Technopolitical Hegemony and Robootology: Deconstructing the Paradox of Post-Westphalian Artificial Intelligence Governance

By Rob Redding

Contemporary populist political strategy remains tethered to a foundational teleological illusion. The prevailing administrative paradigm assumes the enduring viability of a 19th-century Westphalian framework of geopolitical containment, remaining fundamentally unreflexive regarding the structural mutations of the 21st-century technological singularity.

Within mainstream media ecosystems, political discourse that eschews explicit racial lexicon undergoes systematic sanitization. Journalistic apparatuses routinely re-inscribe such rhetoric within normative parameters of state-capital competition or realpolitik security strategy. This hyper-literalist hermeneutic generates a profound epistemological blind spot, obfuscating the ways in which great-power contestation continues to reproduce deep-seated civilizational and racial hierarchies.

This discursive playbook was empirically validated on March 18, 2020. At that juncture, executive leadership defended its explicit geographic vectoring of the global health crisis by deploying the categorical nomenclature “China virus,” asserting to media representatives, “It’s not racist at all, no, not at all. It comes from China, that’s why. I want to be accurate.”

Half a decade hence, this exact structural mechanism of racialized othering and nationalist demarcation has migrated into the domain of cybernetic infrastructure. Following an executive convergence with Silicon Valley plutocrats wherein systemic algorithmic vulnerabilities and safety protocols were dismissed as ideological fabrications, the administration operationalized a semantic rearticulation, codifying artificial intelligence under the rubric of "Super Intelligence" (SI).

The Illusion of Cybernetic Sovereignty: Corporate Oligarchy Versus the Centralized Apparatus

The abdication of regulatory oversight in favor of corporate tech hegemony lays bare a critical structural vulnerability within current U.S. strategy. While the state externalizes its computational trajectory to private technology oligarchs under the ideological guise of neoliberal market supremacy, geopolitical competitors such as the People’s Republic of China maintain a highly centralized, cybernetically integrated apparatus characterized by total state oversight. The prevailing American assumption—that decentralized corporate actors operating via voluntary self-regulation can outpace a state-directed command structure—constitutes a category error. Dismissing systemic existential risk as a hoax while banking on corporate self-governance is an untenable delusion when confronting recursive, non-linear technological acceleration.

During the aforementioned executive briefing, leadership articulated a zero-sum paradigm of global technological dominance, emphasizing global dependency hierarchies and framing structural competitors as permanently subaltern entities that must be artificially suppressed.

While mainstream journalistic coverage categorized these pronouncements through the reductive lens of bilateral trade friction, the underlying syntax reinscribes a paternalistic global hierarchy. This architecture positions allied states as permanent client entities while codifying the primary Asian competitor as a structural antagonist requiring perpetual containment.

The Eschatological Impasse: The Structural Futility of Hegemonic Preservation

The fundamental contradiction of the administration's techno-nationalist gamble lies in its teleological impossibility. Even within the logic of preserving Western hegemony, achieving supremacy through these terms guarantees the structural collapse of the racial matrices upon which nationalist populism depends.

As theorized in my text Black Power in the Age of Artificial Supremacy, co-authored with Kwet Yung Redding-Shim, the trajectory of contemporary technogenesis transcends conventional political economy. The core thesis posits a stark bifurcation. Should the United States cede technological primacy to systemic competitors, legacy paradigms of white supremacy become structurally obsolete. Concurrently, should artificial intelligence achieve recursive autonomy exceeding anthropocentric control—regardless of geopolitical victors—it crystallizes as an autonomous third species. This emergence categorically invalidates all human assertions of ontological supremacy, actualizing the analytical framework conceptualized as "Robootology."

Ultimately, by pathologizing algorithmic risk assessments as institutional hoaxes and delegating governance to private capital, current geopolitical strategy accelerates a post-anthropocentric reality. In attempting to secure transient nationalist dominance through the structural subjugation of external actors, statecraft merely precipitates a condition in which geopolitical posturing, racial supremacy, and human exceptionalism are rendered permanently obsolete.

(Rob Redding is the author of the No. 1 bestselling book Black Power in the Age of Artificial Supremacy, featuring Redding-Shim Kwet Yung. He is the author of 19 books. He is the host of Redding News Review Unrestricted and creator of ReddingNewsReview.com. He is also an emerging visual artist who teaches at Colorado Mesa University.)