The Techno-Oligarchy’s First “Holocaust”

A conventional story tells us that, after the Third Reich lost the Second World War, the Western allies made a convincing case about the Shoah – the Nazi programme aimed at eradicating the Jews from across its empire – and yet many so-called “ordinary Germans”, including “ordinary soldiers”, would not believe it.

Logically, of course, connecting the dots was not intellectually too straining: from the antisemitic legislation that the Hitler regime began to enact in 1933, to the pivotal Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, to the Kristallnacht pogroms of 1938, to the rhetoric of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, and, finally, to the extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. But at some point in this logical chain – at the “Final Solution” rhetoric – many “ordinary Germans” would adopt the “innocent” interpretation of the phrase, breaking the exterminatory sequence of references.

A psychological defence mechanism, protecting “national consciousness” from the devastating humiliation of being linked to the villainy of the Shoah, would send their thoughts off into safer mental acrobatics. Neither Sobibor nor Treblinka nor the other camps were about extermination – they were only about “special treatment” and “resettlement”. That millions were killed in those camps had no connection to the genocidal interpretation of the “Final Solution” – they died for other reasons.

Perhaps the “innocent” interpretations of “solution”, “treatment”, “resettlement”, “evacuation” and other words appeared more rational, more in keeping with the traditions of German idealism, than the eliminatory ones, but they were not. Once the Nazi belief system had established that the Jews represented an existential threat to the Aryan race, the “Final Solution” became a managerial problem: resettlement would not neutralise the threat – it had to be eradicated. Or, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor, it became a gardening problem: to keep a garden in its planned shape and to take care of the cultured plants, the weeds had to be exterminated.

A gardener’s motives are always rational – his hand moves in a calculated manner. The bureaucracy of the gardening state “is programmed to seek the optimal solution. It is programmed to measure the optimum in such terms as would not distinguish between one human object and another, or between human and inhuman objects. What matters is the efficiency and lowering of costs of their processing” (Bauman).

The language of optimisation and efficiency is inherent to all bureaucracy, but the removal of the fundamental difference between human and inhuman objects, and their consequent treatment on a par, is a step towards the dehumanisation of people. And the larger the scale of required optimisation of the processes involving human beings, the higher the cost in human lives, in a cold pursuit of efficiency as the greater good.

It is precisely this language of efficiency, formulated by the US techno-oligarchy and followed in 2025 by action to achieve it, that laid the foundation of what I am calling the techno-oligarchy’s first “holocaust”.

I use the word “holocaust” with reference to the ancient Greek sacrificial practice in which animals were wholly burnt (“holókaustos”) as an offering to the gods. Importantly for my use of the term, the sacrificed animals were consigned to the fire not out of hatred or any animus directed at them. On the contrary, while their lives were appreciated within the logic of sacrifice – the ritual implied giving up something of real value – it was ultimately indifference to their lives that governed how they were treated.

And it was indifference, rather than hatred, towards people who would potentially be affected by the White House’s decision to pause yet effectively cancel US foreign development assistance following Donald Trump’s return to presidency in early 2025.

Framed as an action against the alleged misalignment between the existing US foreign aid apparatus and American interests and values, Trump’s Executive Order 14169, which set in motion the dismantling of USAID, was, to a certain extent, inspired by the US techno-oligarchy’s managerial approach to efficiency.

Writing in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in November 2024 – just two weeks after Trump was elected US president – US entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy claimed that Trump had asked them to lead “a newly formed Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, to cut the federal government down to size”. The op-ed promised that DOGE would “help end federal overspending”, and, as would become evident later, “overspending” included funding for USAID.

DOGE was officially launched by Trump’s Executive Order 14158 on 20 January 2025, the same day that the White House “paused” foreign development assistance. The order’s stated purpose was to transform federal spending by ensuring transparency in government contracts, grants, and loans, and accountability among federal employees to the American public. While USAID was neither the only nor the primary target of DOGE, Musk seemed exceptionally obsessed with dismantling it. He called it “a criminal organization” and “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America”, and eventually declared, in early February 2026, that he and his team had “spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper”.

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Sending USAID, which had been running numerous missions across the world, to the “wood chipper” implied stopping its programmes in areas ranging from education to democracy promotion, from environmental protection to global health. And it is precisely with regard to global health – the health programmes were hit by DOGE first and hardest – that the actions of the techno-oligarchy amounted to a “holocaust”.

