Fascism 2.0

The grip of Big tech is not merely a matter of financial domination or caste privilege. It structures an authentic (techno-)fascism. A global system far more resilient than an oligarchy. This power does not seek to convince, but rather to neutralize all dissent at its root. Through attentional capture and algorithmic invisibilization, it imposes a perpetual and globalized present that freezes inequalities and seeks to confine existences within a permanent biopolitical order.

(Here is an English translation of my previous article. I am sharing it in response to requests from several readers. Please forgive any inaccuracies, but I believe the key points have been faithfully conveyed.)

In a very interesting article titled “Techno-oligarchy or fascism?” (Le Grand Continent, May 19, 2026), Anton Shekhovtsov offers a reflection on the nature of Big Tech’s power. The interest of the article lies not so much in its conclusions (that the Big Tech oligarchy would be more dangerous than what we call fascism) as in the framework for discussion it opens: it allows for defining the contours of what should be called contemporary techno-fascism.

Shekhovtsov characterizes as “techno-oligarchy” this mode of governing things by a minority holding capital and informational infrastructure. While the existence of this oligarchy is indisputable, this concept seems, in my view, insufficient to characterize the current period. I am not merely splitting hairs.

An oligarchy is a reversible political configuration; it remains vulnerable to crises of value, economic recessions, climate disasters, or sector-specific supply disruptions (and today’s wars, especially when they involve oil, are a perfect example capable, precisely, of toppling this oligarchy). Fascism, on the other hand, is not reduced to a simple governmental outgrowth or a caste privilege: it is a global system and a biopolitical structure.

As a system, fascism exhibits a superior resilience to that of oligarchy. While the latter manages short-term economic flows (and any planning would be an admission), techno-fascism operates over the longue durée. It works by neutralizing historicity, confining populations within a perpetual and standardized algorithmic present (just as the Third Reich was meant to last a thousand years), designed to freeze inequalities and make relations of domination structurally indisputable.

But before going further, I will open a parenthesis regarding this term “biopolitics.” I proceed from the premise that techno-fascism consists in imposing a new biopolitical order. However, it must not be confused with classical biopolitical analytical frameworks in the vein of Foucault. For Foucault, the neologism biopolitics (the exercise of biopower) refers to the entry of human life and the biological mechanisms of the population (birth rate, mortality, public hygiene) into the calculations of (State) power starting from the 18th century. Constraint was then exerted through physical institutions of capture: the school, the military barracks, the factory, the clinic, the prison. Historically, fascism pushed this disciplinary logic to its climax by bringing the biological body under State control, subjecting it to racial hygienization and physical preparation for industrial warfare.

The new biopolitical order of Big Tech performs a qualitative leap: it no longer relies (no longer solely — one only need observe the overcrowding of prisons and “administrative” detentions) on material institutions of confinement, but on an infrastructure of control at the atomic scale. Contemporary biopower does not wait for the individual to enter a school or a factory to format them; it installs itself directly within their daily life to operate upon their very existence. This new order is defined according to three modalities:

1. The dissolution of the distinction between the biological body and digital data: techno-fascism does not merely monitor bodies; it converts them into continuous flows of behavioral data through a staggering number of sensors: those of our smartwatches and smartphones, attention metrics on social media, measurements of purchasing behavior and interactions with institutions (platformization and systematic mediation), and global surveillance (video surveillance, technopolice, mass espionage). In return, behavioral engineering uses this data to modify the behaviors and the affective and psychic states of individuals via personalized algorithmic stimuli. The human body becomes a biological feedback node within networks maintained by capital (the owners of these infrastructures).
2. Governing through affects and forced pacification: unlike historical fascism, which required a loud and militant mobilization of bodies (parades, mass rituals), the new biopolitical order demands, depending on the imperatives, either sedation or controlled drive. A dirigisme of affects (whereas the Nazis required the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 to calm the most fanatical). Attentional capture and the continuous activation of the dopaminergic system through digital interfaces settle the masses into passivity or mobilization through affects (generally reactionary). Power no longer imposes an ideology through discursive constraint; it regulates the population’s impulses to stifle insurrectionary potential at its biological source (or to command it, as seen with Donald Trump’s supporters in 2021 or the attempted coup in Brazil with those of Jair Bolsonaro in 2023).
3. The technical naturalization of inequalities: this biopolitical control prepares the ground for the anthropological bifurcation of transhumanism. By biologically managing populations for the purposes of sorting and optimization, Big Tech transforms class conflict into a hierarchy of a technical and biological nature. The dominated are no longer merely deprived of political rights or economic resources: they are defined, within the biopolitical environment, as under-optimized organisms, confined to a role as data providers for machine learning.

