Can Bernie Sanders save us from Artificial Intelligence?
Written by Alexandros Schismenos, Ph.D.
In the fourth year of the Age of Artificial Intelligence, while the world seems to be overwhelmed by governments’ institutionalized technophilia and futurists’ populist technophobia, official calls for some form of technoskepticism are beginning to multiply. In recent months, two distinct forms of technoskepticism regarding Artificial Intelligence have been voiced loudly: one theological and one institutional-parliamentary, from Pope Leo XIV and Senator Bernie Sanders, respectively. In my opinion, although useful as warnings for the general public, they are inadequate responses to the expansion of Artificial Intelligence, as we need a different, social version of democratic technoskepticism. I will try to briefly explain my position.
On Monday, May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued the papal encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas*, the first official ecclesiastical warning against the threat of uncontrolled Artificial Intelligence.
Among other things, the Pope called on governments to “disarm” Artificial Intelligence, making it clear that his appeal does not mean rejecting the technology:
“To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” [110]
The Pope thus advocates a theological technoskepticism that seeks to reconcile traditional Thomist theology with the current dominance of technology and science. It is striking that he clearly distances himself from the theological technophobia that characterized other eras and other Popes, a fact that represents a concession by the Holy See to the gravity of the empirical socio-historical situation.
But is the Pope’s call feasible at a time when governments — both those of the superpowers and other nations — seem to have strong incentives not to “disarm,” but to invest even more in artificial intelligence companies? But let’s say that, at the very least, the liberal governments of the developed world also have strong opposition parties capable of expressing different perspectives within the institutional framework of representative governance. Are there institutional ways to “disarm” artificial intelligence companies, if there is the corresponding political will?
Is institutional, parliamentary technoskepticism feasible?
This is a question that U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is attempting to answer in the affirmative, in terms of redistributing exported capital — and, consequently, the influence associated with it — back to the citizens.
Sanders is the first professional politician to launch an organized campaign against the artificial intelligence oligopolies on behalf of U.S. workers. In 2026, he published reports showing that artificial intelligence and automation threaten to eliminate nearly 100 million jobs in the U.S. over the next decade, particularly in low-wage sectors. He introduced a draft bill to suspend the operation of artificial intelligence data centers (the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act of 2026), which was co-sponsored by Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with the aim of temporarily suspending the construction of new artificial intelligence data centers until strong national safeguards for security and the environment are established. The bill has not yet been put to a vote, but it is unlikely to pass with the required majority.
On Thursday, June 18, 2026, a new bill was introduced [“American A.I. Sovereign Wealth Fund Act”], under which leading artificial intelligence companies with annual revenues of at least $200 million would be required to pay a one-time tax equal to 50% of the value of their shares, with the aim of creating a public investment fund for taxpayers, which would amount to approximately $7 trillion. This fund would pay an annual dividend of 5% to citizens, which, according to Sanders’ estimates, would exceed $1,000 per beneficiary. An interesting proposal. Will it pass?
Of course not, since there is no corresponding political will within the prevailing power structures. But if there were such political will and a different balance of power, would Sanders’ bill be enough to curb the technocratic oligarchy?
Probably not, since it seeks only to prevent the accumulation of capital — which is terrifying and based on the vicious cycle of speculative financing — and to redistribute the wealth produced to citizens, but, in doing so, it ensures the perpetuation of the conditions under which this wealth is produced, while leaving intact the — even more terrifying and based on the dual extraction of surplus value — firstly from the extraction of user data and secondly from the management of information to manipulate user behavior — the accumulation of information and computing power by the oligarchs of Artificial Intelligence.
But might Sanders’ bill, rather than limiting the power of technocracy, actually unleash it by aligning it with the interests of U.S. taxpayers at the expense of the interests of the global public? Already, artificial intelligence is acting as a factor in widening the inequality of wealth and power between former colonial powers and the countries of the Global South. The domestic authority of national governments is strengthened, as they are the supreme bodies responsible for controlling users’ access to cyberspace, as demonstrated by the theocratic regime in Iran’s strategic use of internet shutdowns to suppress dissent.
There is an institutional void in representative government regarding the regulation of digital technology, which is reshaping social relations in terms of digital telepresence. This institutional void lies at the core of the dominant institutional framework, in the very logic of delegation. The delegation of governmental power to a political oligarchy of professional representatives, with minimal institutions of public accountability or the assignment of public responsibilities to officials, leads to a widening gap between the actual functioning of state mechanisms and the public’s perception of how they operate. The myth of effective technocratic governance does not originate with John McCarthy, the “godfather” of Artificial Intelligence, but with the authoritarian ideologues of the interwar period. In other words, it is the institutional void of democratic social control over power.
