We have never not been fascist: Infrastructures of state violence as technofascist laboratories

Abstract

This commentary critiques narratives of Silicon Valley exceptionalism in current efforts to diagnose technofascism. The rapid global spread of fascism has not been initiated by the current American Right, nor does the technological character of this iteration of fascism present a rupture: fascist conditions have continuously existed for peoples colonized, enslaved, indentured, exterminated, or otherwise oppressed by Western imperialism since the beginning of modernity/colonialism. Likewise, surveillance and calculative technologies—from paper to digital—have always been central in inflicting violence on these peoples because they solve issues of scale in necropolitical population control: from biometrics to track fugitive slaves, over census technologies to control and eradicate colonized peoples, to surveillance infrastructures of apartheid, to now algorithmic war machines. Now more than ever, it is urgent that we recognize that the structural conditions of this iteration of fascism have been created by modernity/coloniality and racial capitalism, and that the potential of technofascism lies in the bureaucratic-legal and calculative nature of the modern state.

When Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk sat center stage at Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2025, an outcry went through the media. Many took it as Big Tech's far-right coming out and a sign of the dawning corporate takeover of American democracy. ¹ And when Musk, who just days earlier had drawn condemnation for throwing up a Nazi salute at a Trump rally, started gutting central functions of government as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, it did not take long for headlines to drop the f-bomb: “Headed for technofascism”; “Techno-fascism comes to America”; and “Trump's Washington Is a Technofascist Fantasy.” ²

As usual, these discussions have been profoundly US-centric. While the outrage over Silicon Valley's political influence is understandable given the horror show that is current American politics, this Silicon Valley exceptionalism, I argue in this commentary, is distracting us from diagnosing the structural conditions of global technofascism. What we are facing is a global conjuncture rather than an ideology radiating from Silicon Valley; and what is enabling technofascism is much more ordinary than the “broligarchy's” spectacular displays of chauvinist power. Its underlying infrastructure is not exceptional but the normal operations of the legitimate institutions of violence of the modern state—policing, prisons, borders, and the war machine.

An important analytical key to understanding contemporary technofascism is provided by Toscano's (2023) recent search to diagnose “late fascism.” Drawing on the black radical tradition and anticolonial thought, Toscano highlights that fascistic conditions have continuously existed for peoples colonized, enslaved, indentured, exterminated, or otherwise oppressed by Western imperialism and settler colonialism. Whether we think of the horror of plantation slavery in the Americas, the colonial fascism which “boomeranged” back to Nazi Germany (Césaire, [1950] 2000), the fascistic terror experienced by Black Americans throughout Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and contemporary police brutality, or the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Palestine—Indigenous and racialized people have been subjected to fascistic terror since the beginning of “modernity/coloniality” (Quijano, 2000). Throughout history, Toscano (2023) argues, fascism has tended to exist in pockets in societies which we ordinarily would think of as “liberal”—pockets typically demarcated by colonization, racialization, or poverty—and under full-blow fascist rule, these laboratories of fascism are then generalized to broader populations. In this sense, Western societies have never not been fascist.

Accepting the premise that fascism and liberalism can exist simultaneously fundamentally reorients where we look for technofascism. Instead of analyzing Silicon Valley ideologies, we would look to the ways in which the thoroughly digitized infrastructures of state violence have helped create and maintain such pockets of fascistic terror for millions of people across the globe, and how these may indicate nascent fascist formations. And such pockets are plenty.

We could, for example, look to the ways in which Israel's genocidal war on Gaza ³ has been powered by Big Tech, and how the technological vocabulary of “error rates” helped conceal the indiscriminate annihilation of entire families by AI weaponry (Gray, 2025); or more generally, how the death-worlds of war have served as testbeds for the development of necropolitical technologies from WWII to the current period of algorithmic warfare (Black, 2012; González, 2022; Loewenstein, 2024). We could also look to the everyday terror occurring in the Western border regime which is subjecting a good chunk of a breathtaking 123 million globally displaced people to everyday dehumanization, violence, and premature death: from drones and robots chasing people through US deserts to death by desiccation and refugee boats back into the Mediterranean to death by drowning, to the terror of total surveillance at checkpoints in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, to mining people in African refugee camps for biometric data in exchange for food and using them for unethical technological experimentation (Besteman, 2020; Chaar López, 2024; Fatafta, 2023; Madianou, 2024; Molnar, 2024). ⁴ Closer to home, we would also look to the ways in which predictive policing technologies help direct gratuitous violence and premature death at immigrant and poor communities and communities of color while at the same time extracting economic value from the brutal exercise of state power (Brayne, 2021; Jefferson, 2020; Wang, 2018); or we could examine how carceral technologies facilitate the devastation of mass incarceration and the coerced extraction of data and labor from prison populations (Kaun and Stiernstedt, 2023; Magnet, 2011).

