Asma Mhalla: Everything we are witnessing today was not only foreseeable, but already underway. The current situation reveals a realignment of power structures and modes of government. Apart from the outrageous statements made by the Trump-Musk duo, I am amazed at the speed with which this configuration has taken hold. In Technopolitique , I develop the idea of a new two-headed Leviathan: Big Tech and Big State. We are currently experiencing its almost literal incarnation. We are witnessing the weakening of an institutional power inherited from the twentieth century, based on classic structures – executive, legislative, judicial and bureaucratic apparatus – which Trump has skilfully undermined by presenting himself as the avatar of modernisation through efficiency. This modernisation involves the technology giants, as represented by Elon Musk, among others. From a structural perspective, independently of individuals, we are witnessing a radical transformation of the state model. Tim O'Reilly, an influential figure in Silicon Valley, spoke several years ago of ‘government as a platform’. And that's exactly what it is: a platforming of power, wherein human government gradually gives way to governance by algorithms, codes and data. I see this interdependence between Big Tech and the Big State as the major symptom of the new political moment we are living through. It would be naive to think that one could exist without the other, or that they could be dissociated.

A. M. An analysis that is fairly widespread in the United States is to say that what is happening is a coup d'état. This view is highly questionable. Trump was elected, like others before him, in a democratic process. He has real support. Granted, we are witnessing a spectacular display of power that is very offensive and massively relayed by social media, which should be considered as ideological weapons. But this strategy is based on a broader objective: to develop a new political narrative. This is no coup d'état, but rather a  gradual shift towards a new order. A clinical observation of the political landscape reveals that real power rests on data, algorithms and, more generally, information, both raw and processed. This is a structural shift; not a rupture, but a profound and progressive change.

A. M. The concept of technopolitics is based quite simply on the observation that technology is fundamentally political. I'm speaking here as a political scientist. We can no longer think of these issues in terms of a single disciplinary silo. It is impossible to understand the current stakes without looking at international relations, history and technology. Technopolitics requires both an interdisciplinary and a transdisciplinary approach. It is not a simple juxtaposition of two fields, but a symbiosis in the organic sense of the term. This can be seen in what I call hypertechnologies, or hypervelocity technologies. Here I am referencing Paul Virilio, the philosopher of acceleration, who in the 1990s spoke of dromology – the science not of time, but of speed. Applied to the military sphere, as some American thinkers have done by inventing the concept of hyperwar to define a war almost entirely controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), this reading shows the extent to which the datafication of the world profoundly transforms our relationship with reality. We can no longer grasp it without using an algorithmic filter: the mass of data is such that it exceeds our cognitive capacities. This means that contemporary conflicts are less about opposing camps and ideologies, and more about struggles against speed. Whoever is the first to recognise, understand and act has the upper hand. The relationship between time and space is therefore being reconfigured today, and these two dimensions are being privatised by the big technology companies. I believe the capture of time and space by Big Tech is one of the major shifts of our time. And if we fail to think this phenomenon through, we run the risk of ignoring its significance.

A. M. This is a fascinating question. Trump has given us a striking answer. The current American president fully embodies this change. In his own way, he is proposing a response to democratic fatigue: he is further centralising executive power, short-circuiting federal agencies, marginalising checks and balances such as Congress, and concentrating everything in a promise to deliver efficiency. This is based on false assumptions, but it doesn't matter; what does matter is the narrative. Trump is thus not just changing the balance of power, but transforming our relationship to truth. We are moving from a system of truth, in the Foucauldian sense, to a system of reality. This system is no longer just about forging a common narrative around certain hypotheses, but of twisting reality itself. Trump is advancing a profound reconfiguration of political reality. His election in 2016 marked our entry into a post-truth regime; his re-election in November 2024 takes us into a post-law era. It is in this context that our political reality is now being structured.

