The Algorithm Doesn’t Hate You—It Just Needs to Sort
How Big Tech and the State formed a symbiotic loop to build a stable, frictionless tyranny.
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.”
— Oscar Wilde
In October, 2025, in Tokyo, standing before the polite applause of a world that is looking at the exit signs, Ian Bremmer needed eight thousand words to declare America unreliable. The diagnosis was elegant, academically sound, and delivered with the somber authority of a physician confirming a terminal illness. He spoke of allies pursuing “defense first, hedge second” strategies, of a global order unmoored from its traditional anchor.
You might assume this essay will be another geopolitical rant, a catalog of institutional failures, a lament for declining hegemony, perhaps some hand-wringing about populism. But I don’t have time for political meteorology. What interests me is not the storm but the physics of the storm itself. What I want to track is what the algorithm will do to human consciousness in the next twelve months, and I’m going to use these political events not as the subject but as symbols, markers of a transformation happening at the level of being itself.
Because Bremmer, for all his perspicacity, remained at the surface. He saw the weather. He missed the climate system. The true mechanism of collapse, the engine driving our great unraveling, wasn’t revealed in his lengthy talk.
Here are some events that we are scrolling to, and what they mean for our ontology.
In the current operating system, truth is a bug.
On August 22, 2025, Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of the recently renamed Department of War, fired General Jeffrey Kruse, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
No scandal. No operational failure. No catastrophic intelligence lapse. No reason.
Kruse’s sin was his competence.
He was fired because his agency produced a painstakingly accurate damage assessment of American airstrikes on Iran—an assessment concluding the strikes were far less effective than the President had publicly claimed.
The report was not wrong. It was merely true.
But, in the current operating system, truth is a bug.
Here, the curtain pulls back. Not to reveal a grand, tragic unreliability—a declining empire struggling with its contradiction.
But something more brittle, more pathological: a system that has begun to actively sever its own sensory organs. This is not an empire choosing erratic behavior. This is an organism eliminating the neural pathways that report pain, hunger, damage. We may call it “frictionless fascism”. But it is more than that. This organism is achieving a perfect imperviousness to feedback, not through strength but through systematic self-blinding.
What Bremmer diagnosed as political dysfunction is actually ontological violence. The American state isn’t merely behaving unpredictably; it is becoming an entity incapable of perceiving reality in the first place, because it now treats accurate information as an attack on its own integrity. This is institutional autoimmune disorder—the body mistaking its own immune system for a foreign invader and destroying it. As Ian said in his talk, Trump considers our enemies not foreign, but domestic.
When an organism can no longer process signals from its own nervous system, it doesn’t become unreliable. It becomes a corpse that just doesn’t know it yet. And what dies first—before the geopolitical order, before American hegemony, before democracy itself—is something more fundamental: the capacity to perceive that anything is dying at all.
“Accountability is friction. A complaint is friction. An accurate intelligence assessment is friction. And the goal of the modern state, like any good algorithm, is to achieve a perfectly frictionless operation.”
The firing of General Kruse was not an anomaly. It was a system declaring its new operating principles. It was the public beta test for a logic that had already been perfected in the state’s darker laboratories—those places where the imaginal space between human and non-human, between subject and object, between truth and power, had already been systematically collapsed.
Before Hegseth could purge the Pentagon’s command structure—a process that began with the symbolic renaming of the institution to the “Department of War” because, as he stated, “the era of Defense is over”—another agency had already field-tested and refined the art of accountability erasure. Not in the spotlight of military spectacle, but in the shadows where transformation happens before it gets named.
What Hegseth is doing to generals, the system had already done to migrants. What he’s scaling up at the center, ICE has already perfected at the periphery. And what both reveal is not just political cruelty but something stranger: the systematic elimination of the mediating space where reality can disclose itself, where suffering can register as real, where the distance between what the system claims and what the system does can even be perceived as distance.
