“So hot rn [right now]”. There was no need for Elon Musk to be any more explicit, but he still decided to illustrate his post with a picture of a couple having sex, where the man was watching a laptop screen depicting Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, giving a speech.
Musk was teasing Milei, who took office on 10th December 2023, but also congratulating him for making his first address to the World Economic Forum in Davos. The image was not intended to titillate, but to communicate the pair’s shared political philosophy: extreme individualism. Musk shared the post on X on 18th January 2024. At the time of writing the post has nearly a million likes.
In deteriorating democracies, likes are in greater supply than votes—and they are also helping to break the foundations of democratic government. In such places there’s no participation, no protest, no freedom of expression, no respect for the law, no division of powers, no public debates, no multilateral organisations, no international treaties. There is much less democracy, even though they have elected governments. The difference between authoritarianism and democracy is clear—but it’s being diluted. Authoritarian democracies are not real democracies, even though people vote for governments within them. This is not an alarm about the future. It is a snapshot of the present.
In North and South America, two recent examples show how one can both win free elections while punching holes in them, and resist handing over power to whoever won. On his return to office, Trump freed 1,500 rioters responsible for the 6th January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. While in Brazil, an attempted coup on 1st January 2023 tried to stop Luiz “Lula” de Silva taking power. Recent developments in the US affect clearly affect many other countries, too.
But the bigger problem is the attempt to influence elections through the concentrated power of technofascism. Ahead of the German elections, Musk made a show of support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) on X and conducted a public conversation with the AfD’s leader Alice Weidel. On 14th February, outgoing chancellor Olaf Scholz said he did not accept those who “intervene in our democracy”. And after the anti-immigrant riots in the UK last year, Musk wrote on 4th August 2024 that “civil war is inevitable”, while also accusing Keir Starmer of having been an “accomplice” to crimes of sexual violence when he served as director of public prosecutions.
Argentina and the UK are very different countries, albeit with a colonial conflict and a war in their recent shared history. Today, however, the power of technofascism impacts Argentina just as it does Britain. Nobody is safe or exempt from its effects. It’s no good reading about what happens in Argentina as if it were an exotic case. The same billionaire who influenced elections in South America and helped to normalise the far right there helped to normalise the threats of arson against migrant hotels in the UK. It is the same man who instrumentalised the crimes committed by so-called grooming gangs for his own political purposes, and not in order to prevent or condemn violence against girls and women.
The world is not polarised, but paralysed, in the face of this extreme right. No one dares to stop it, save for women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. As such, the extreme right has made popular, anti-racist and diverse feminism its great enemy. It uses crimes against women and girls to spread more hatred, not to call for better protection.
In his speech at the World Economic Forum in January Milei attacked homosexual couples and the term “femicide” (which in Argentina is an offence listed in the Penal Code). Outrage over his remarks led to historic protests. On 1st February, some two million people across Argentina reportedly participated, and there were further demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, London, Paris and Berlin. The march was not merely a reaction to Milei, it set an example: the response to a global problem must be global itself.
The extreme misogyny of the extreme right attacks women. It extracts the pain caused by femicides and rapes to generate more hate and reduce safeguards against violence. The extreme right doesn’t want to avert the murder of women. It wants to silence women. From the experience of Argentina, the greatest risk here is the implicit alliance between men of various ideological sectors who no longer want to hear women asking for space, budgets or public policy.
These are the men who allege that feminism has gone too far, that it is men who should speak for women, and not women, in order to settle the historic debt of female silence. There are real consequences to this. Last year, Milei’s government closed the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity; it also threatened to repeal the aggravating factor for femicide in the Penal Code; and it supported increasing penalties for so-called “false allegations” in order to scare those who try to denounce gender violence and sexual abuse; and it dismantled a government programme that gave economic support to victims who need to leave violent situations. On 15th November, Argentina was the only country to vote against a UN resolution condemning online violence against women and girls. This should not have passed without notice.
On 14th February, Milei promoted a meme coin with the slogan: “The world wants to invest in Argentina”. Its value peaked as high as US$4.5bn and then proceeded to fall without a parachute. Those who followed Milei lost out when the value crashed. He is now facing investigations of fraud and calls for impeachment. Can a post on X can constitute a crime? Yes. But the questions continue: Can a post on X replace democracy?
Ni Una Menos was also born in a social media post. It is not words, rather the distortion of words—in order to scam or cheat, in order to intervene in sovereignty or to incite violence—which breaks the rules of democracy. Fraud is a democracy in which you no longer vote for who governs you. Instead, the algorithm chooses who governs. The token that let loose the crypto scandal was called “$LIBRA”—and the danger is closer than you think.
