Dehumanizing Humans, Personifying Computers: Why Modern Fascism Wants You to be Lonely
Welcome to fully-automated luxury fascism. Can I take your personhood?
Contributing to our community is very important to us at The Flytrap.
All profits this month from this fantastic bandana designed by our Art Director, rommy torrico, will be going to Comunidades Organizando El Poder Y La Acción Latina, a grassroots, immigrant-led organization supporting Latine families in Minnesota.
I keep thinking about the ICE agent who was caught on tape last month wondering aloud to a horde of his fellow goons: “It’s just like ‘Call of Duty.’” He says this almost cheerily, while wielding a weapon of war in the streets of Minneapolis. This odious and cowardly fucko, gunned up and masked, terrorizing the people of Minnesota—though, I guess in his view, Minnesotans aren’t people at all. Just a bunch of random NPCs. Fodder for the fascist high score.
I also keep thinking about the Nvidia shill—sorry, ahemm, the company’s ”global head of generative AI for automotive”—inviting attendees of the CES 2026 tech conference to “think of the car as having a soul and being an extension of your family.” Souls for cars with computers! Am I losing my mind? Do I even have one? Am I committing automotive abuse if I don’t tuck mine in each night and read it a bedtime story?
And I keep thinking of the growing anti-abortion efforts to grant constitutional rights to zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. Such proposals pave the way for the prosecution of people who have abortions—an explicit policy goal of the anti-abortion “abolitionist” faction and one that’s becoming increasingly palatable among mainline “pro-life” leaders. The anti-abortion lobby calls this “equal protection” or “fetal personhood,” and it demands that pregnant people relinquish their own human right to reproductive self-determination.
I don’t know how people use ChatGPT to write grocery lists. I don’t want a grocery list made by a computer designed to tell kids to kill themselves.