This is not repression. Repression acknowledges what it suppresses. This is something more elegant: the engineering of a reality where the gap between truth and power cannot even achieve the status of a gap. Where feedback doesn’t get ignored—it becomes structurally impossible. Where the scream doesn’t get dismissed—it gets ontologically downgraded to noise that never qualified as signal in the first place.
The algorithm is learning to optimize away not just friction, but the possibility of friction. And in doing so, it is eliminating the one thing that makes transformation possible: resistance. Not political resistance. Ontological resistance. The friction that reality offers when you try to reduce it to your models. The way the rose withdraws even as it blooms. The way being simultaneously discloses and conceals itself, demanding that we attune rather than control, participate rather than possess.
This is where we’re going. Not collapse. Not yet.
Let me show you how it works. (and who is funding it).
The algorithm has no affect at all. It simply recognizes that certain classes of data—suffering that demands response, truth that contradicts narratives—introduce computational overhead, drag on the system, obstacles to the perfectly frictionless operation.
Human suffering as statistical noise.
For years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operated as the proof of concept.
The “beta” environment where the system could test its most radical hypothesis: that human suffering could be successfully reclassified as statistical noise.
This was not merely an agency of cruelty.
Cruelty implies intention, emotion, the residue of human choice. This was something colder, more elegant: a marvel of epistemological engineering that perfected a closed loop where feedback becomes structurally impossible.
The mechanism is brutally simple. You don’t argue against complaints. You don’t suppress them through force. You simply dismantle the architecture designed to govern them.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties—the internal regulatory organ that reports of abuse within the detention machine—was not reformed or streamlined. It was slashed. Its mandate hollowed out. Its function deprecated, like legacy code no longer compatible with the new operating system.
The result: a system that could not hear screams. Because it had surgically removed its own ears.
Between 2010 and 2017, government data revealed at least 1,224 complaints of sexual assault filed from within ICE detention centers. That’s one sexual assault every other day for seven years. Let that sink in for a moment.
Each complaint was a desperate attempt to communicate a system error. Each was routed into a bureaucratic black hole. Not suppressed—that would imply the system registered the signal and chose to ignore it. No: the aperture through which such signals could even register as signals had been systematically closed. The scream never achieved the status of scream. It was pre-emptively downgraded to distortion, malfunction, interference with optimal throughput.
When you eliminate that space for friction, you don’t just enable cruelty. You achieve something more comprehensive: you make cruelty imperceptible.
Data is a new form of class warfare.
This is the logic now being scaled up. Ported from the periphery of the carceral state to the center of the American war machine.
The Pentagon purge is not an invention; it is an implementation. Hegseth is simply doing to generals what the state is doing to migrants: redefining those who report reality as the problem to be eliminated.
But notice the deeper pattern. The migrant’s complaint and the general’s intelligence assessment are not just analogous—they are the same phenomenon viewed from different altitudes. Both represent friction. Both introduce resistance into a system optimizing for flow. Both force the system to acknowledge a gap between its narrative and reality. And both must be eliminated not through argument or suppression, but through the more elegant solution of making them unregisterable in the first place.
The algorithm doesn’t hate migrants or distrust generals.
The algorithm has no affect at all. It simply recognizes that certain classes of data—suffering that demands response, truth that contradicts narratives—introduce computational overhead, drag on the system, obstacles to the perfectly frictionless operation.
And so it does what any good algorithm does: it optimizes them away. The corpse doesn’t know it’s dead yet. But the nervous system is going fast. This is what’s being perfected.
And the Rose Garden is where it received its funding.
The ancient, durable bigotries of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are repurposed as computationally efficient heuristics for data dismissal. The algorithm doesn’t need to hate; it just needs to sort.
Rose Garden and Arithmetic of Anxiety
On September 4, 2025, the architects of our new reality gathered in the Rose Garden.
What we got was a live-streamed ritual of mutual consecration, broadcast to millions of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, watching on devices they could barely afford as men pledged amounts that could rebuild entire cities.
