Cyberpunk

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 Asma Mhalla interrogates how the marriage of Big Tech and anti-democratic shifts in government toward totalitarianism are transforming our brains into political battlefields.

In Cyberpunk, Asma Mhalla argues that contemporary U.S. politics represent not a return to historical fascism, but the emergence of a new, technologically mediated regime; 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. To Mhalla, control of civil society no longer operates primarily through censorship or repression, but through infrastructure—platforms, AI systems, cloud monopolies, and attention capture. We are entering a hybrid regime where democracy and authoritarianism, reality and fiction blur, where freedom and surveillance expand in parallel, and where civil and military power increasingly converge.

An urgent, in-depth examination of the rapid transformation of the State, the mounting threats to our democracies, and the defining conflicts of the century ahead.