‘Hot Type: TechnoFeudalism's Warm Embrace' - My Latest Column for Byline
In today's Hot Type column in Byline, I report how two new studies reveal liberal democracies are being replaced by technofeudalism
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If you want to feel good, read Timothy Snyder’s latest post:
If you want a grim reality check on how liberal democracies are becoming an endangered species, please read my latest column in Byline Supplement:
Both reports are important. It’s important to stay in action and out of despair, and when you engage in non-violent protest, you stand a chance of participating in a movement that can change the course of history.
It’s also important to face reality head on, which is what I did this week with my report on technofeudalism, which is a concept I began warning people about before the 2024 election. I saw it so clearly, even though as I told others about my concerns, I couldn’t fathom it coming to pass. And here we are.
I am posting an excerpt of my column below, and I thank you as always for supporting Byline Supplement and Byline Times. Independent investigative journalism is crucial to the survival of truth.
Hot Type: TechnoFeudalism’s Warm Embrace
Two new studies suggest liberal democracy is gradually being replaced with technofeudalism, reports Political columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda
Published on March 21, 2026, Byline Supplement
“First comes Pushkin, then come the tanks” – Ukrainian idiom
I wept when reading the new Democracy Report from the V-Dem Institute. Not because it detailed the ‘autocratization of the USA’. That I had expected. The collapse of American democracy is something we can all see. But tears welled up when I read on page 4: “Among the new autocratizers are five European countries: Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the UK.”
Seeing the UK listed as an autocratizing country was devastating. Perhaps naïvely, I am still holding out hope that UK citizens will wake up in time to stop the worst from happening. All they have to do is look at the devastation in the US – that should be enough to jolt the British into preventing further erosion of their democracy.
But that is not how this invisible war we are all in works – the poison slips in country by country, through its unprotected internet borders, with fine-tuned and work-shopped messaging designed specifically for each nation, to turn citizens against their own freedoms.
The V-Dem Institute, part of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, measures global democracy and in the time that I’ve been reading their reports, we have seen democratic nations trending in the wrong direction — from about half of the world a decade ago, now, 74% of the world population live in autocracies, with only 7% of the world population living in liberal democracies. Like the monarch butterfly and polar bears, liberal democracies are now an endangered species.
According to the latest study: “The global democratic decline is notable and ongoing, whichever measure we use. For the average global citizen, the level of democracy is now back to 1978. It means that the enormous expansion of freedoms and rights achieved with the ‘third wave of democratization’ is almost entirely eradicated.”
The fire that America played with in 2024, determining its democratic incumbent too old to lead and risking a fascist coup, has come back to burn the world. As the V-Dem report notes: “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history” calling it “the most dramatic decline in American history.”
Again, we can witness with our own eyes the tragedy unfolding in America, but to read that the UK is autocratizing, with such markers as freedom of academic and cultural expression and media self-censorship worsening, should be a rallying cry.
Russia At the Center
The new V-Dem report comes at the same time as the EU released its 4th annual Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) Threats report, released by the European External Action Service, the EU’s Diplomatic Service. The EEAS report documents how Russia is at the center of ongoing and relentless attacks to destroy the remaining democratic nations and its leaders.
Notably, the report reveals Russia has eased information attacks on the US to prioritize the targeting of Europe.
According to the report “the EEAS detected 540 incidents globally. As in previous years, Ukraine remained the primary target, followed by France, Moldova and Germany.”
The EU report noted that the “attacks not only increased in frequency and intensity but also became more sophisticated,” as FIMI adapts to “technological advances, particularly in Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI-generated text, synthetic audio and manipulated video have shifted from experimental use to routine deployment, becoming cost-effective and scalable tools for threat actors.”
Although these attacks often occur covertly, the EEAS identified about a third of the origins of 10,500 social media channels and websites that produced or amplified FIMI, with 29% attributed to Russia and 6% to China. The researchers also found regional interference hubs operating in Africa, the Middle East, Moldova, and Armenia. Not surprisingly, a main target of Russian FIMI campaigns continues to be elections. In 2025, Russia targeted elections in Germany, Poland, Romania, Moldova, the Czech Republic, and Côte d’Ivoire, replicating patterns observed in previous electoral cycles, according to the report.
The revelation that Russia is now focusing its hybrid warfare on Europe is obvious to me – Putin already has his big dog in the White House to solve his problems, leaving Europe the final democratic frontier to dismantle.
“They are obsessed not only with Ukraine, but with controlling the world,” Ukrainian historian Tetiana Boriak told me in a recent interview. “Because the system that has been built in Russia cannot coexist with the democratic countries. The ugliness of the Soviet statehood would be seen immediately.”
She said “the only way for Russia to survive is to spread their influence… and (political technologist Vladislav) Surkov wrote about this perfectly, he said, ‘We want to undermine the world order.’”
As I travel through European countries, I see how Russia is undermining the democratic world order with its firehouse of active measures, tailored to each populace. As PoliticoEU reported last week, “Russia’s newest spy may be someone you know”, citing the growing industry of gig worker espionage, recruiting ordinary people online to carry out “vandalism, espionage, sabotage, and disinformation (campaigns)... attacks carried about by the Kremlin to weaken Europe.”
It Can Get Worse
I have become a collector of grievances. I can see Russian information warfare at work – how disgruntled people are about their democratically elected leaders. That might have been fine before the invisible war, to place blame on Western leaders for the price of eggs… or gas.
