Year: 2025-2026
Research Team Type: Student-led
Team leads: Jillian (Lee) Crandall, PhD Student, Department of Geography, Designated Emphasis in New Media & STS
This research group aims to study the critical intersection between technology, politics, power, and space in the 21st century. Specifically, they aim to better understand the rise of cyberlibertarianism, venture capital extremism, secessionism, and techno-fascism/techno-authoritarianism. With roots in Silicon Valley’s “build fast and break things” logic of technological innovation, democracy is now seen by some tech-venture capitalists as an outdated technology to be replaced with algorithmic decision-making and private technological governance solutions. These accelerationist logics are posed to concentrate power for VC tech elites and threaten the freedoms, lands, and lives of marginalized populations on the grounds of race, gender, and sexuality.
With this, the Contours of Techno-Authoritarianism Research Group will center on the following: how media and flows of information are controlled; how anti/post-state development intersects with far-right extremist ideologies; how they have moved from fringe to mainstream; and how these ideologies are being made concrete with technical infrastructures such as AI, blockchain, and cryptocurrency. This research will make connections between histories of technology and fascism, drawing from critical theory and the Frankfurt School, social theory on crowds, and contemporary scholarship on tech-libertarianism and politics of exit/secession. The researchers hope to intersect the critical social sciences with political economy, political science, history, literature, computer science, new media, language, and rhetoric. As this research group is future-thinking and praxis-oriented, they will also explore strategies of resistance movements and democratic interventions which may help inform and connect across scholar-activist lines.