The Algocracy Agenda: How AI and the Deep State Are Digitizing Tyranny
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
The Deep State is not going away. It’s just being replaced.
As we stand on the brink of a new technological order, the machinery of power is quietly shifting into the hands of algorithms.
Under Donald Trump’s watch, that shift is being locked in for at least a generation.
Trump’s latest legislative initiative—a 10-year ban on AI regulation buried within the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—strips state and local governments of the ability to impose any guardrails on artificial intelligence (AI) until 2035.
Despite bipartisan warnings from 40 state attorneys general, the bill passed the House and awaits Senate approval. It is nothing less than a federal green light for AI to operate without oversight in every sphere of life, from law enforcement and employment to healthcare, education, and digital surveillance.
This is not innovation.
This is institutionalized automation of tyranny.
This is how, within a state of algorithmic governance, code quickly replaces constitutional law as the mechanism for control.
We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one ruled by software.
Algorithmic governance refers to the use of machine learning and automated decision-making systems to carry out functions once reserved for human beings: policing, welfare eligibility, immigration vetting, job recruitment, credit scoring, and judicial risk assessments.
In this regime, the law is no longer interpreted. It is executed. Automatically. Mechanically. Without room for appeal, discretion, or human mercy.
These AI systems rely on historical data—data riddled with systemic bias and human error—to make predictions and trigger decisions. Predictive policing algorithms tell officers where to patrol and whom to stop. Facial recognition technology flags “suspects” based on photos scraped from social media. Risk assessment software assigns threat scores to citizens with no explanation, no oversight, and no redress.
These algorithms operate in black boxes, shielded by trade secrets and protected by national security exemptions. The public cannot inspect them. Courts cannot challenge them. Citizens cannot escape them.
The result? A population sorted, scored, and surveilled by machinery.
This is the practical result of the Trump administration’s deregulation agenda: AI systems given carte blanche to surveil, categorize, and criminalize the public without transparency or recourse.
And these aren’t theoretical dangers—they’re already happening.
Yet the Trump administration’s approach to AI regulation reveals a deeper plan to deregulate democracy itself.
Rather than curbing abuses, the Trump administration is accelerating them.
An executive order titled “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” signed by President Trump in early 2025, revoked prior AI safeguards, eliminated bias audits, and instructed agencies to prioritize “innovation” over ethics. The order encourages every federal agency to adopt AI quickly, especially in areas like policing and surveillance.
Under the guise of “efficiency,” constitutional protections are being erased.
Trump’s 10-year moratorium on AI regulation is the logical next step. It dismantles the last line of defense—state-level resistance—and ensures a uniform national policy of algorithmic dominance.
The result is a system in which government no longer governs. It processes.
The federal government’s AI expansion is building a surveillance state that no human authority can restrain.
Welcome to Surveillance State 2.0, the Immortal Machine.
Over 1700 uses of AI have already been reported across federal agencies, with hundreds directly impacting safety and rights. Many agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services, are deploying AI for decision-making without public input or oversight.
This is what the technocrats call an “algocracy”—rule by algorithm.
In an algocracy, unelected developers and corporate contractors hold more power over your life than elected officials.
Your health, freedom, mobility, and privacy are subject to automated scoring systems you can’t see and can’t appeal.
And unlike even the most entrenched human dictators, these systems do not die. They do not forget. They are not swayed by mercy or reason. They do not stand for re-election.
They persist.
When AI governs by prediction, due process disappears in a haze of machine logic.
The most chilling effect of this digital regime is the death of due process.
What court can you appeal to when an algorithm has labeled you a danger? What lawyer can cross-examine a predictive model? What jury can weigh the reasoning of a neural net trained on flawed data?
You are guilty because the machine says so. And the machine is never wrong.
When due process dissolves into data processing, the burden of proof flips. The presumption of innocence evaporates. Citizens are forced to prove they are not threats, not risks, not enemies.
And most of the time, they don’t even know they’ve been flagged.
This erosion of due process is not just a legal failure—it is a philosophical one, reducing individuals to data points in systems that no longer recognize their humanity.
Writer and visionary Rod Serling warned of this very outcome more than half a century ago: a world where technology, masquerading as progress under the guise of order and logic, becomes the instrument of tyranny.
That future is no longer fiction. What Serling imagined is now reality.
The time to resist is now, before freedom becomes obsolete and we become Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”
“The Obsolete Man,” a story arc about the erasure of individual worth by a mechanized state, underscores the danger of rendering humans irrelevant in a system of cold automation and speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete.
As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”
We now face a fork in the road: resist the rise of the immortal dictator or submit to the reign of the machine.
This is not a battle against technology, but a battle against the unchecked, unregulated, and undemocratic use of technology to control people.
We must demand algorithmic transparency, data ownership rights, and legal recourse against automated decisions. Otherwise, AI becomes the ultimate enforcer of a surveillance state from which there is no escape.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the time to fight back is now—before the code becomes law, and freedom becomes a memory.
The post The Algocracy Agenda: How AI and the Deep State Are Digitizing Tyranny appeared first on CounterPunch.org.