Authoritarian Stack
* Report / Project : The Authoritarian Stack. How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic America — And Why Europe Is Next. Francesca Bria et al. , October 2025.
URL = https://authoritarian-stack.info/
"This project maps the "Authoritarian Stack" — a network of firms, funds, and political actors turning core state functions into private platforms."
Contextual Quote
"Silicon Valley’s Authoritarian Tech Right is not theorizing this world. They are already building it. The pipelines are operational. The feedback loops are functioning. The sovereignty transfers are completing.
Democracy persists as a legacy interface— maintained for stability, while being systematically hollowed out and replaced.
The question now is whether democratic societies can recognize this formation for what it is—and build alternatives before the infrastructure of control becomes too deeply embedded to dislodge."
- Francesca Bria [1]
Context
"In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the U.S. Army quietly signed away a piece of its sovereignty.
A ten-billion-dollar contract with Palantir Technologies—one of the largest in the Department of Defense’s history—was framed as a move toward “efficiency.”
It consolidated seventy-five procurement agreements into a single contract.
...
J.D. Vance, propelled to the vice-presidency by $15 million from Peter Thiel, became the face of tech-right governance. Behind him, Thiel’s network moved into the machinery of the state.
Under the banner of "patriotic tech", this new bloc is building the infrastructure of control—clouds, AI, finance, drones, satellites—an integrated system we call the Authoritarian Stack. It is faster, ideological, and fully privatized: a regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules.
Our investigation shows how these firms now operate as state-like powers—writing the rules, winning the tenders, and exporting their model to Europe, where it poses a direct challenge to democratic governance.
...
To understand why this capture is happening so rapidly, follow the personnel. The revolving door no longer spins between government and industry—it locks them together into a new architecture of power."
Characteristics
The Stack
"The Stack: Five Domains of Privatized Sovereignty
Critical state infrastructures are being privatized across five domains—data, defense, space, energy, and money—the foundations of democratic power. These domains form the architecture of privatized sovereignty: a technological regime where power flows through laws, infrastructure and automated platforms.
- Crypto Sovereignty
- The Nuclear–AI Complex
- SpaceX: Orbital Infrastructure
- Anduril: Autonomous Warfare
- Palantir: The Operating System of Government
- Privatizing the state’s data and decision making.
(https://authoritarian-stack.info/)
More information
"This project maps the "Authoritarian Stack"—a network of firms, funds, and political actors turning core state functions into private platforms. Based on an open-source dataset of over 250 actors, thousands of verified connections, and $45 billion in documented financial flows. The map aggregates and categorizes information from existing online sources to chart actors, institutions, and their relationships. Data handling and normalization were performed by the Autonomy Institute Data Unit. All entries were manually reviewed and verified. The map reflects connections as of October 2025 and is a living, collaborative resource." [2]
- Report issues to map@xof-research.org."