A. M. Post-law does not mean that the law has disappeared or that it no longer exists. The institutions are still there. There has not been a coup d'état in the traditional sense: nobody has officially brought the institutions to heel. They are simply no longer operational; they function as a showcase. They still allow a form of democratic normality to be displayed – fundamental freedoms, such as freedom of expression, voting, suffrage, etc. These elements are still used in political language, but their real function has collapsed. We continue to invoke these benchmarks, because they are reassuring and give structure. In reality though, they have become obsolete, bypassed by other channels, in particular through the concentration of executive power, which is particularly visible in the United States. This model is gradually coming to resemble that of regimes such as China and Russia. In his book The Revolt of the Elites, the American sociologist Christopher Lasch describes a phenomenon that we are seeing in full force today: it is no longer the people who are protesting, but the elite who are rebelling, because they feel that the order inherited from the twentieth century is holding them back. Similar views are expressed in a much more brutal version by the American entrepreneur Peter Thiel, for example. We are not living through a popular revolution as in 1789, but a counter-revolution from the top. The image of Musk and Trump side by side in the Oval Office says it all: today, power is both political and technological. It is technopolitical. This reality is now visible and obvious to the whole world. 

A. M. Europe today seems lost. We suddenly realise that what we believed in – the separation of powers, the rule of law, the liberal order – was partly a story we told ourselves. The speech by US Vice-President J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 is extremely revealing. In this post-law world, it is the checks and balances and the institutions designed to guarantee democratic balance – the judiciary, the press, parliament – that have become marginalised. What is more, civil society is being sidelined. We, the citizens, are being sidelined. Europe has not only become a prey, but has also, and has long been, a vassal. I was recently in Taiwan and Viet Nam, and then in the United States. I was struck by the total silence about Europe. It simply does not exist in Asian strategic discourse. It is perceived, at best, as a territory under American management. China fully understands this: it is adopting a multilateral tone and playing the dialogue card, in good cop mode, while the United States is advancing its pawns in a much more offensive manner. The trade war that the US is currently waging reveals two things. First, it shows Europe's fragility and strategic dependence on a hostile United States. We are in a bad situation in this balance of power, because one of the possible American retaliatory measures is existential. This could take the form of military security blackmail or the break-up of NATO, for example. Second, at the more invisible level of the systems needed by armies, this trade war is also a means of pressure exerted by the United States to maximise the interdependence of our information systems, for example via American infrastructures. In this game, technological hawks like Eric Schmidt and certain Big Tech players well ensconced in the American techno-military complex are at the forefront. However, if Europe plays its cards right, this new hostility against a backdrop of populace anti-globalisation beliefs also opens up the possibility of other areas of partnership with countries that reject the American approach, such as Canada and India, which could act as a countervailing force on some issues.  

A. M. The United States administration is not simply adopting an ideological stance; it is following a deliberate policy of fragmenting Europe. The more fragmented the European Union becomes, the less able it is to impose regulation on American power. This is clearly seen in the way the hypothetical ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine has been staged by the Russian-American duo. Some European countries are watching from afar, but others, such as the United Kingdom, have come surprisingly close to the French vision, notably at the London Summit in March 2025, after Volodymyr Zelenskyy's visit to Washington and his disastrous humiliation by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. The plasticity of the axes is fascinating to observe. We no longer operate in monolithic blocs, but in fluid diplomacy. The American reactionary far right is finding fertile ground in this fragmentation, resonating directly with certain political fringes of the European far right. Because of this fragmentation, the United States is in a position of strength when negotiating bilaterally, as with Italy, for example. But this is not necessarily the case when faced with a group of countries like the European Union. Another element of fragmentation is military interoperability. NATO remains essential because it ensures the alignment of systems. But to be interoperable with the Americans, we have to adopt their technologies and protocols. And that is where we see the real process of becoming a vassal: through infrastructure, which is invisible to the naked eye. This is why J.D. Vance's Munich speech was a deliberate power grab. Since 20 January, the American message has been clear: you will submit. And if gentle means are no longer enough, the pressure will become brutal.

