Hacking Techno Authoritarianism, Digital Commons & more
What happens when trust fractures and we start outsourcing our sense of reality to machines?
During our last dancefloor, we welcomed Jaya Klara Brekke—strategist, cryptography wonk, and political theorist—for a deep dive into technoauthoritarianism and the urgent need for collective spheres of resistance. The mood? Serious, but not without groove.
Into the Dark
Jaya didn’t sugarcoat it. We’re living through what she called a "dark period"—a structural crisis where speed collides with precarity. On one side: hyper-acceleration of tech. On the other: eroding trust, fractured realities, and the algorithmic outsourcing of our public selves.
It’s not just about Big Tech. It’s about how those systems tap into us—our fears, our confusion, our deep desire for certainty—and weaponize them. Polarisation isn’t a glitch. It’s the business model. It’s a system fueled not by neutrality, but by emotional volatility.
The result is a socio-technical feedback loop that destabilizes more than it connects.
Three Cracks in the System
We explored the key tensions at play:
1. Unsecurity: Not just fear of crime or crisis, but a pervasive existential uncertainty. When the systems around us—economic, social, digital—feel too complex to grasp, how do we orient ourselves?
2. Relativity vs. Rationality: As consensus reality fragments, we’re left floating in competing truths. Tech platforms don’t resolve this—they amplify it. The supposed neutrality of data becomes a tool for narrative warfare.
3. Trust vs. Trustless Systems – Many emerging technologies bypass human trust altogether. Blockchain, for example, frames humans as unreliable actors to be coded around. But what do we lose when relationality is replaced by protocol?
These aren’t just technical dilemmas—they’re philosophical. Here, Jaya channeled Paul Virilio’s Administration of Fear and the metaphysical tension between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein. Where Einstein gave us linear, absolute time, Bergson offered “duration”—a more fluid, experiential sense of time grounded in intuition and lived experience.
This isn’t just a scholarly throwback. It’s central to the way digital infrastructures now shape our lives. Platforms operate on Einsteinian precision—real-time data, instant feedback, seamless automation. But we live in Bergsonian time—subjective, unpredictable, full of nuance. When system logic outpaces human rhythm, dissonance sets in.
We traced roots back to the privatization of the internet—how the dream of digital commons became a nightmare of surveillance capitalism. But Jaya reminded us: it’s not just about naming the beast (technofeudalism, technoauthoritarianism)—it’s about facing it. This is not theoretical. The machine is working. And it’s winning by amplifying the very human flaws it pretends to solve.
From Crisis to Collective Imagination
The way out isn’t simple. But it starts with shifting our direction of travel:
→ From fear to hope
We resist the ambient paranoia seeded by polarizing feeds and opaque algorithms—not by denial, but through practices that ground us. Collective spaces, trusted rituals, and political imagination that refuses apocalyptic fatalism.
→ From fractured realities to new trusted institutions
Not nostalgia for the old ones, but the patient work of building new ones. Institutions of mutual aid, citizen assemblies, shared infrastructures that can hold multiple truths without collapsing into chaos.
→ From freedom from to freedom to
We often define freedom as escape—freedom from control, from surveillance, from bureaucracy. But what if freedom is also about capacity? Freedom to heal, to be different, to relate across difference, to imagine the otherwise.
Reclaiming the Commons
In this light, the privatization of the digital commons becomes more than a policy issue—it’s a cultural wound. The term “technofeudalism” (shout-out to Yanis Varoufakis) echoed through the call. We were reminded that the digital commons were never truly commons—they were privatized before we even realized what was at stake.
Once we surrendered the infrastructure of connection to profit-driven platforms, we allowed relationality itself to be commodified. And now, public services are increasingly mediated through interfaces that remove even the most mundane human touch. No more chats at the counter, no more shared frustrations in queues. Just sleek efficiency, but at what cost?
Maybe it’s time to dream not just of resistance, but of slight digital degrowth. Toward infrastructures that prioritize presence over optimization. Toward systems that make room for difference, dialogue, delay. In a world where techno-systems define what’s “real,” the radical act is to rebuild spaces of encounter—where shared meaning can emerge again.
We’re not backing away from technology. But we are reclaiming the right to shape its tempo, its use, and its meaning. The digital Leviathan can’t be slayed with code alone. It will take collectivity, curiosity, and the courage to stay with the trouble.
If this resonated, stay with us. More sessions, more provocations, more collective remixes coming soon. As always, we’re one click away at [parti.earth](http://parti.earth).
photo: credits www.uva.nl