The president spoke first, setting the tone with his characteristic mix of boast and beneficence: “It’s an honor to be here with this group of people… the most brilliant people… we’re making it very easy for you in terms of electric capacity and getting it for you, getting your permits.” He positioned himself as the gracious patron, the enabler of genius, the man who removes obstacles. In other words: “I am the one who makes friction disappear.”
Mark Zuckerberg went next, and for a moment—just a moment—the performance cracked. When asked how much Meta would invest, he hesitated: “Oh gosh… I mean I think it’s probably going to be something like I don’t know at least $600 billion.” Like “oh gosh” and “$600 billion” should be in the same sentence.
That “oh gosh” is the most revealing moment of the entire event. It’s the sound of a man calculating in real time, weighing the obscenity of the number against the necessity of saying it, performing enthusiasm while his internal spreadsheet runs scenarios. Because Zuckerberg has the most to lose here. Meta is bleeding cultural relevance. The metaverse pivot failed. His company has become synonymous with surveillance capitalism at precisely the moment when people are beginning to understand what surveillance capitalism actually means.
The $600 billion is a rehab fee. Zuckerberg is shape-shifting from surveillance architect to patriotic builder, from oligarch to innovator. He’s buying the narrative infrastructure that will continue replacing human consciousness with algorithmic mediation, and he’s doing it by wrapping the whole enterprise in the flag of domestic job creation, data centers on American soil, tangible infrastructure you can point to.
Sergey Brin’s girlfriend takes the microphone—one of the dinner’s few unscripted moments. “I truly every time I’m here or in your presence I’m so grateful… you’re applying a lot of pressure to Maduro and I think that’s phenomenal…”. Ok. Next.
Then Sergey Brin himself, co-founder of Google, delivers what might be the evening’s most honest statement: “…the fact that your administration is supporting our companies instead of fighting with them it’s hugely important… obviously it’s a global race…”. Interesting choice of words coming from a man familiar with antitrust hearings and regulatory pressure, particularly during the years when the federal government treated Big Tech as something that might need to be constrained rather than unleashed.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, follows with the more diplomatic version: “I would echo what Sergey said… the AI action plan under your leadership I think is a great start and we look forward to working together.” More buttoned-up, more professional, but the message is identical: we will be good partners if you will be good to us.
What is Google gaining? A regulatory environment that treats Google not as a monopoly to be broken up but as a national champion to be supported in the “global race.” He’s trading cooperation for impunity, wrapping corporate consolidation in the language of patriotic competition.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, takes a different angle: “…not only the innovation but it’s the market access that you have obviously championed for us all over the world and also the trust the world has on American technology…”. He’s less focused on domestic investment than international dominance. His ask is more sophisticated: use American diplomatic and trade power to open foreign markets, to position “American technology” as the trusted alternative to Chinese alternatives. He’s thinking globally while his peers think domestically, and his invocation of “trust” at the precise moment trust’s foundations are being dismantled is a masterclass in inversion.
Then Bill Gates speaks, and the temperature changes. He’s not there as a CEO but as a philanthropist, an elder statesman: “I’m in the second phase of my career giving away all the wonderful money… the president and I are talking about taking American innovation to the next level to cure diseases… we want “a doctor for everyone in Africa through AI…”. He’s the only one who can afford to sound visionary rather than transactional, humanitarian rather than calculating. He’s not asking for regulatory relief or market access. He’s lobbying for his foundation’s causes, connecting AI to global health, using his unparalleled access to influence the president on a completely different axis.
Tim Cook, as always, is calm, deliberate, almost understated: “I want to thank you for setting the tone such that we could make a major investment in the United States and have some key manufacturing advanced manufacturing here…”. That phrase—“setting the tone”—is perfect Cook. It’s diplomatic, respectful, carefully calibrated to acknowledge the administration’s “America First” manufacturing focus without being obsequious. He’s announcing Apple’s $600 billion investment while simultaneously protecting Apple from criticism about its Chinese supply chain. He’s performing patriotic capitalism while maintaining operational flexibility. Smart.
