The looming AI-powered cultural revolution

Scientists, journalists, artists, academics, humanitarian workers, and NGOs are increasingly viewed as deceptive elites and untrustworthy tricksters. On the right, the backlash against the institutions of high culture and their 'cancel culture' knows no bounds — anyone could be a 'woke traitor'. On the left, too, these positions and the professionals of civil society are increasingly being questioned for their complicity in, or at least their inability to counter, the reproduction of structures of domination and inequality.

As liberal democracy wanes and liberal institutions appear increasingly irrelevant, some sort of reform seems necessary, given the general dissatisfaction and the high cost of maintaining them. This is especially the case when we consider the successes of over four decades of permanent neoliberal revolution. Beyond the erosion of public institutions and the emptying out of culture for the sake of financial interests, neoliberalism pushes for the commercialisation of every corner of life by reshaping the individual: everyone becomes an entrepreneur, every act an investment and every situation an opportunity; everywhere is the market, an arena of competition. The entrenched nihilism and structurally overdetermined meaninglessness produced under these conditions stimulate demand for quick, potent semantic fixes. Supply nuance, reflection or dialogue and you will go out of business. Economic rationale justifies the politically charged assault on 'wokeness', and a not-so-passive cultural revolution is already underway. Big tech has fallen in line by denouncing diversity, equality, and inclusion. Legacy media outlets, both public and private, are slowly following suit. Academic freedom is regressing in many more countries than it is progressing, particularly in the US, the UK, and Germany. Research budgets are being cut. Mainstream comedy shows are being cancelled for joking about the wrong things. Critics are gradually being forced out of positions of authority and critique is becoming socially displaced.

The AI-thoritarian Turn

Our authoritarian moment is consolidating at the intersection of three trends of the past two decades: the antagonisation of politics, the militarisation of the state and the automation of culture. These trends have culminated in the current AI hype, which is being driven by an unprecedented acceleration in investment in technological innovation. Over the past two years, the combined capital expenditure of the four largest US technology companies has more than doubled to surpass $300 billion — a sum larger than the GDP of most countries. It is not just the corporations, either. The US and Chinese governments are heavily investing in AI advancement, and their competition is often described as an arms race. Given the military applications of AI, this is not just hyperbole. Other states are involved too. In the UK, Starmer wants to 'mainline AI into the veins' of his nation and has signed a contract worth almost a billion dollars with Palantir to boost military AI.

The potential of AI for surveillance, control and centralisation makes it an ideal instrument of authoritarian governance. However, beyond its technical applications and efficiency in the near future, the AI narrative legitimises the disempowerment of people, whether they are dissidents, workers, or consumers, through disruption, deregulation, and further capital concentration under the guise of inevitability. Some jobs will be lost and more precarious ones created; big tech will be subsidised and huge cash transfers justified with security and arms race arguments. No one will be better suited to regulating complex AI technology than the AI corporations themselves. Meanwhile, a great buffer of accountability will be erected that could facilitate it all: 'The algorithm did this', 'The model decided that'.

Institutions of culture and knowledge are facing a potentially existential threat from an AI-powered assault. As aesthetic and intellectual standards continue to decline, generative AI and large language models, though still limited, are reaching functional thresholds sufficient to replace many roles in the knowledge and creative economy with AI. Promotional videos and posters with saturated colours and generically epic aesthetics created by AI are already proliferating, and public agencies and corporate clients are increasingly preferring to type some prompts rather than hire actual visual artists. Translators and copy editors have already felt the pressure. A team of journalists, already forced to regurgitate generic platitudes, could be replaced by an AI-literate editor. Junior researchers will be pressured to sift through ever-increasing amounts of information, innovate more using AI, or risk being replaced by it. It is only a matter of time until some educational institutions offer cheaper, faster degrees with AI tutors.

The question is not whether AI tools can produce work of a quality comparable to that of humans, or even do so significantly more cheaply and efficiently. It's not just that some knowledge workers will lose money; the social value of their entire professions could be subject to a hostile redefinition. AI technologies not only provide a strong leverage and a plausible pretext for weakening individual creators and educators, but also for structurally curtailing the power of cultural institutions, shifting the centre of gravity from tightly regulated and diverse public and semi-public sectors to a handful of private digital technology firms. Authoritarian forces determined to subjugate universities and the media are also deeply invested in big tech's success in AI. It does not take a genius to align these two projects. To effect a Western cultural revolution, there is no need to parade neo-Nazi mobs on campus. Professors grow old and retire, and their work can be redistributed among precarious tutors and AI. There is no need to burn down bookshops when Amazon has almost finished that job already. Reading is in decline anyway, and literacy and numeracy are falling in many countries.

