From a Matriarchal Perspective, The Fascist Tech Bros Have Already Lost.

What patriarchy never understood about power.

Exactly one and a half years ago, a woman standing behind a microphone said something that completely altered the way I think about the future. Her exact words were: “Either matriarchy is the future, or there won’t be a future.”Sounds dramatic, I know, but stay with me.

Most people have a misguided understanding of what matriarchy actually means, so allow me to clarify. What it most certainly doesn’t mean is: “Either women will rule the planet, or there won’t be a planet.”

It means: The planet is a finite fucking living system and we have managed to establish and normalize an economic system that fundamentally DEFIES the logic of being resourceful in favor of fighting to be the most resourceful. Still, on a finite planet. You don’t need a degree in political science to understand the inherent paradox we were all born into.

Ever since hearing that wise woman at the conference put into words what I hadn’t yet been able to articulate, the world has gotten progressively worse and just a couple of days ago, we all went about our daily lives while receiving a little push notification informing us that some tech bro had announced the end of humanity in approximately three years.

The news wasn’t particularly shocking to me because, after spending the past four years scrolling from videos of the IDF hiding bombs inside footballs to kill Palestinian children, to excerpts from documents that prove how the president of the United States was auctioning off girls based on the tightness of their vaginas, to Temu fashion hauls, to catastrophic floods wiping out entire villages, a tech dude predicting the end of humanity somehow doesn’t seem all that bad.

Naturally, I reached for the only framework that might actually make sense of this shit: matriarchal thinking.

What I love so much about matriarchal thinking is that it has allowed me grasp a complete different understanding of power. In a domination-based system (patriarchy), power is measured by how much control you can exert over other people, resources and, ultimately, life itself. In a matriarchal framework, power isn’t defined by how much power you can exert over life, but how well you can sustain life. Makes sense for everyone who hasn’t outsourced their brain cells to AI yet, doesn’t it?

From this perspective, most of our current ideas of “power” start looking fucking ridiculous. If we look at the current panic around fascist tech bros building increasingly powerful AI while casually entertaining the possibility that it could wipe out human civilization in the next three years, the underlying structure becomes painfully clear. Why do we treat this as the ultimate expression of technological power? Why does the possibility of building something so powerful that it could potentially destroy us make investors’ dicks hard? Precisely because we have defined power as the ability to dominate and exert control regardless of the consequences.

The more you can control, the more you can extract. Billionaire mindset type shit. And if your creation becomes so “powerful” that it threatens the very conditions that make human life possible? Apparently, you get awarded by Axel Springer for your contribution to democracy and society. I’m not making this shit up, Peter Thiel will receive the award on September 24th in Berlin. Not without me and other anti-fascist-tech-bro-activists rallying in front of the building of course.

A matriarchal definition of power asks a much more logical question:

Does this person/ project/ company/ system actually sustain life? And correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that… the whole fucking point of evolution? Sustaining… life? Unless we don’t want to evolve as a species of course. I mean, the logic of becoming the most powerful species on Earth only makes sense if you conveniently forget that Earth is the very thing enabling our human existence to begin with. What good is being the most technologically advanced, economically powerful, resource-rich species in history if the systems that made us powerful are simultaneously destroying the conditions that allow us to exist?

Also, and this is really important to clarify at this point, I’m not using the word ‘fascist’ as a hyperbole. For an interview¹ with the Guardian, the journalist Gil Durán says, “Silicon Valley has gone fascist because they have adopted an extreme ideology of tech supremacy.” First of all, you cannot convince me that this obsession with creating something artificial that can rule all life doesn’t come from a deep-seated envy of the natural systems that already know how to sustain it.

Here we are, on a planet that grows forests, births oceans of clouds, turns sunlight into food, regulates its own temperature, somehow manages to keep billions of species alive, and along comes a tech bro fantasizing about recreating everything nature has been giving us for free for billions of years, only this time he gets to own it and put it behind a fucking paywall. Why? Because the patriarchal definition of power cannot simply marvel at something it cannot control.

This is what I meant when I said that from a matriarchal perspective, the fascist tech bros have already lost.

See, what unites us at this point in history is our humanity. And an overwhelming majority of humans don’t want their tech circus. The tech bros know it, which is why they are working overtime to convince us of its inevitability and its power to annihilate humanity.

I’m aware they aren’t exactly known for their rigorous logic — judging by the atrocious interviews they keep giving — but my aim with this essay is to show you just how spectacularly ridiculous their version of power actually is. The only reason these men are given so much airtime in the first place is because they are the perfect puppets of a system that specifically Black feminists have been challenging and screaming to dismantle for centuries. It’s also why feminism keeps being turned into ridicule. At its most radical and uncompromising, feminism was not aimed at getting women a slightly better seat inside the existing system. It was about questioning the fucking system itself. A system in which the oppression of women isn’t some unfortunate bug, but one symptom of a much larger disease: our collective inability to imagine power as anything other than domination.

The one thing a patriarchal system has never understood about power is that it doesn’t have to belong to anyone to exist. It can simply rest between us. It can rest in the relationships we build, the knowledge we share, the food we grow, the children we raise and the resources we redistribute. It actually yearns to rest after centuries of being abused. Let it rest already.

I hope this essay showed you that the tech bros aren’t actually powerful from a logical viewpoint. They’re simply operating under a really destructive definition of power, one that has become socially acceptable. We can stop accepting that. We can build our own systems where the goal isn’t to be the most resourceful, but to be resourceful enough to sustain life.

We can let power rest between us.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/aug/05/journalist-taking-on-tech-fascists-silicon-valley