Cyberpunk: The New Totalitarianism

Asma Mhalla’s wildly popular Cyberpunk is a prescient, urgent deep dive into techno-political totalitarianism with more than 50,000 copies sold since its release in France.

French political scientist Mhalla interrogates how the marriage of Big Tech with anti-democratic shifts in government toward totalitarianism is transforming our brains into political battlefields. To Mhalla, control of civil society no longer operates primarily through censorship or repression, but through infrastructure—digital platforms, AI systems, cloud monopolies, and attention capture.

In Cyberpunk, Mhalla argues that Big Tech does not merely influence politics, it constitutes a parallel sovereignty; that “free speech” rhetoric is increasingly used as a structural double bind; that AI systems are not only tools but cognitive infrastructures shaping the boundaries of the thinkable; and that Western democracies may be transitioning toward a post-liberal configuration without formal rupture. She sees contemporary U.S. politics not as a return to historical fascism, but as the emergence of a new, technologically mediated regime.

With parallels to the writings of Slavoj Zizek and Karen Hao’s Empire of AI, Cyberpunk is something new: an urgent, in-depth examination of the rapid transformation of the State, the mounting threats to our democracies, and the defining conflicts we’re likely to be facing in the century ahead.