The Seating Chart as Political Artifact

At re:publica 26, philosopher Rainer Mühlhoff presents a diagnosis that refuses to separate AI infrastructure from authoritarian ambition.

In Brief: Rainer Mühlhoff speaks today at re:publica 26 in Berlin, presenting his Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung award-winning book Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus. The philosophy professor argues that the convergence of tech billionaire power and far-right politics represents not a coincidence but a structural alignment. His talk addresses how democratic societies might limit the political influence of AI infrastructure before that infrastructure becomes indistinguishable from state power.

The question of what happens when computational systems become instruments of authoritarian governance is precisely the kind of problem that requires more than passive observation. For those ready to engage directly, Human x AI Europe convenes tomorrow in Vienna, where the European response takes shape.

The Front Row

Consider the image. January 2025, Washington D.C. The second inauguration of Donald Trump. In the front row, closer to power than most elected officials, sit the chief executives of the world's largest technology companies. This is not a photograph of attendance. It is a photograph of arrangement.

As re:publica's announcement notes, what followed that ceremony has been described by many as a digital coup d'état. Under Elon Musk's direction, the newly created Department of Government Efficiency began dismantling the American administrative apparatus using what Mühlhoff characterizes as a mixture of ambush tactics, intimidation, and hacker methods.

The seating chart, in other words, was not symbolic. It was operational.

What Gets Naturalized

Mühlhoff's intervention, presented today at 17:30 on Stage 1 at STATION Berlin, refuses the comfortable separation between technology and politics that has structured so much AI discourse. The book's title alone performs this refusal: Künstliche Intelligenz und der neue Faschismus places two terms in conjunction that polite conversation prefers to keep apart.

The philosopher, who holds a professorship in Ethics and Critical Theories of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Osnabrück and maintains affiliations with the Einstein Center Digital Future and Berlin's Charité, has spent years examining what he calls the connection between AI and power. According to his publisher's description, this connection produces new forms of exploitation, social inequality, and the strengthening of authoritarian political styles.

What makes Mühlhoff's analysis distinctive is its attention to the ideological work performed by AI discourse itself. The apocalyptic scenarios, the breathless speculation about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, the hypothetical achievement of human-level machine cognition), the oscillation between salvation and extinction narratives: these function, in his reading, as distraction. They draw attention away from what AI systems are actually doing in the present.

The Distraction Economy

There is something almost too convenient about the way AI discourse organizes itself around the future. Will superintelligence save humanity or destroy it? Will AGI arrive in five years or fifty? These questions generate enormous attention, enormous funding, enormous cultural energy. They also happen to be unanswerable.

Meanwhile, the answerable questions go unasked. Who benefits from the current deployment of predictive systems? Whose labor trains these models? Which populations bear the costs of algorithmic decision-making? What happens when the infrastructure of prediction becomes the infrastructure of governance?

Mühlhoff's book, which has remained on the Spiegel bestseller list for nineteen weeks in the non-fiction paperback category, addresses these present-tense questions. The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's jury recognized the work with their annual prize for political books, awarded to texts that contribute to public understanding of political developments and stimulate democratic debate.

The prize ceremony takes place on May 21st in Berlin, three days after today's re:publica presentation. The timing creates a kind of institutional echo: the same argument, heard first in the context of digital culture, then in the context of political education.

Heilsversprechen

The German word Heilsversprechen appears in re:publica's description of Mühlhoff's talk. It translates roughly as promises of salvation, but carries theological weight that the English loses. The tech industry's claims about AI, in this framing, are not merely optimistic or exaggerated. They are messianic.

This matters because messianic claims demand messianic responses. If AI might save humanity, then those who build it deserve extraordinary deference. If AI might destroy humanity, then those who understand it deserve extraordinary power. Either way, the conclusion is the same: ordinary democratic processes are too slow, too uninformed, too human to govern these systems.

The far-right ideologies that Mühlhoff identifies in Silicon Valley's leadership class fit neatly into this structure. Hierarchy becomes natural. Expertise becomes authority. The masses become obstacles. Democracy becomes inefficiency.

The European Question

For policymakers, governance scholars, and foresight practitioners watching from Europe, Mühlhoff's analysis poses uncomfortable questions. The AI Act has been celebrated as the world's most comprehensive regulatory framework for artificial intelligence. But regulation assumes that the entities being regulated accept the legitimacy of the regulatory process.

What happens when they don't?

The support that certain tech figures have provided to the AfD, Germany's far-right party, suggests that the challenge is not merely American. The ideological alignment between concentrated technological power and authoritarian politics appears to be structural rather than incidental. It travels.

Mühlhoff's previous work, including his 2025 re:publica presentation with Aline Blankertz, traced how discourses around superintelligence and transhumanism are spilling over to Europe and influencing startup and economic policy here as well. The 2026 talk continues this thread, now with the additional evidence of another year's developments.

The Artifact Remembers

There is a photograph from January 2025 that will outlast most of the policy documents written about AI governance that year. It shows a seating arrangement. It shows who was close to power and who was not. It shows what the discourse forgot to notice while it was busy speculating about superintelligence.

Mühlhoff's book, and his presentation today, function as a kind of counter-archive. They insist on recording what is actually happening while it is still possible to name it. The book's translations into English (Pluto Press), French (Agone), and Turkish (Zoe Kitap) suggest that this insistence resonates beyond German-speaking audiences.

The question the talk poses is not whether AI systems are powerful. That much is obvious. The question is whether democratic societies will exercise any meaningful control over how that power is deployed, or whether the seating chart from January 2025 represents the new normal.

What Remains Visible

Standing in the STATION Berlin today, watching Mühlhoff present his argument, notice what happens to the room. Notice whether the audience maintains critical distance or whether something else occurs. Notice what questions get asked and which ones don't.

The talk runs thirty minutes. The book costs eight euros. The prize ceremony happens Thursday. These are small artifacts, easily overlooked in the flood of AI announcements and product launches and funding rounds that constitute the daily news cycle.

But artifacts remember what discourse forgets. And the question of whether artificial intelligence becomes an instrument of democratic governance or authoritarian control will not be answered by the systems themselves. It will be answered by the humans who still have the capacity to notice what is being naturalized, and to refuse it.