Cyberpunk

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.