Trenches of Meaning amid the Culture Wars

In the face of converging and permanent crises, nativist authoritarians offer an easy way out in the form of promises of certainty and superiority. Meanwhile, their assertion of national sovereignty demonstrates the limitations of neoliberalism and sometimes explicitly clashes with its teachings and practices. However, crude exceptionalism cannot fundamentally challenge neoliberalism or provide lasting, elaborate structures of meaning. We still need to make sense of the tedious chaos, and many of us are trying to do so. Moments of collective resistance continue to emerge. Recently, the Global Sumud Flotilla demonstrated that actions can still pierce through the noise and open new possibilities. The two-day general strike that followed in Italy showed that struggles can be connected and that mass mobilisation and bringing the capitalist machine to a halt is still possible, even in a G7 country and the world's eighth-largest economy, which is ruled by an actual former fascist and is the third-biggest exporter of arms to Israel.

Palestinian liberation is a Palestinian cause and an international one. It always has been. The same goes for Kurdish liberation. Although their struggles are ultimately centred on a national identity, both Palestinians and Kurds have refused to be defined by a fixed, closed identity determined by religion or ethnicity, despite facing campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Their refusal to essentialism demonstrates that collective identity can sustain universality by preserving its multiplicity and vulnerability. Authoritarianism, by contrast, depends on policing boundaries. This is why migration becomes its central obsession, not because migrants fail to integrate, but because they do so too successfully. Migrants embody the entanglement of histories and cultures that challenges rigid notions of belonging. The everyday coexistence, overlap and fusion of cuisines, languages and cultures expressed through this multiplicity undermines the fantasy of purity on which authoritarian imaginaries depend.

Despite decades of neoliberal restructuring and the rise of the far right, institutions of culture and civil society retain residual commitments to plurality and social responsibility. These commitments, though often procedural and depoliticised, generate minimal spaces of possibility. University managers in the US and Europe collaborated with the crackdown on Gaza solidarity encampments. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that it was universities that provided the space for such mass mobilisations in the first place. Such institutions are not purely instruments of domination or autonomous spheres of resistance, but rather contested spaces shaped by their internal heterogeneity. Authoritarian forces resort to culture and technology, but these spaces consist of a significant proportion of people whose politics do not align with those in power.

Culture and intelligence, artificial or otherwise, are ultimately about making meaning, a process that is inherently dynamic, contradictory and collective. This undermines the authoritarian impulse towards static purity. This means that interpretative entities, such as universities, courts, and digital information platforms, are not merely tools of domination and control, but also key terrains of struggle. Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign shows that a radical vision can be combined with practical policies and communicated in an accessible, engaging way that can appeal to TikTok audiences. Similarly, the ICC and ICJ rulings against Israel suggest the possibility of wresting the universalist claim of an international order based on coercion against itself, rather than dismissing the law as mere imperial hypocrisy or the sanctification of power. These rulings do not redeem the courts, but they do signal that, beyond insurgency, the complexities and contradictions of the architecture of power create potential for counter-hegemonic actions.

When it comes to countering the rise of authoritarianism, explicitly political acts concerning the machinery of the state (including resistance against it) are insufficient. Without strategies for fostering a sense of belonging, developing alternative social technologies and consolidating institutions, there is a risk of reducing the struggle to reactive and defensive gestures that, fundamentally, reproduce the logic and forms of oppression with a different set of moral panics, abstract dogmas and opportunistic agendas under the guise of virtue. Decaying public institutions cannot simply be allowed to die at the hands of soulless managers and despotic masters; however, they cannot be defended without undergoing democratising transformations that render them fit to serve as infrastructures of collective values. As authoritarian states and tech monopolies seek to circumvent thought and automate desire, the task is not merely to critique, but also to establish spaces for care and collaboration. This is not wishful thinking: the fact that global computing runs on Linux demonstrates the practical power of cooperation. The most secure messaging app, Signal, redefines communication and security when the logic of profit is abandoned. Similarly, Wikipedia is a treasure trove of knowledge, driven by volunteers, offering an alternative model of authorship and editorship for academics and journalists. These projects are not utopian frivolities; they are the necessary conditions for a future in which culture, truth and freedom remain possible.

While there is no clear boundary between culture and politics, confusing the two undermines both. While artists, scholars and journalists can certainly be organisers and campaigners, each domain has different — and sometimes conflicting — goals, methods, requirements and timeframes. As in Brown’s discussion of the Weberian defence of academia, fortifying the institutions of meaning against the looming AI-powered cultural revolution paradoxically entails a modification of their promise. The same is true of realising their potential in any emancipatory political struggle. In the age of hyper-politicisation, the clear, assertive and polarising statements that are necessary for political interventions leave limited room for the ambiguity, fragility and affinity that could be fostered through knowledge and the arts. Radical proclamations could be more modest while working towards the institutional reconstruction and reorientation of bodies of knowledge and culture that embed practices of cooperation into their economies. As algorithmic bombardment with brainrot and AI slop disintegrate the common sense, it is imperative to expand the commons of sense.