After months of attacks by right-wing media, Guido Arnold speaks about the power of Big Tech and its ideological orientation. The physicist warns of further authoritarian developments and has ideas for resistance.
We approached you for an interview back in January, but you declined. Why?
At that time, I had no desire to provide fresh material with my answers that could be picked up and used against me by NIUS and Apollo – instead, I wanted to sit out the wave of discrediting and personal destruction from the right-wing gutter press and respond later. Now, in April, the “NoToNius” campaign is also launching with an event in Berlin Kreuzberg, not far from the NIUS editorial office.
For two years, you have been disparaged by Springer publications as a reference point for a new sabotage movement, and now also by Reichel’s far-right pillory. How do they arrive at this?
I cannot answer that; there are still no files accessible to us regarding any investigations. However, the articles in “Welt” suggest that they have been fed conjectures from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, namely that passages of text to which I am alleged to have been a co-author may have been used by activist groups in their statements. It is well known that “Welt” and “Focus” allow themselves to be instrumentalised for campaigns by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
In January, NIUS attended a publicly advertised lecture of mine in Basel and produced a report as though they had been in the midst of a conspiratorial planning meeting for attacks against the tech industry. It is not surprising that a medium like NIUS resorts to such methods. However, when “Spiegel” also took up these defamations in a journalistic manner that is questionable, this caused some astonishment among me and those around me.
You did indeed give the lecture in Basel in question. What was it about?
It dealt with the authoritarian to fascistoid political ambitions of the “Big Tech” industry since the second term of Donald Trump. And with the political rightward bias of their AI tools: specifically, “social” media in interaction with large language models.
Whom do you mean exactly by the “Big Tech” complex?
Traditionally, “Big Tech” refers to the five most economically powerful IT companies: Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple and Microsoft. These are also the leading companies in the fields of AI and cloud solutions. However, in terms of ecological destruction, not only the enormous waste of resources in operating data centres is relevant, but also the hardware sector – primarily the production and subsequent disposal of computer chips. This is why I also consider the ten largest technology companies: NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, Broadcom, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Oracle, Palantir Technologies and ASML.
But what is right-leaning about this?
These companies are largely run by a clique of rightward-leaning tech billionaires who are no longer content merely to offer technological solutions that exacerbate social inequality, erode the political public sphere as a space for debate, and undermine its relation to reality. Rather, these companies are also striving to develop an AI-based superintelligence that they explicitly intend to use to implement totalitarian visions of the future.
You also see a new antifeminism within this right-wing complex. What does that have to do with “Big Tech”?
First of all, antifeminism is, in a very non-technical sense, the binding agent in the highly heterogeneous alliance of ultra-right libertarian tech figures with the MAGA movement in the United States. Substantively, there are frictions everywhere – and without the shared enemy image of (queer) feminism, this contradictory movement would have long since fallen apart. In addition, there is the motivation of “Big Tech” to develop current large language models towards a superintelligent, transhuman future. This is closely linked to ideologies from the spectrum of eugenics. Elon Musk, for example, is working on artificial wombs to enable desired genetic traits in certain people. This is the wet dream of every technocrat: selective reproduction without the “tedious necessity” of a woman.
I found it interesting how, in your interview with Radio Dreyeckland, you elaborated that the right always has a “civil war option” in mind in its culture war. From Weimer to Weimar?
“Culture war” sounds harmless, confined to a level of symbolic politics in which the right, for example, uses staged outrage over left-wing cancel culture in order to in turn suppress books, films, cultural funding, and so on. In 2025, the Minister of State for Culture Weimer warned of a “global culture war” threatening the freedom of science and art, only to wage it himself in Germany in 2026. “Social” media facilitate the intended polarisation by driving up the social (conflict) temperature through a disproportionate amplification of the reach of hate, agitation and fake content.
The constant intensification of conflict serves fascism. Fascism even requires unrestrained violence in the streets. A grazed ear of Trump, a murdered Charlie Kirk, the openly displayed violence of the deportation unit ICE – these are potential flashpoints for a fascising escalation of violence with the possibility of a civil war, the imbalance of forces of which would currently favour the right.
You criticise that technology always reflects power relations. And in a system without domination?
A liberated society must, with the participation of society as a whole, assess the benefits and harms of individual technologies. A nuclear power plant remains a socio-ecological catastrophe, even if it is not operated in a capitalist manner. And anyone who considers the enormous waste, particularly of energy and water, in relation to social benefit will come to the conclusion that, alongside language models such as ChatGPT, cryptocurrencies and streaming are not options for a liberated society – we must be honest about that.
What existing damage do you observe?
First and foremost, the ecological damage caused by the unchecked expansion of high-performance data centres for AI. The effect of the erosion of the political public sphere will only be recognised by the majority very late. I would go so far as to say that “Big Tech” is currently, almost unhindered, advancing a “politics of the end of politics”. Without massive resistance, we will inevitably end up in the post-democracy of algorithmic population management.
In two weeks’ time, you will be coming to the “Cables of Resistance” conference in Berlin. This will also address socialisation. Which “Big Tech” could be saved from a left-wing perspective – and which could not?
Not a single one can be saved as it is. We would have to painstakingly extract each technology from its technocratic entanglements – some would have to be fundamentally restructured socio-technically – for example, “social” media. For some technologies, this is not possible at all – such as AI language models like ChatGPT. And some are not compatible with an emancipatory society at all – such as the automation of killing with the help of Palantir.
Some – including left-wing tech optimists – describe the “liberation” of specific technologies as a “detachment” from capitalism. I consider that naive at best. There is no easily identifiable core of capitalism from which we can neatly separate the shell of a supposedly neutral technology. The technological assault on our ecological, material and social foundations of life is unfortunately far more complex.
How could a corporation like X/Tesla/SpaceX be brought to its knees? Who would have to stand together?
In the United States in 2025, there was – among other things out of contempt for Elon Musk’s coup-like dismantling of the federal administration as “master of layoffs” – a broad campaign against his corporate conglomerate. Hundreds of Tesla showrooms were blockaded or attacked. Celebrities publicly sold their Teslas for effect. Many others placed stickers on them reading “I bought this before Elon went crazy”. This severely and lastingly damaged the reputation of the former model electric car manufacturer. Elon Musk is, in terms of character, the ideal figure for unrestrained ridicule and contempt.
An orchestrated exodus from the platform X, on the other hand – which, in conjunction with the AI “Grok”, is increasingly generating a fascistic resonance in debates – is admittedly a tough nut to crack, as X still maintains itself as a politically and journalistically relevant “decision-maker” platform and triggers the traditional media.
As for SpaceX, Starlink and Neuralink, one can at most imagine cunning hackers – but admittedly that sounds very much like wishful thinking. In short, an antifascist and feminist counteroffensive at the level of the technological offensive still has to be laboriously developed – the aforementioned movement conference from 10 to 12 April in Berlin could be an important building block.
Since this week, our daily newspaper is no longer printed on paper, but is available only in the app, with individual articles of course also online. After everything we have discussed: how do you personally view this step towards digitalisation?
Negatively – I like reading newspapers without having to disclose which articles I am specifically interested in.
Guido Arnold is a physicist and works at the Duisburg Institute for Language and Social Research. He obtained his doctorate in quantum theory and today deals with the political consequences of AI and big data.
Published in German in „nd“.
