the other codes the system. “This is not a crisis of democracy but the tipping point into a new regime,” writes Asma Mhalla.

Something is at work. A simulacrum fascism: a hybrid, algorithmic regime in which the state appears to withdraw… the better to control everything. In the shadow of neo-reactionary ideologues and Silicon Valley gurus, a new architecture of power is settling in — post-Orwellian, fluid, irresistible, formidable.

In the world to come, you will not be augmented. You will be programmed.

From the American laboratory where the matrix of the future is being written, this book decodes the techno-totalitarian software — a programme reconfiguring our democracies, our bodies and our minds on a planetary scale. It reveals the irruption of an unprecedented power: cognitive power. Infiltrated into the intimacy of the masses, it steers attention, formats perception, models desire. And its hold advances in silence.

The future is already here. The cyberpunk dystopia is no longer fiction, it is our reality. The countdown has begun. Will we understand in time what is at stake?

Asma Mhalla delivers a hard-hitting essay that names the new arena of power — and defends what remains of our freedom.