Creative resistance under the ‘Broligarchy’

The Civic Futures team reflects after RightsCon2025

Amidst the shock and awe of Trump-Musk tactics, the mask has dropped. The dystopian reality of the convergence of Big Tech and State Security powers in the form of the ‘Broligarchy’ is now plainly revealed for all to see. The global repression of civil society with authoritarian tactics is not new, but technology is super-charging their power in dangerous new ways. Now is the time for creative resistance and reimagining resourcing.

All over the world Civic Space is under attack: from Egypt – where activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, detained by national security services remains languishing in prison, to China, where national security laws are used to repress online speech, to the attack on human rights in Kenya using national security frameworks.

While in the Global Majority world, states have been using national security to repress their own populations for years, the Global Minority or Global North has largely tended to reserve its most repressive national security tactics for use externally, whether through the funding of genocide in Gaza, the War on Terror or the violent policing of borders. Global north political parties across the spectrum appear united in their commitment to this particular approach to security, which seeks to protect a small minority while ignoring the deeper underlying crises.

But that external repression was destined to be turned inwards. Just as Cesaire described how the cruelty of colonialism sank deep into the heart of Europe, creating a boomerang effect where this repression came back to the imperial core in the form of fascism in the 1930’s – Arun Kundnani argues that the current resurgence of the far Right in Europe and the United States is the ‘War on Terror come home’.

Rooted in this understanding of the centrality of national security as a tool for repression, last week, we spent a week in Taiwan for RightsCon2025, seeking to learn more about how technology is being used in the name of national security to close civic space, and to connect with others working on these issues.

What we found was that national security simmers underneath almost all discussions around digital rights, whether the focus is content moderation and regulation, internet shutdowns, surveillance and spyware or biometrics and AI.

None of this is new – but the entanglement of Big Tech and the State has deepened in the last few years, even since 2023 when we wrote about the role of technology in a global ‘Security Playbook’ used for civil society repression. And with the Trump-Musk alliance, the “broligarchy” is now unmissable.

Silicon Valley’s involvement in defense has rapidly accelerated in recent months, with agreements in December between companies like Palantir, Anduril, and OpenAI to supply the U.S. government with defense and weapons capabilities, helping them to access a share of the $850 billion U.S. defense budget.

Meanwhile, Musk’s company SpaceX is working with US national intelligence agencies to produce the “largest geospatial surveillance program in human history” made up of hundreds of spy satellites which will connect with Musk’s thousands of Starlink satellites.

While the authoritarian and repressive tactics of the State are not new, these technologies dramatically shift the balance of power between states and their citizens.

We met brilliant activists and thinkers at RightsCon doing the vital and risky work of calling out the power structures behind these technologies. Their rigorous research demonstrates how technology developed and used for genocide, policing or for border control is eventually rolled out and used universally. When you draw the dots together, we are witnessing the unfolding of a dystopian reality.

All this is taking place amidst dramatic changes to the civil society sector itself, with massive funding cuts from the US and other Global North governments affecting the work of many of the organisations from around the world who attended RightsCon 2025.

While civil society around the world has been resisting criminalisation, surveillance, restrictions on foreign funding, administrative and legal harassment for many years, the cuts in funding from major global north government donors undoubtedly represents a moment of disruption for the sector as a whole and forms part of the newly emboldened repression of civil society coming from the global north.

The blows have come hard and fast – mirroring a shock and awe military model aimed at disrupting our ability to observe, orient, decide and act. Their goal is to leave people confused and unable to sense-make under the fog of war.

The beauty of convenings like RightsCon, is in the opportunity to connect with others and take inspiration from their creative and joyful modes of resistance – the antidote to the fog.

Some key lessons we’re taking back from RightsCon: We must not obey authoritarians in advance, nor allow them to control our imagination of what is possible, or push us into adopting the fear-based, competitive mindsets which ultimately only benefits fascism. The scarcity mindset drives competitiveness and competition for resources, which not only divides and weakens movements, but also shores up the very fear-based mindsets and mental models underlying the hard security paradigm. In these moments of crisis, slowing down feels counterintuitive. But now, more than ever, we must dig deep and carve out space to refocus on our values, create deep connections with others and tap into our creative minds to rethink our theories of change and reimagine resourcing.

At Civic Futures we entered 2025 with the beginning of our experimental grant programme to ‘Imagine the Alternative to the Hard Security Paradigm’. Ten grants of 90K USD were made to civil society groups from a range of geographies, movements and sectors, to generate new ideas on security alternatives or test out narrative strategies to elevate existing ideas.

While our partners, and others across the ecosystem collectively imagine alternatives, philanthropy must step up to support this re-imagining and also to fund urgent work to challenge repression. Only work which truthfully acknowledges the power structures at play has any hope of disrupting those power structures. Honest analysis of power also ensures that efforts at reform and harm reduction in the short term support the longer-term vision of transformative systems change. Philanthropy has a vital role to play in disrupting these power structures – given that Big Tech and the State are in alignment over national security, neither can be relied on to resource work that meaningfully challenges power.