Refusing Tech Fascism

Fascism is on the rise. In Germany, in Europe, in the US, in India, all over the planet. The version of it that has been dominating for the last few years – especially the form it has taken in the US – has sometimes been called "Tech Fascism".

Why should we talk about Tech Fascism specifically? Historically, fascism has always combined authoritarian government with capitalist interests, aligning the two kinds of power – despite their seemingly different goals. With computerization and the Internet having brought technology into almost every aspect of our lives and any product or service we interact with, one could argue that Big Tech (meaning companies such as Microsoft, Meta or Google among many others) is just the current representation of capital that is starting to align with fascist politics and governments. So, is Tech Fascism a continuation of fascism as we have known it for decades?

If "Tech Fascism" is to be considered a meaningful distinction – or better yet, a specific iteration – there must be structural shifts in how contemporary fascism forms its ideology and puts it into practice. This includes particular properties, logics, or narratives of modern technology that shape how fascism operates and connects to collective thinking and reasoning.

Our Poisoned Tech Stack

It boils down to the question of whether fascism is enmeshed in our modern tech landscape, within its protocols and its ways of seeing and structuring the world. Is our 'tech stack' – the collection of technologies and protocols that our modern digital world is built upon – as such poisoned with fascist ideas?

I am afraid so.

The idea of technologically mediated processes being beyond all regulation is inherently antidemocratic.

Since the 1996 "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," our digital technologies have increasingly emancipated from national governance by claiming to be "the new home of mind."¹ The Internet, on a protocol level, is built to circumvent any limitation – be they democratic or undemocratic – to the free flow of data. "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it," the saying goes, attributed to early digital activist John Gilmore.²

The idea of technologically mediated processes being beyond all regulation is inherently antidemocratic. It frames technological infrastructure as neutral and places the politics of those who shaped it outside the ability of communities and even democratic states to set and enforce common rules and establish norms. This amounts to technologically implemented structural violence and thus prioritizes the ethics (or lack thereof) or ideals (used further down) of the tech sector over any political and social governance or decision-making. To the Internet, you and the society you live in deciding through a democratic vote that something should be illegal is the 'damage' to route around.

Modern technology relies on specific frameworks and structures that are used to translate the world into a form which computers can understand and work with. In other words, technology creates organized structures or models to represent real-world information in a way that computer systems can then process. Data in this context remains the most valuable resource: The Internet's originally distributed nature, intended to protect against power grabs, is now being funneled through chokepoints. This is one point at which data structures enforce worldviews shaped by what the provider and developer of the infrastructure consider useful: Sure, you can define whatever structure of personhood you want online, but when you need to interface with Meta’s platform, Meta’s model – explicitly built to enable an easy way to sort people into groups of different target audiences (with the explicit goal to extract money through ads) - reigns supreme.

Unlike fascism, tech fascism does not conjure up the restoration of a nation. Instead, the rhetoric is about defending 'the future' as it is defined by leaders within the tech sector. Regulations or politics based on equal participation and rights (i.e. democracy) are thus interpreted as attacks on this future whose creation is deemed essential for humankind. The concept of the 'nation' that needs saving is replaced with the abstract idea of 'the future'.

The tech sector has always sold its gadgets with narratives of a future that would manifest only by purchasing the right devices. However, there has been a gradual shift toward the claim that this future can only be brought about through the unhindered development of the right technologies. It’s no longer "In the future we’ll have hoverboards," but rather "You need to let us do whatever we want in order for the future to come." Nowhere does that become more explicit than in what is called 'AI'. All existing rules and legislation, understandings of consent, copyright, or the right not to become the subject of automated biometric data processing, go down the drain because without all the data, AI supposedly won’t become smarter than us humans, won’t emerge as our new machine god. And we need that magic AGI to solve all our problems and maybe even rule us. Nobody was asked for their input on that vision. A few technologists just made their secular religion the only acceptable way to think about the future.

This is Tech Fascism

As these examples show, fascist ideas are embedded in how the tech sector operates, perceives the world, and views itself. I argue that this constitutes a specific Tech Fascism, due to the central role technology and the tech sector play in society today. Technology is expected to solve everything – from the climate catastrophe and the 'problem' of migration, to the correct distribution of resources and the organization of power. Tech is not just  part of the economy; the tech sector and its solutions have become the operating system of (not only) western societies.

Tech Fascism emerges when a select few have the power to structure the world according to their very limited ideals of efficiency and 'rationality'. These ideals, which leave little room for dignity or the richness of human experience, bring fascist logics into every aspect of even liberal governments, into every aspect of our digitally mediated lives, in an essentially totalitarian manner.

Tech Fascism emerges when a select few have the power to structure the world according to their very limited ideals of efficiency and 'rationality'.

We talk of Tech Fascism because of its explicitly colonizing pushes to destroy existing political, legal, and social structures and their values by replacing them with a computerized model that strips away all that is deemed useless or wrong. Fascist ideas can be found everywhere, especially in the disdain for democracy and its basic values like equality, participation, human dignity. These are viewed as inefficient and lacking in data-verifiable truth.

Refusal

It is not enough to fight the external manifestations of Tech Fascism; we have to refuse fascist logics from entering our collective minds piggybacking on the logic of technology. We have to refuse the ideologies of mindless efficiency, the violent automated classification of human beings, and the political determinism embedded in the technological infrastructures upon which we’ve built our societies. We have to refuse the logic of optimization and frictionlessness as utopian.

We need to outwardly fight Tech Fascism. But we also need to refuse it on every level.

Refusing Tech Fascism goes beyond blowing up a data center or moving infrastructure towards open source systems. It demands more than making better individual choices or enacting regulations to curb the worst effects of our current technologies. It requires the willingness to let go of what the late David Golumbia called the "Cultural Logic of Computation"³ – the belief that our minds function just like computers, an inhumane ideology that limits our collective imagination and action. The world does not need to be compatible with computers and digital systems, rather, it is the other way around: We need to re-learn to bring democratic values– values of human dignity and rights – back to the core of our thinking, making them the basis of our utopias. We need to remind ourselves that the promises of cold, data-driven efficiency do not serve us, but serve only those in power. We have to reject these logics on a fundamental level.

On the part of software developers, refusal could mean refusing to build new systems that rigidly classify users or refusing to adopt intransparent, complex algorithmic media curation based on such rigid categories. For users, refusal may involve avoiding commercial platforms that employ these opaque techniques altogether. However, even our open-source infrastructures are infused with ideas that align with Tech Fascism, since they copy the user experience of existing platforms and thereby perpetuate their ideologies. We are only at the very beginning of conceptualizing anti-fascist tech, but the task is more urgent than ever.

We need to outwardly fight Tech Fascism. But we also need to refuse it on every level.