This allows large AI companies to exploit the accelerating digitization of social functions to establish parastatal and private centers for monitoring, control, and management of personal data beyond the oversight of traditional antitrust institutions.
What are the modes of production of Artificial Intelligence? Well, of course, by analogy with the early centuries of colonial capital accumulation, the modes of piracy, the depletion of natural resources, the overexploitation of the labor force, and the transformation of local communities into nodes for extracting value within a vast infrastructure network — one that stretches from rare-earth mining industries to energy-and water-intensive data centers — which are the hallmark of developed countries under globalized neoliberalism, exacerbating desertification — all of this before we even reach the “dematerialized” form of data on users’ screens. This network is global, but its corporate structure is strictly centralized, and the companies’ headquarters are located in specific countries and subject to specific political mechanisms. A new division of the world is taking shape, with information-based metropolitan centers and peripheries defined in terms of connectivity, within which digital competition between the major powers — the U.S. and China — is taking place.
The political economy of Artificial Intelligence is the political economy of purely parasitic capitalism. That is why it makes no sense to seek the “ethics” of digital technologies, which are already embedded in their design as the immorality of speculation without a return on investment.
Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire through the stock market listing of Space –X’s stock market debut, whose value at the Initial Public Offering (IPO) was estimated at 28.5 trillion dollars (!). As The Atlantic magazine points out, the company does not base this valuation on its space activities, but on projections for future profits from artificial intelligence applications. SpaceX, you see, acquired XAI, Musk’s AI company with the infamous Grok, which had acquired X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter. Musk has thus created a colossal oligopoly, a technocratic ecosystem whose primary aim is to manipulate global public discourse and extract surplus value from the Internet. We could say that this is a form of a cyclical value-extraction mechanism that parasitizes the World Wide Web of digital telecommunications. However, this parasitic mechanism is so compatible with the dominant structures of political heteronomy and the oligarchic entrenchment of power that it aspires to supplant them by reversing the terms of interdependence.
Certainly, the terms of interdependence between governments and corporations are political. This is even more evident in the case of the “Pope” of technocracy, Peter Thiel, whose digital system, Palantir, uses artificial intelligence to gather data from countless different sources (bank transactions, drone footage, cell phone movements, health records) and synthesize it into a unified, visual map that it makes available exclusively to government and military agencies. The Gotham platform is primarily used by the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement It played a central role in providing artificial intelligence for identifying and targeting enemies in the war with Iran, with the infamous automated “Kill Chain” openly advertised on the company’s homepage.
And the inadequacy of Bernie Sanders’ proposals is not a sign of moderation but an indication of the magnitude of the problem and the failure of established state mechanisms to generate the necessary political will to address it. An institutional constraint on the unparalleled power of deception and the barrage of misinformation from Artificial Intelligence and the technocrats who control it requires a radical institutional transformation.
We need a project of democratic technoskepticism in terms of digital autonomy, which can only complement and expand the project of social autonomy. The project of democratic technoskepticism requires a fundamental shift both in our conceptual understanding of technology and in our political structures, challenging the dominant techno-industrial complex and its theoretical foundations. As research in the field of Artificial Intelligence shifts toward world models and neuro-symbolic approaches, there is a political and economic bubble surrounding high investments in large-scale models (LLMs) that yield no returns, which threatens to disrupt the global economy and the ongoing expansion of the digital revolution.
The rise of algorithmic governance, the expansion of data extraction, and the normalization of predictive control are not merely technical phenomena; they are expressions of a broader imaginary framework that elevates efficiency, quantification, and instrumental logic above democratic deliberation and human autonomy. This is the spectrum of digital barbarism. a situation in which societies surrender public space and time to the opaque authority of technocratic power. However, the very social ontology that reveals the dangers of digital barbarism also illuminates the possibility of resistance. Since Artificial Intelligence is a social construct, its future is not predetermined. The imaginary significations that shape our relationship with digital systems can be challenged and redefined.
We should challenge and deconstruct the propaganda of mythinformation that fosters institutionalized technophilia. We should recognize the essential role of the human subject, as the creator of meaning, at every stage of a digital system’s operation. This entails a public reexamination of the institutions and rules governing citizens’ relationships with technology providers, including the role of technology within society. We need to envision public institutions capable of regulating technological power, educational systems that foster embodied contact, physical coexistence, and critical reflection, as well as a free public space and time for social deliberation. We must recognize that the digital world is not a foregone conclusion, but a field of political struggle.
But all of this remains mere theoretical exhortation unless it is realized in grassroots social movements with specific political goals and a shared vision of the future. I believe that moving beyond theoretical reflection on the digital world in practice requires synthesizing direct democracy, the public commons, and social ecology.
However, the practical elaboration of this synthesis has yet to take place through collective processes in the social-historical sphere of public life.
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