A. M. By definition, power, or rather the mechanisms of power, are everywhere. We can analyse the issue from two angles. First, in terms of executive power, Trump’s whole game, particularly through Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), is to expand his power as much as possible in order to advance his ideological agenda. The alliance of political power and technological might, with no safeguards or effective checks and balances, is problematic for the rule of law in the world's leading power. Second, from a more military angle, we can see another extension of the issues of power and might. Although it has deep roots, it has recently come to the fore of public debate in light of the war in Ukraine. This extension relates to cyberspace, now designated as the fifth area of conflict, after land, sea, air and space. This is where informational wars, hybrid confrontations, cyberattacks, digital espionage and cognitive conflicts take place. The space can broadly be broken down into three main layers, although some models go as far as eleven, but let's keep it simple. The first layer is material: the physical infrastructure. We're talking here about cloud computing, satellites and undersea cables, which form the industrial basis of the entire digital ecosystem. To say that we live in a post-industrial world is a complete misnomer. This world is based on heavy industry, including the production of semiconductors, giga-factories, critical resources such as rare earths, electric grids – in other words, concrete, massive, physical infrastructures. Over the past fifteen years or so, Big Tech has made impressive strides in this area. Today, most undersea cables are owned or operated by Google and Meta. Fifteen years ago, they were the responsibility of governments. Today, entire sections of global infrastructure are located in grey areas, both geographically and legally. Who is responsible? Who regulates? This is where a major part of sovereignty is at stake, well upstream of the debate on algorithms. The second logical layer is that of information systems: protocols, languages and software infrastructures. From the perspective of hybrid or cyber conflict, this is where cyberattacks, espionage and sabotage operations take place. In the first layer, you can physically cut an undersea cable and trigger immediate panic whereas actions are less visible in the second layer. An attack does not necessarily have an immediate effect: it can take place over time. Military ‘hunt forward’, or defensive cyber, operations, designed to locate and identify cyber (IT) threats on their own turf, can neutralise the attacks before they reach key targets or cause major damage. In simple terms, they offer a proactive way of preventing cyber threats before they occur. There are also cyber infiltration or cyber espionage operations – techniques aimed at penetrating the computer systems of adversaries in order to monitor them, collect data or sabotage operations. The third layer is the so-called visible layer. It consists of what citizens see on a daily basis – applications, social media, digital interfaces. This is also where data production is concentrated. It is the layer that structures contemporary information warfare, particularly through the militarisation of social media. 

A. M. There's a bit of a technical debate between punctilious experts about the word militarisation. Today we prefer using the term ‘weaponisation’ to describe this very concrete phenomenon, which can be found in the symbiosis I mentioned earlier between truth and falsehood, and between reality and virtuality. Social media platforms undoubtedly best embody this hybridity. They are applications that anyone can download, use to get information, chat, shop and so on. In short, an infinite number of innocuous personal uses. In reality, they are also spaces where confrontation dynamics unfold, as vectors of propaganda, disinformation, misinformation and coordinated operations – what we call inauthentic coordinated campaigns. There are troll farms, bots and, now, artificial intelligence. With generative AI, it is possible to produce very convincing deepfakes for a few thousand euros on the darknet; to launch destabilisation or disinformation campaigns on the fly, whether from Baku in Azerbaijan or anywhere else. These platforms are thus becoming spaces of conflict in their own right, where narratives are deployed. What Russia or even China – which, as Paul Charon puts it, has also adopted the Russification of these issues – are doing, shows that the objective is not to promote their own model. They don't care. The goal is to weaken democracies from within, by activating fault lines and fanning the flames of centrifugal forces. It's a strategy of chaos and destabilisation. Putin is not trying to convince the masses that his regime is admirable. He prefers to hit them where it hurts: he exposes the internal divisions of democracies, the disfunction of their elites and the mistrust towards their institutions. To do this, he uses social tensions, the Yellow Vests, Islamists, extremists, etc. Trump is pursuing a similar goal: weakening nations that refuse to bend. War no longer needs to be physical. All you have to do is wait until the worm is firmly embedded in the fruit and society collapses from within. It's important to understand that the groundwork was already in place. It would be too easy to pin democratic malaise on disinformation. The malaise predates social media. The players mining it were able to detect it, understand it and exploit it. They identified the weaknesses, the targets and the opinion multipliers, sometimes without the latter even aware that they are being exploited. We are now seeing a kind of new international movement, not necessarily reactionary in the ideological sense, but rather structured around the logic of destabilisation. In this dynamic, we Europeans are not the subjects. We are the objects. This is where the tragedy of democracies begins. Because by their very nature, they are open. And it is precisely this openness that makes them vulnerable today. They are the victims of their own principles. We can see the trap set by Vance's speech in Munich: ‘If you are in favour of freedom of expression, then you cannot filter content. If you do, you are a dictatorship.’ This logic is profoundly perverse, but frighteningly effective. The USSR used it, as have jihadist groups, and now Putin is using it, whether on Covid or other issues. The method is not new. It is classic. But it works all the better today because the terrain is favourable to it. Some of these campaigns are highly sophisticated, but what has really changed is not so much their nature as their scale: we have moved into another dimension. Even within military institutions, it's not easy to identify what is happening, to understand it and to react to it. 

