The history of techno-fascism

DOGE's parallels with 1930s Japan

This is the personal newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my Internet column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I do more riff-y newsletter writing in One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post most often on Bluesky and Instagram.

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What is it called when technology takes over the government? It’s helpful to have a label for what’s going on right now so that we can have a communal framework to discuss Elon Musk and DOGE. The upheaval is increasingly often being called a coup. But the underlying ideology is familiar from Silicon Valley, Mark Zuckerberg’s dictum to “move fast and break things” and replace the messily human with frictionless technology, built by elite engineers who are supposed to know better than anyone else. My latest column is about the ideas running through the Trump-Musk government’s actions, including techno-fascism, techno-feudalism, and techno-accelerationism. All of them have to do with giving tech free rein in the operation of the state, not just the websites we visit for fun.

For the piece, I spoke with the academic Janis Mimura, who studies the fascist Japanese government in World War II. Her book Planning for Empire looks at the little-known bureaucrats and political managerial class that took power under the guise of the emperor in the 1930s and pushed the nation into all-out war. Mimura has been struck by the parallels between those 1930s Japanese technocrats and Musk’s DOGE, both technology-driven groups who have taken on unanswerable authority. I really enjoyed my conversation with her and found it revealing for what we’re dealing with today. Here’s a bit from my column:

In the nineteen-thirties, Japan colonized Manchuria, in northeastern China, and the region became a test ground for techno-fascism. Nobusuke Kishi, a Japanese commerce-ministry bureaucrat, was appointed to head the industrial program in Manchuria, in 1936, and, with the collaboration of a new crop of the Japanese conglomerates known as zaibatsu, he instituted a policy of forced industrial development based on the exploitation of the local population. When Kishi returned to national politics in Japan, in 1939, along with a clique of other Japanese technocrats who had worked in Manchuria, he pursued similar strategies of state-dictated industrialization, at the expense of private interests and labor rights.

What ended the rein of the technocrats was the dissolution of their alliance with conservative politicians and the military. Ultimately, the technocrats created a war machine that they themselves could not stop and they were pushed out of the government when they began to urge caution, wanting to avoid an unwinnable fight. It made me wonder which direction Musk and the other Silicon Valley CEOs are really pushing the U.S. in, and what it would take for the bond between Trump and Musk to dissolve.

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Notes

• My New Yorker colleague Lauren Michele Jackson wrote a great essay on “The End of Seriousness.” We want to laugh at the chaos that’s going on right now, but laughter, even at the blatant absurdity, doesn’t offer much relief. It pinpoints a feeling I’ve been having lately: We can’t not talk about Trump-Musk and the destabilized international arena, but we also can’t talk about it directly — it’s just too extreme, too dramatic, too unknown. A bleak newsletter, sorry!