A small number of people now control the infrastructure that everyone depends on. This cluster has the words for that.
This cluster maps the structural concepts describing the political-economic architecture of the digital age — who has power, how it is exercised, and what language is used to obscure it. The terms here are not about individual bad actors. They describe systems: feudal structures, information weapons, governance models, and the machinery by which public authority is transferred to private hands.
Some of these terms are new. Some have been in use for decades and have acquired new urgency. All of them describe something that was already happening before anyone had a name for it.
The question this cluster asks: who owns the infrastructure you cannot live without?
Terms in this cluster
Broligarchy
The tech oligarchy as male bonding network. Power and proximity, inseparable.
Cybernetic Governance
Governing through algorithms and automated decisions. The bureaucrat replaced by the model. No one to appeal to.
Digital Colonialism
Data centres in the Global South consuming local energy and water without local benefit. Your cloud dries their river.
Digital-Military-Industrial Complex
The extension of the military-industrial complex for the digital age. Big Tech and the Pentagon. The contract that nobody voted on.
Dual-Use Technology
Civilian and military applications in the same product. The boundary is structurally porous — not a design failure but a design feature.
Financial Fabulism
Financial claims that systematically exceed reality. Not fraud — a genre. Real consequences for the people who believe it.
Flood the Zone
Bannon’s strategy: overwhelm the information environment so that nothing can be verified and nothing sticks. Confusion as governance.
Fortress Futurism
Technology as a walled enclave. Origins in apartheid South Africa. Now a Silicon Valley aesthetic.
Founder Mode
Graham, 2024. Founder authority above governance. The startup logic applied to institutions that affect everyone.
Grifters
Con artists with an ideological veneer. The scam that comes with a manifesto.
Grokipedia
xAI’s AI-generated encyclopedia. The language of neutrality as ideological instrument.
Hubris Syndrome
Owen, 2009. What sustained, unchecked power does to judgment. The leader who stopped listening.
Memecoin
Cryptocurrency as subcultural phenomenon and financial weapon. Speculation disguised as community formation.
Military-Industrial Complex
Eisenhower, 1961. The entanglement of the military and the defence industry. Still running. Now with software.
Muskism
Slobodian and Tarnoff, 2026. A governance model for the 21st century — private infrastructure, public dependence, no accountability.
Narrative Engineering
The deliberate construction of political narratives via platforms. Not individual lies — coordinated story architectures. (new V10)
Panopticon
Bentham via Foucault: surveillance that makes itself unnecessary. You behave as if you are being watched because you might be.
Reconstruction Economy
A market that only exists because something was destroyed. The profit motive and the bomb in the same sentence.
Revolving Door
Moving between government regulation and the private sector being regulated. The regulator becomes the regulated. Then back.
Social Credit System
A system that scores and rewards or punishes citizen behaviour. Discussed more in the West than it currently operates in China — but the logic is global.
Sovereignty as a Service
State sovereignty outsourced to private tech infrastructure. The government that depends on a vendor it cannot fire.
Surveillance Capitalism (Political Economy)
Zuboff, 2019. Human behaviour as raw material for prediction products. You are not the customer. You are the commodity.
Techno King
Musk’s self-chosen title at Tesla. Irony as power display. The joke that is also serious.
Technofeudalism
Varoufakis, 2023. Platform owners as feudal lords. You work on their land. They set the terms.
Technofascism
Coeckelbergh, 2026. The fusion of Big Tech and authoritarian rule. A new political category for a new political formation.