A. M. Exactly. I address this point in Technopolitique. The technological hyper-strength is turning into a hyper-power that is turning against the civilian populations it is supposed to protect. The tools are the same. The methods are the same. But there is no effective counterweight. In Europe, regulation is strong in theory, but slow in implementation, and by now it is probably caught up in a conflictual relationship with American anti-regulation. Yet our sovereignty also depends on our ability to enforce our own laws in our own territory. The application of the law is becoming a geopolitical balance of power on this new chessboard. In a classic totalitarian regime, you know what to expect: power is visible and identifiable. Here, it’s the reverse: power slips away. Domination is insidious. One has the impression of being free, of making choices, of browsing however you want, but in reality, scrolling for hours on end locks people in unawares. As long ago as 2002, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee spoke of ‘modern digital enclosures’ – the closed spaces of three or four apps where people go round and round in confined circles, like the recluses of the Middle Ages.

A. M.  We are clearly in a period of transition with the hybridisation of war. On the one hand are the classic forms of conflict that are kinetic, physically violent and highly visible – Ukraine and Gaza – with death and destruction. On the other are the wars of the future: automated, algorithmic warfare, based on the mastery of data, systems and networks. There are two fundamental elements here. Firstly, the central role of Big Tech in the dynamics of war: Starlink in Ukraine, Microsoft in cyber, Amazon or Palantir in critical infrastructures, and so on. There is a growing fusion between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon in what some call the techno-military system. This is not science fiction, but a fact. Joe Biden tried to warn us about it, using the words of Eisenhower, who denounced the military-industrial nexus back in the 1950s. Second, we need to deconstruct the idea that algorithmic tools would enable clean, precise, targeted warfare – in other words, the fantasy of a surgical strike. Nothing could be further from the truth. Artificial intelligence systems, data cross-referencing, targeting software and semi-autonomous or even autonomous weapons are in fact weapons of mass destruction. For example, targeting software, based on simple cross-referencing of data – geolocation, social profiles, digital behaviour – can be used to conduct massive, indiscriminate targeting campaigns. One example is the Lavender software, which was the subject of a scandal exposed in 2024 by Israeli journalists. And this is the crux of the matter. Technopolitics is not about technology overtaking politics, or politics exploiting technology. It is an organic fusion of the two. A new form of government for weapons and humans. A new hybrid, symbiotic way of exercising power, as I write in Technopolitique, which thrives on the grey areas and vagueness – neither war nor peace, neither man nor machine, but all at once. We will need to be able to think in terms of complexity in a polarised and binary world. This is our great challenge. 

February 2025