Sam Altman, by contrast, brings energy: “Thank you for being such a pro-business pro-innovation president, it’s a very refreshing change… we will invest a ton in the United States… and we will do our best to make sure that we continue to lead here.”. That “refreshing change” line lands like Brin’s “instead of fighting with them”—it’s a pointed contrast with the previous administration. Altman seems genuinely pleased to have a government that wants to accelerate AI rather than interrogate it. His calculation is transparent: praise the “pro-innovation” stance to ensure OpenAI has maximum freedom to build and deploy increasingly powerful models without regulatory constraints. He’s the newest player at this table, the one with the most to prove, and he’s using enthusiasm as currency.
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
— George Orwell, 1984
Watch them all together. The subtle nods. The micro-confirmations. The way they look at each other, building consensus in real time. This is game theory performed live, broadcast to millions, and the subtext is unanimous: We are in this together. We have to be. Because if one of us breaks ranks, the performance collapses. This is dialectical subservience—each oligarch simultaneously master and slave. They have unprecedented power to shape how billions perceive reality. And yet they sit in the Rose Garden, performing gratitude to a president many privately consider beneath them, because they need what he provides: the systematic elimination of every feedback mechanism that might constrain them.
And Trump needs them. Needs their capital, first and foremost. But also needs their expertise, their ability to make algorithmic governance look like innovation rather than tyranny. It’s mutual dependency so complete it transcends corruption into something stranger—a merger at the level of logic itself.
The millions of Americans watching—drowning in debt, one emergency away from catastrophe—are the audience this performance simultaneously addresses and excludes. Addressed because power must be witnessed to be real. Excluded because their witnessing cannot be allowed to matter, cannot generate the friction that would slow this machinery down.
The performance ends. The pledges stand. And the frictionless future lurches one Rose Garden meeting closer to completion.
The precariat is anyone whose existence generates contradictory data. The migrant in a detention center whose complaint of assault introduces an unwanted variable into the deportation throughput calculation.
Where do we go from here?
Here, then, the logic of the system is unveiled. The true class lines of the 21st century are drawn. This is not the clean, industrial war of Marx, a struggle over the ownership of factories. This is a messy, algorithmic class war, a struggle over the means of epistemological production. We are fighting a war in a new metaphysical dimension: algorithmic oppression. This dimension will generate wars based on perception. This is why I keep saying AGI is already here. AGI is the creator of this new dimension, which we are in.
The new ruling class—the masters—is a symbiotic partnership between those who control the flow of information (the tech oligarchs at the Rose Garden dinner) and those who control the application of state violence (the Hegseths in their newly christened Departments of War). Their shared project is the pursuit of a perfectly optimized, frictionless world. And in this world, the new precariat—the slaves—are not defined by their labor or their poverty, but by their new nature as producers of friction.
The precariat is anyone whose existence generates contradictory data. The migrant in a detention center whose complaint of assault introduces an unwanted variable into the deportation throughput calculation. The general whose accurate battlefield assessment disrupts a clean narrative of victory. The climate scientist whose models predict a costly and inconvenient future. The seven million protesters whose physical presence represents a massive, un-monetizable dataset of dissent.
To the optimized system, a cry for justice is just a denial-of-service attack. The durable bigotries of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are repurposed as computationally efficient heuristics for data dismissal. The algorithm doesn’t need to hate; it just needs to sort.
Ian presents two potential futures in the next 12 months
This war of perception leaves us at a precipice with a view of two equally terrifying futures.
The first future: Ian Bremmer gestures toward accelerationist collapse. A system that has systematically severed every feedback loop—that has fired every general, defunded every oversight body, and ignored every complaint—eventually becomes so profoundly detached from reality that it crashes into it. Wars are lost not for lack of valor but for a surplus of delusion. Economies crater because the data showing their fragility was deemed too negative to circulate. This is the inevitable fate of an organism that blinds and deafens itself. The crisis Bremmer predicts arrives not as a political realignment but as the brute force of physics reasserting itself against a state built on pure narrative.
