Surviving the Broligarchy

I've come across yet another newsletter to subscribe to. Given the craven capitulation of the mainstream media to the autocratic regime in the US and the general alt-right trend almost everywhere else, newsletters are becoming the best way of getting untainted news and analysis.

Carole Cadwalladr is a journalist who has been writing for The Guardian and it's magazine, The Observer, for more than 20 years. Sadly, The Guardian seems to be moving rightward and she's losing her position in April. She's decided to start a newsletter and podcast called "How to Survive the Broligarchy", a term she coined in 2024 to describe the fusion of right-wing autocratic government with the new tech industry.

Just after Trump’s re-election in November 2024, I wrote a column headlined ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy’ (reproduced below) and in the three months since, pretty much everything it predicted how now come to pass. This is technoauthoritarianism. It’s tyranny + surveillance tools. It’s the merger of Silicon Valley companies with state power. It’s the ‘broligarchy’, a concept I coined in July last year though I’ve been contemplating it for a lot longer. Since 2016, I’ve followed a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica to expose the profound threat technology poses to democracy. In doing so, I became the target: a weaponized lawsuit and an overwhelming campaign of online abuse silenced and paralysed me for a long time. This - and worse - is what so many others now face. I’m here to tell you that if it comes for you, you can and will survive it.

This week represents a hinge of history. Everything has changed. America and Russia are now allies. Ukraine has been thrown to the dogs. Europe’s security hangs in the balance. On the one hand, there’s nothing any of us can do. On the other, we have to do something. So, here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting a conversation. I’ve recorded the first one - a scrappy pilot - a podcast I’ve called How to Survive the Broligarchy and I’ve re-named the newsletter too. This first conversation (details below) is about how we need a new media built from the ground up to deal with the dangerous new world we’re in. That can only happen, in partnership with you, the reader. The days of top-down command and control are over. Please let’s try and do this together.

I enjoyed the discussion in the podcast and will continue to read and listen to her as they come out.