But I want to scream, ‘It can get worse! Much worse! They are building concentration camps in America! Don’t you see?’
I listen to their grievances about immigrants, and I want to yell, ‘That’s the oldest trick in the book! Don’t you see where that leads?!’
But instead, I read the reports that perfectly illustrate how we are accelerating the end of liberal democracies. I write my findings, and repeat.
I stay sane by interviewing people who understand the dangers all too well.
Professor Boriak, now a refugee in Lithuania, told me Russia has been targeting international law to weaken any defense we might have against global autocratization.
“It seems like we return to some kind of Middle Ages with the law of those who have strength,” she said…
She explains how this war for our consciousness is actually a tool of subjugation to encourage us to ignore reality and keep marching off nearby cliffs.
She cautioned:
“I have a feeling that if Ukraine will fall, or will be forced to capitulate, to write some kind of agreement, first, it would be a temporary agreement, and then do you really think the Russian army will return home? I don’t think so. They will go further. And they have Finland. They have Baltic states, Lithuania, where I now live with my two kids as a refugee. They have Kazakhstan, and they see that nobody can stop them. That is the problem of this whole situation and international community, they are charmed with Russian literature, Russian language, Russian presentations, Russian ballet, sport, music… And if you do not stop an aggressor, why should he stop by himself? They have militarized the economy. They have fun bombing Ukrainian houses that are left with no water, electricity, heating. Why should they stop? They will not stop. They did not stop in 2014 — why would they stop now? They even did not declare openly the war to Ukraine. There was some speech of Putin, about a special military operation, a three-day special military operation.”
Technofeudal Dystopia
We live in the time of the AI war, where the speed and scale of these wars-not-called-wars – the quickness with which they bury children under rubble – is diminishing our capacity to comprehend the horror. But comprehend the horror we must.
We live in the time of the AI arrest, where computers assist in snatching people from their homes, including an innocent Tennessee grandmother, jailed for six months when the computer got it wrong, when the artificial ‘intelligence’ facial recognition software incorrectly identified her as a suspect in a bank fraud case in a state she’s never visited. Please don’t look away from her horror.
On a panel for Byline Times in the summer of 2024, I warned that to reinstall Trump is to bring on a thousand years of darkness, an unprecedented era of technofeudalism, where the extraction oligarchs hide in their bunkers, while the rest of us are enslaved.
It seemed so dystopian at the time, and I was sure America would wake up in time to do the right thing on election day, but instead, millions – wittingly or unwittingly – sought the warm embrace of technofeudalism.
So now, I turn toward the UK, France, and Germany, and all other parts of the remaining, endangered species we call the free world. I am begging the people to choose democracy. If just a few countries hold, civilization stands a chance to correct course. If more Western leaders speak out against active measures, even going so far as to admit this is war, voters could then rally behind leaders who represent a democratic future and not Russkiy mir — Russian world.
The Soul and Barbed Wire
I’m slogging my way through Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, originally published in the 1970s. The Soviet author, who spent 11 years in labour camps and in exile, writes “how the majority sits quietly and dares to hope.”
Quiet won’t do, and loud might not be enough, but at least it’s something.
In Part IV, titled ‘The Soul and Barbed Wire’, he writes about the techniques that are used to muzzle freedom: constant fear, servitude, secrecy and mistrust, universal ignorance, squealing, betrayal as a form of existence, corruption, the lie as a form of existence, cruelty, and slave psychology.
That sounds exactly like what’s being built in America in 2026, Soviet style subjugation – not the nice Russian fantasy sold to duped Westerners through its poets, but a cruel reality – ignorance, betrayal, fear, servitude – all nicely managed by machines.
As the Kremlin cracks down on domestic internet usage, it continues to exploit every algorithm of the West.
Tetiana Boriak joins me in pleading with Europe to stand strong.
“Only together, we can survive and have a future, only together,” she said. “Otherwise (Russia) will divide Europe and then they will eat country by country.”
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The work is difficult, and I don’t sleep well. But I woke up this morning to a pleasant surprise: a kind comment. This work does not get easier. In researching my recent report on the work of Anna Politkovskaya, I read how many of her peers thought her writing too grim.
Not me. I thought her work truthful and empathetic. That’s our job, in my opinion. To write about truth from a place of empathy, and not become like the monsters we document.
The comment I woke up to came from a Byline supporter named Richard Stephens, who read my column and responded:
Brilliant! ….this is one of the most clear and frank descriptions of what we can all now see as the forced trashing of the western world and our democracy is going out with it!
It’s yet another precious piece of work from a fringe independent journalist with the courage and foresight to put down strategic events & assembled facts covering rapid changes to our assumed, expected, decent, fair and traditional ways of living that are purposely being disguised by today’s wicked combinations of power, greed and political manipulation.
And Russia is the new world controller.
But. There is, through truth and eduction…still hope.
WRITE ON!
I wanted to write back, “You get me!” But instead I gave it a like and continued working on my latest report.
I am committed to doing at least one beautiful thing a day, so no matter what I’m working on, each day I carve out time to see something beautiful. I recommend it.
Thank you to everyone who supports my work here and at Byline.
Reminder to Bette members, do not miss tomorrow’s Speakeasy with cultural anthropologist Stephen Douglas on the new EU FIMI study.
And Tuesday, Jim Stewartson is returning for Part 2 of our AI conversation with him, co-hosted by Prague technologist Josef Holy. Registration coming Sunday.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter/producer, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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