In July 2025, The Lancet, one of the world’s highest-impact academic journals, published the first study evaluating the impact of USAID funding on mortality across the globe over the previous two decades. The study found that “USAID-funded programmes [had] helped prevent more than 91 million deaths globally, including 30 million deaths among children”. At the same time, the forecasting models developed by the authors of the study established that the cuts in USAID funding – unless they were reversed – “could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, averaging more than 2.4 million deaths per year”. These deaths would “include 4.5 million among children younger than 5 years, or more than 700,000 deaths annually”.

These shocking figures assumed the total defunding of global aid programmes, which, fortunately, has not occurred. Actual US spending fell far less in 2025 than the wholesale dismantling implied, as money kept flowing on existing commitments. Even so, at the end of 2025 the Center for Global Development, reconciling its numbers with The Lancet’s as “broadly congruent”, estimated that the cuts already realised implied between 500,000 and a million deaths over the year, with credible projections of up to 1.6 million a year if the cuts deepened.

It was bureaucratic inertia, not mercy, that deterred the larger toll – yet the cost in human lives of the techno-oligarchy’s pursuit of “efficiency” already exceeds most of the atrocities to which the twentieth century gave names.

Yet nearly all programmatic mass atrocities of the last century carried an ideological load that suggested hatred towards their victims. Often the hatred was ethnic, religious, or both: Armenians, Jews, Roma, Tutsis, Bosniaks, and others were targeted, murdered, or lethally abandoned because their mere existence – their perceived culture, skin colour, way of life – provoked hatred or revulsion in their persecutors.

Even the atrocities emanating from twentieth-century collectivisation efforts, such as the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine or the Khmer Rouge purges in Cambodia, were not purely matters of indifference. Whatever part ill-conceived quests for agricultural efficiency played in them, the victims were not a neutral, invisible side effect: they were marked out – as class enemies, as ideological obstacles, as bearers of the wrong nationality – and destroyed as such.

The victims of the techno-oligarchic “holocaust” constitute a radical departure from the murderous experience of the twentieth century. While their deaths result from a programme driven by ideology, they themselves are not treated as enemies – exactly as the animals wholly burnt in ancient holocausts drew no animus from those who offered them.

The meaning of such a sacrifice is not to kill or abandon someone or something; it is to achieve an objective – to win the favour of the gods, or to secure government efficiency. The victims are therefore programmatically invisible; they are neither named nor categorised. And this programmatic invisibility – the absence of any reason for which they are singled out – is mirrored in the physical invisibility of their demise. Those deaths are recorded only as “excess” or “additional”; they are statistical and geographically dispersed, so that no single body can ever be registered as part of the “holocaust”.

But is this epistemic uncertainty not one of the defining characteristics of techno-oligarchic control over the flow of information – control that goes beyond anything the fascist or communist regimes of the twentieth century imposed?

Fascists burned undesirable books, communists pulped them; the techno-oligarchy lauds “freedom of speech” yet employs opaque algorithms to demote and down-rank unwanted information. For the former, the damage to information was visible and often violent; for the latter, it is covert, deniable, and leaves no ash. Likewise, one could excavate and identify the dead at Auschwitz, Sandarmokh, or Choeung Ek as victims of ideological mass murder – yet the techno-oligarchic “holocaust” leaves no such place for anyone to mourn.

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The “ordinary Germans” of today will have little trouble denying how lethal a pursuit of efficiency indifferent to human life can be. Just as the Shoah was hidden behind euphemisms such as “special treatment” or “resettlement”, the techno-oligarchic “holocaust” hides behind “optimisation”, “reevaluation”, and “sound industrial logic”.

Yet here, too, it is not intellectually too straining to foresee the consequences of the dehumanisation inherent in techno-oligarchy. This technocratic dehumanisation differs from the kinds that psychologically facilitated the mass atrocities of the twentieth century. The practice of the Shoah or the Porajmos suggested that Jews or Roma were of lesser human worth than their tormentors. Techno-oligarchic dehumanisation proceeds from a different point of departure: people are placed on a par with inhuman objects. This does not mean they are held to have no value. Rather, it means they are evaluated in terms of function – exactly as inhuman objects are – by those for whom “government efficiency” and “technological progress” are the greater good.

Reduced to function, like any other component, human beings lose all cultural protection from the not-so-invisible hand of the techno-oligarchic gardener – protection rooted in classical antiquity and crystallised in the humanistic traditions of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

Reduction of this kind does not stop at a single “holocaust”. Its natural endpoint is a global human tragedy of a magnitude we have not yet seen.