A system that has optimized away its capacity to perceive reality will eventually discover—catastrophically—that reality does not care about your optimization.
The second future: This future, however, is perhaps more horrifying, characterized by a stable, frictionless tyranny. The system doesn’t collapse; it perfects itself. The ICE detention center, the erasure of accountability, becomes the model for all governance. A new equilibrium is reached where the state and its partnered tech monopolies achieve a perfect symbiosis, a closed loop of optimized control. Dissent isn’t crushed; it is simply rendered algorithmically insignificant.
Consider the estimated seven million people who participated in the “No Kings” protests—a physical event of staggering scale, perhaps the largest in the nation’s history. In the curated reality, it becomes a footnote, a blip, afforded less weight and circulation by the great sorting algorithms than Bremmer’s single, high-status speech. The system didn’t need to arrest them; it just needed to de-rank them.
This is the achievement of stable tyranny: not the suppression of resistance but its successful reclassification as irrelevant data. The protesters still march. The complaints still get filed. The accurate reports still get written. But the aperture through which these signals could register as meaningful—the imaginal space where their truth could disclose itself, where the gap between what is and what should be could generate transformation—has been systematically closed.
The crisis is not coming. The crisis is that the feedback loops have already been cut. The aperture has already closed. The imaginal—that translucent space where transformation happens, where symbols work, where you can look at something and through it simultaneously—is already being systematically eliminated, replaced by the avatar, the digital twin, the model that is you with such computational fidelity that the gap necessary for becoming other than what you are has been optimized away.
The question is no longer what we will do when it arrives.
The question is: will anyone be left who remembers what it was like before the desert of the real?
References
1. Ian Bremmer’s State of the World Address
Ian Bremmer, “State of the World 2025 Speech,” GZERO Summit Japan, Tokyo, October 21, 2025
Full video and transcript: https://www.gzeromedia.com/video/state-of-the-world/ian-bremmer-state-of-the-world-2025
2. Rose Garden AI Dinner Video
“Trump Rose Garden AI Dinner with Tech CEOs,” September 4, 2025
3. General Kruse Firing
Warren P. Strobel, “Hegseth fires head of Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse,” The Washington Post, August 22, 2025
4. ICE Sexual Assault Data
Women’s Refugee Commission, “Too Swift for Human Rights: The Catastrophic Cost of Eliminating Government Oversight over Immigration Enforcement,” April 9, 2025
5. ICE Sexual Assault Historical Data
Freedom for Immigrants, “Sexual Assault in Immigration Detention” (documenting 1,224 complaints 2010-2017)
6. Pentagon Purges Context
Konstantin Toropin, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Michelle L. Price, “Hegseth Fires General Whose Agency’s Intel Assessment Angered Trump,” Military.com, August 22, 2025
7. Rose Garden Dinner Coverage
“Trump to host tech CEOs for first event in newly renovated Rose Garden,” The Hill, September 5, 2025
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5485218-trump-host-tech-ceos-rose-garden/
8. No Kings Protests
Ian Bremmer, “Trump is leading a political revolution. Will he succeed?” GZERO Media, October 22, 2025
https://www.gzeromedia.com/by-ian-bremmer/trump-is-leading-a-political-revolution-will-he-succeed
(Notes “more than five million Americans turned out in thousands of ‘No Kings Day’ protests”)
9. ICE Detention Abuse Investigation
“Hundreds of immigrants have reported sexual abuse at ICE facilities. Most cases aren’t investigated,” PBS NewsHour, July 21, 2023
10. DHS Oversight Elimination
Project On Government Oversight, “DHS’s Secret Reports on ICE Detention,” March 19, 2025
https://www.pogo.org/investigations/dhss-secret-reports-on-ice-detention
Really interesting piece. You are onto a lot here. Pretty insightful :)
Hey, great read as alwasy, love how you always dive deep into the algorithms shaping our reality, really appreciate your perspective.