Hito Steyerl: Art, Automation and Authoritarianism | Doomscroll

Overview

Hito Steyerl argues that AI is increasingly being used as an “AI-assisted authoritarianism” tool—both to automate state power and to reshape culture and politics in ways that hollow out democratic deliberation.

AI automation and the shrinking of democratic “judgment”

• Steyerl contends that right-wing governments use AI to automate parts of government decision-making, replacing collective deliberation with automated “judgment.”
• She frames this as “automating the public sphere”: when the processes that allocate public resources (and justify decisions) become mechanized, democratic practice—debate and shared judgment—can disappear.
• She compares these shifts to systems that can deny public services through automated decision chains, shifting authority away from public reasoning and toward algorithmic control.

The “public sphere” is being captured; an AI “for the left” is uncertain

• Steyerl argues authoritarians have already captured key AI workflows and the “means of production” behind them.
• She doubts a left-wing AI at scale will emerge soon, noting that building labor organization and social-democratic structures historically took decades—and those conditions are now made harder by labor automation.

Ideological content is “baked into” AI systems

• In discussing image-generation experiments, Steyerl emphasizes that generative models can reproduce ideological “meme” structures, and that refusals can be bypassed.
• She connects this to long-running political myths, including a “horseshoe theory”-style equivalence between far left and far right under a shared “totalitarian” logic.
• Her broader claim is that new AI models may be “cosplaying” neoliberal assumptions, such as:
  • the idea that capitalism behaves like an optimal computing system, and
  • the belief that replacing humans with AI yields better outcomes.

De-globalization and competing spheres increase resource extraction pressures

• Steyerl links the current geopolitical shift (roughly the end of post-1989 global optimism around 2016) to shrinking horizons and attention.
• She argues that supply-chain simplification and “friend-shoring”/nearshoring produce quasi-colonial patterns, including intensified extraction of rare minerals needed for AI infrastructure.
• She claims the EU is scrambling to define influence zones and is pulled by strong Eurosceptic politics; some parties align with Eurasian-style ideologies connected to Russian strategic thought.

Cultural/technological politics: tech emancipation narratives collapsed

• Steyerl argues that during the Arab Spring, technology was already being used for propaganda and surveillance, not emancipation—suggesting a rapid fall of liberal pretense.
• She describes a broader trajectory:
  1. first, mass consumer/behavioral surveillance, then
  2. a rapid turn where oligarchs no longer feel compelled to maintain liberal legitimacy.

Protest and “missing revolution”

• Building on themes associated with Vincent Bevins, Steyerl argues protests don’t automatically lead to revolution.
• Protest may function like an “information accelerator” or a valve, generating social-media visibility (“vibe”) more than durable organized change.
• She allows that protest waves can become the prelude to later organization, but it may take a long time to coalesce.

Convergence of authoritarian models and “nationalizing capitalism”

• Steyerl suggests there may be “only one system left,” with the US and China not fundamentally different—both moving toward nationalized, top-down capitalism governed through tightly controlled tech infrastructures.
• She notes that corporations and the state can capture each other in either direction, but in both cases a broader controlling class benefits.
• She highlights a contradiction: crypto-libertarian ideas clash with increasing state nationalization and the war-economy logic.

AI, far-right rise, and how elites reconcile competing interests

• She asserts a strong correlation between AI development and far-right politics (causation remains unclear).
• She argues AI helps tech oligarchs by:
  • automating labor,
  • reducing reliance on migration, and
  • scaling propaganda cheaply.
• As a result, right-wing movements may share incentives with AI platforms—even when populist ideology appears “anti-elite.”
• She points to messaging that performs solidarity with blue-collar workers while simultaneously automating them.

“Degenerate art” and “AI slop” as a new cultural battleground

• Steyerl connects the Nazi concept of “degenerate art” (and its institutional use for censorship) to today’s controversy over generative “AI slop.”
• Her framing is that cultural wars are intensifying over what counts as legitimate art versus content to be automated, dismissed, or discredited.

Contemporary art’s changing function under austerity and speculative finance

• Steyerl argues contemporary art is already shifting away from its role as status/reputation infrastructure.
• She claims it has also functioned like a tax/wealth-management mechanism; as speculation (betting markets) replaces that function, art’s role will not simply return.
• She describes austerity across European cultural institutions:
  • budgets tighten, and
  • culture becomes preemptively aligned with nationalist scrutiny.
• She says fascist movements are prepared to use cultural institutions for national cultural programs, while left parties often lack an equally coherent “culture program.”

Presenters/Contributors

• Joshua Citarella (host)
• Hito Steyerl (guest; filmmaker, author, professor of digital media)