Politics and Digital Technology: The Cascade of Rules
Social exclusion no longer proceeds solely from individual decisions or explicit ideologies. It now operates through the automatic propagation of rules embedded in our technical infrastructures.
Technofascism or Exclusion by Cascade
Lennie Stern coined the concept of “technofascism” to designate an implacable logic: in the digital space, rules propagate from one system to another according to a cascade principle. As soon as a person is judged foreign to a system, take for example French judge Nicolas Guillou, placed under American sanctions for having authorized arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, the consequences multiply instantly. Overnight, Airbnb closes their account, Amazon ceases its services, PayPal blocks them, hotel reservations made via Expedia are automatically cancelled. Some European banks close their accounts for fear of violating American rules. Everyday means of payment disappear: Visa, Mastercard, American Express.
What strikes here is the absence of any identifiable human decision. A European magistrate, working in an independent international institution, becomes in practice banned from banking over a large part of the planet, not because of a judicial decision concerning them, but due to the ordinary functioning of private infrastructures that apply, in cascade, rules decided elsewhere.
We have all experienced this logic on a more modest scale during the Covid period. Exclusion from social space operated progressively according to constantly evolving criteria: first being sick with Covid, then simply being positive for the virus without being sick, then being a contact case of a positive person, with a virtually mandatory vaccination that had never been designed to prevent transmission. A manifestly absurd system, whose rules evolved in cascade towards ever more controls, increasingly arbitrary, with real impacts on people’s lives: exclusion from professional space, intrafamily conflicts, concrete impossibility of moving, paying, eating.
CSS: A Grammar of Cascade
I would like to illuminate this concept of rule cascade through a computer language that we have before our eyes daily without necessarily knowing it: CSS, for Cascading Style Sheets.
All the web pages we consult, the slightest online newspaper, the slightest social network, are built in a page layout language called HTML, invented in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee. This markup language is above all “semantic”: it distinguishes a level 1 heading, a level 2 heading, a paragraph, highlighted text (bold) or an excerpt (italic), a list, a table, etc. This semantic information gives the page its relevance for search engine indexing, for artificial intelligence, for accessibility for blind people, and for future interfaces, still unknown, but which will be able to interpret this “structural meaning.” From 1996, then more fully in the early 2000s, a second language appeared: CSS, which separates content from form. HTML says what an element is; CSS says how it appears.
The benefit of this separation is considerable. In a site with several hundred thousand pages, you stipulate once, in a single style sheet (the CSS sheet, to which all HTML pages refer), that level 1 headings are green in size 18. If you decide to make them blue in size 22, you simply modify a single line in the CSS file, and the entire site instantly changes its layout, while remaining consistent.
But here’s where the system becomes interesting for our purpose: these style sheets function in cascade, that is, by inheritance and progressive specification. You can define that all level 1 headings are green, except in the “International” section where they will be brown, while inheriting the size and font defined globally. You can add cascade levels, sub-levels, exceptions to exceptions. The final style of an element is never written in a single place: it results from the accumulation of rules that chain together and combine.
The Experience of Powerlessness in the Face of Automated Rules
For anyone who has worked with CSS style sheets, the experience is often disconcerting. You don’t understand why a given element has taken a certain color or size. It’s very difficult to trace back the cascade of rules that produced this result. The machine has effectively applied something that may seem completely absurd, totally beyond our control, because its functioning is based on a system of cascading rules whose sequence becomes opaque to us.
This experience of powerlessness is so widespread that it has generated a revealing technical solution: the !important rule, a sort of super-rule that attempts to impose a style despite the cascade, when you can no longer understand the sequence of rules. If you examine the CSS style sheets of any Internet site (you can do this by displaying the source code of any page, via a right-click), you’ll find that they are often riddled with !important, these patches that attempt to regain control over a technical bureaucracy that has become uncontrollable.
This bureaucracy, very effective, which allows “industrializing” (little effort for great effects) CSS style sheets, therefore also has its perverse effects: a power that makes decisions despite us, that imposes them on us, and whose decisions are often in spite of the most elementary common sense. This is the daily experience of thousands of web developers who rail against machines that seem to make decisions incomprehensible to them.
Naming Right to Think Right
This is exactly what is political in the way digital technology governs our lives. In the very concept of the rule cascade, there is very quickly great confusion and a loss of meaning, and above all a loss of common sense. These are two sides of the same coin: on one side, great efficiency that allows for standardized regulation; on the other, as soon as exceptions multiply, a growing difficulty in maintaining coherence.
Lennie Stern nevertheless brings an essential nuance to her own concept. In a recent column, she writes that “the word technofascism acts like a poorly oriented magnifying glass”: it pushes us to seek power where it is most visible, in discourses, figures, stated intentions, when the essential takes place elsewhere, “in procedures, technical architectures, access conditions” (Lennie Stern, “Technofascism: when fear of totalitarianism prevents seeing the power of infrastructures”, Jean-Jaurès Foundation, December 2025). She draws on the reflection of historian Enzo Traverso, who reminds us that “words are never neutral: they orient our gaze, they draw the mental setting in which we think about problems” (Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism, 2017).
The term technofascism thus encloses a new reality in an old metaphor, reassuring because already known, but precisely unsuited. What is happening today does not involve frontal political violence: it is a progressive shift where technical infrastructures become the silent matrix of our collective decisions. Constraint is born from functioning, not from confrontation. It holds because it is already there.
For Democratic Vigilance on Rules
The CSS metaphor offers a path of understanding and a way out, in my view: if in a cascade rule system we work to constantly put rules back on the workbench, clarify them, document them, maintain them, improve them, then democracy, clarity, meaning can exist. But without this attentive and permanent work on rules, it’s quite impossible. The drift is almost immediate.
The best practices developed by the web developer community to master the complexity of CSS (overlays, meta-languages, naming methodologies, systematic documentation, limitation of cascade levels, regular code review) perhaps constitute a model that can be transposed to the governance of our digitized social systems. Not to abolish the cascade, which has its own efficiency, but to maintain control over it.
The challenge is therefore not to find yet another word, but to accept that our political vocabulary lags behind reality. Naming correctly is creating the conditions for a new lucidity. It’s shifting the spotlight. And perhaps, finally, looking at reality as it acts, rather than continuing to project onto it our fears inherited from the past.
Mechanisms of domination and paths to emancipation
Contemporary power no longer operates so much through visible constraint as through the manipulation of narratives and the manufacture of consent. We too easily forgive the moral failure of those who govern us, we accept calling “freedom” what is authorization, we let information lull us into voluntary submission. The health crisis revealed this fundamental confusion: the authorization regime replaced the freedom regime under the guise of protection. The post-Covid inversion of powers shows how censorship and state lies weaken our democracies while paradoxically rehabilitating yesterday’s dissident voices. Faced with the calm crowd that submits, faced with manufactured consensuses that stifle debate, resistance passes through a lucid presence that refuses the attraction of submission. The left itself, prisoner of the system it claims to fight, must rediscover an authentic political consciousness, distinct from the good conscience that contents itself with moral postures. Restoring democracy requires creating spaces where all discourses are authorized, where complex and partial truth can emerge from dialogue rather than being decreed by experts or algorithms. Authentic politics is born from this tension between care for the collective and resistance to biopower that controls bodies and minds.
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