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

Dialogues Digit Soc. 2025 Sep 11;1(3):252-255. doi: 10.1177/29768640251377169. eCollection 2025 Dec.

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.

PMID:42005046 | PMC:PMC13086256 | DOI:10.1177/29768640251377169