Generative AI as a Symptom of the Polycrisis of Us Digital Capitalism and of the Trumpian End-Times Fascism

The article critically interrogates why the build-out of generative “AI” in the ideological-material form it has taken in the USA can be viewed as symptomatic of the intensifying polycrisis of US digital capitalism and the US-led neo-imperial order. Employing a neo-Luddite-Marxist approach to analyse the technology of GenAI, first the eugenic-eschatological ideological underpinnings of it are examined, along with the central problematic, ecologically unsustainable technical characteristic of its development and functioning and the politico-economic conditions of its possibility which make it a symptom of the polycrisis. The second focus is the centrality of GenAI in digital capitalism’s mutation to become an even more speculative, unsustainable, environment- and society-destructive, power-centralising and worker-exploiting form – ‘Muskism’, that is parasitically dependent on the US state. Finally, it tackles the role of GenAI in the implementation of the end-times fascist project of the second Trump Administration and its deliberate escalation of the polycrisis.