From Orwell to Silicon Valley: Dystopian Literature and the Political Grammar of Techno-Neoliberalism

This paper builds on my 2024 APSA presentation, "Are We in Post-Neoliberalism Yet?," which argued that neoliberalism has not entered a post-neoliberal phase but has instead evolved into an increasingly authoritarian and adaptive political ideology. Rather than disappearing with a renewed focus on statecraft and the return of industrial policy, strategic competition or a more interventionist state, neoliberalism has proved capable of incorporating these developments while preserving its central assumptions: the primacy of markets, the subordination of democratic politics to economic imperatives, and the concentration of power in private hands. The paper asks whether the growing political influence of digital platforms, artificial intelligence and technology billionaires represents a new phase of neoliberalism, one that requires a more precise conceptual vocabulary than existing accounts of either ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘post-neoliberalism.’ Rather than proposing an entirely new ideology, I argue that the current political landscape extends the neoliberal project of the past five decades through the unprecedented fusion of technological, economic and political power. The expanding role of technology corporations in shaping the public arena, knowledge, governance and even state capacity suggests not the retreat of neoliberalism but its consolidation and triumph in new institutional forms. To explore this transformation, the paper adopts an unconventional but historically grounded theoretical framework. It treats four classic dystopian novels - George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, and Jack London's The Iron Heel - not as predictions of the future but as enduring works of political imagination that illuminate recurring patterns of power, authority and social organisation. Great works of literature often identify political tendencies before they become fully visible within academic or policy debates. Read together, these novels provide a political grammar for understanding contemporary developments that recent concepts, including Varoufakis's 'technofeudalism' and Slobodian's 'Muskism', seek to describe. Rather than signalling the end of neoliberalism, however, I suggest these developments are better understood as evidence of its latest mutation. Each novel captures a distinct dimension of the emerging political order: Orwell's analysis of surveillance, permanent war and the manipulation of truth; Huxley's critique of consumerism, technological distraction/entertainment and voluntary conformity; Zamyatin's vision of technocratic rationality, algorithmic governance and the reduction of the human element; and London's depiction of oligarchic capitalism and the fusion of concentrated wealth with political power. These works, rather than describing the future, reveal some political pathologies that have acquired renewed significance in the age of artificial intelligence and oligarchic power (e.g. social control, authoritarianism, technological supremacy, extreme inequality). For this reason, they offer a coherent informative framework for understanding the ideological transformation of contemporary liberal democracies. By bringing political theory into conversation with literary imagination, the paper argues that dystopian fiction remains an indispensable companion for understanding twenty-first-century politics. It suggests that today's democratic crisis is not simply institutional or constitutional, but ideological: a transformation in the ideas that govern society, the language through which citizens understand political life, and the relationship between technology, markets and democratic authority.