In short, pockets of fascistic terror—experiences of systematic dehumanization, arbitrary disenfranchisement, extraction, gratuitous violence, and annihilation—already exist on a global scale. In this context, we can understand the digital infrastructures of state violence as technofascist laboratories in which the techniques of “late fascism” are experimented with, refined, and which may eventually be generalized from the always already dehumanized to all of us. In places where full-blown fascist rule seems increasingly like a possibility, the technologies and techniques of large-scale human destruction will more likely come from these technofascist laboratories than from Silicon Valley.

Importantly, these laboratories of technofascism did not emerge because of ideologies originating in Silicon Valley but are the ordinary infrastructures of modern states. Modern states have always relied on calculative technologies to govern people and things (Scott, 1998), but there is something to be said about how rational bureaucratic organization always tends to carry a seed of technofascist potential. There is an undeniable family resemblance between the rule-based nature of the modern, bureaucratic-legal state and the rule-based nature of algorithmic technologies, which recalls the specter of what Arendt (1963) famously called “the banality of evil.” The success of fascist rule, as Arendt (1963) suggests, does not rely primarily on charismatic leaders but on the rule-following bureaucrat who thinks of themselves as “just a cog in the wheel” or “just following orders.” This is what makes fascist rule banal: the reliance on the ordinary workings of the modern state. Building on Arendt, Bowker and Star (2000) further suggest that large-scale projects of human destruction like South African apartheid could only be possible with the help of vast surveillance infrastructures because otherwise the population-level scale of apartheid rule could not have been materially sustained (see similarly Browne, 2015 on slavery in the Americas). To the extent that AI automates and scales mindless rule-following, we may want to consider how the digital infrastructures of state violence are supercharging the fascist potential of the modern state at a moment in which the global Right is more powerful than ever before.

Finally, we also must understand how old and new sites of technofascism are linked to the demands of global capitalism. On the one hand, this means acknowledging that the digital infrastructures of state violence have emerged in response to the global surplus populations created by racial capitalism—a way of managing “those deemed delinquent, wayward, and undeserving” (Danewid, 2024). Racial capitalism needs the state to create, entrench, and police hierarchies so that it can exploit, extract, expropriate, and discard people and places—and infrastructures of state violence allow states to do so at scale. On the other hand, this also means recognizing that the death worlds of digitized state violence are generating enormous economic value for technology corporations. Not just in the sense that “militarized global apartheid” has created lucrative markets for military technology (Besteman, 2020) but in the sense that state violence itself has become an economic asset for the AI industry: from extracting data for AI models and labor to train them to procuring test subjects for technology development and experimentation. Understanding the relationships between racial capitalism and infrastructures of state violence thus as constitutive has profound implications for liberal appeals to regulate the data economy which have become so popular in recent years. If the technofascist laboratories of ordinary state violence are inextricably linked to the demands of global racial capitalism, then regulation will achieve little to help the millions of people experiencing the dehumanizing terror of algorithmic warfare, border fascism, the suffocating dragnet of police surveillance, or electronic shackles.

Getting our analysis right is going to be critical for effectively organizing our struggle. We must understand technofascism in its global entanglements to effectively mobilize at this moment, as right-wing governments are spreading across the globe, as wars are raging on, as the world's deadliest military force has come under despotic rule, and as our planet is, quite literally, on fire. Rather than focusing on the spectacular fantasies of some Silicon Valley tech bros, we can learn more about emergent technofascist techniques and formations by looking at the ordinary digital infrastructures of state violence, which have for a long time been driven by imperialist, white supremacist, colonial, misogynist, or queer/-transphobic obsessions. In other words, our struggle is not Silicon Valley, it is global racial capitalism supercharged by the digital infrastructures of state violence.