This new biopolitical order represents the culmination of the Big Tech totalitarian project today. It does not seek to break individual resistance through the visible physical violence of the State, but to render indocility technically impossible by modifying the very structure of lived experience and subjectivity. I have many times cited Detlef Hartmann’s concept of technological violence on this blog; this is nearly the same thing, to the power of ten.

Asymmetric Fusion

That being said, should we fear fascism or “only” those who hold power? The main methodological limit of considering only the Big Tech oligarchy (which, I should clarify, Shekhovtsov’s article does not do) is focusing solely on the formalism of institutions. It fails to grasp the joint trajectory of the State and capital. The classic argument posits a principled antagonism: historical fascism would imply the omnipresence of a centralized State, while the actions of Big Tech would aim to bypass or dissolve public power.

This is a legal illusion. The State is not a neutral entity defined by its regulatory functions or social bureaucracy, but the monopolistic apparatus of so-called “legitimate” coercion which, in the capitalist world, places itself at the service of reproducing relations of domination. Industrial and financial capitalism, at the stage of technological maturity it has reached today, does not destroy the State; it performs an asymmetric fusion with it.

The technical infrastructure of Big Tech now functions as the operating system¹ of public power. Entities like Palantir directly integrate and manage repressive and surveillance functions traditionally devolved to sovereign functions — for instance, predictive policing, migration flow management, and border control. By outsourcing its coercive capacity to private monopolies while liquidating its social counterparts, contemporary power completes the logic of fusion between State and capital, to the benefit of capital. That the sovereign is no longer a dictator in uniform but a managerial structure of boards of directors and parliamentary apparatuses does not change the systemic nature of control. Techno-fascism begins precisely where political constraint, police surveillance, and economic imperatives merge within a single technical infrastructure.

Total subsumption

Another idea consists in asserting that the digital era implies the disappearance of the collective in favor of an atomized individualism. According to this perspective, the fragmentation of public space into filter bubbles and the personalization of flows would contradict the requirement for homogenization inherent to fascist systems. One could no longer organize mass gatherings of over 150,000 people in the manner of the Nazi Party at Nuremberg. This is somewhat true. Nowadays, fascists operate mostly in dark alleys or piss-stained bars and march in small numbers under police protection.

However, this approach confuses the aesthetic form of the collective with its reality. Techno-fascism does not destroy the collective: it operates its total subsumption. Even (and especially, I would say) the minor militant “wannabe nazi” does not escape it. The social body does not vanish for the exclusive benefit of a minority oligarchy. It remains the indispensable raw material for the system’s operation. The entire challenge of technological power is precisely to reign over this collective by reconfiguring it. Individuals are not simply isolated; they are regimented as an aggregate of behavioral data and a ready labor force, continuously integrated into the industrial processes of artificial intelligence, lobot-uberized within a vague bourgeois perspective of being one’s own entrepreneur, while they are merely throwing away the key to the irons they have fixed to their own feet.

The process of purging, characteristic of the fascist matrix, changes its modality: it is no longer an immediate physical exclusion based on biological criteria, but a socio-technical elimination. Declared obsolete or rendered invisible are all elements that are non-compliant, useless to the reproduction of capital, or ill-adapted to the imperatives of automation or Uberization (thus, the mentally ill-equipped “wannabe nazi” will be among the first to sink). This sorting demonstrates that a collective is maintained — standardized, administered, but maintained — and if possible, without consciousness of either self or condition. Bernard Stiegler spoke of proletarianization; this is exactly what it is about, with the added impossibility of escape or even revolt.

This control of the collective is coupled with a neutralization of its historicity. There is not even a “privatization of the future” by the oligarchy: techno-fascism suppresses the very category of the future for the masses. By capturing attention and predicting behaviors, Big Tech confines the population within a perpetual and immutable present. Depriving the collective of any perspective of historical rupture constitutes the ultimate means of its pacification. Like the millenarian projects of historical fascism, techno-fascism aims to permanently freeze class relations and inequalities within a technological order presented as unsurpassable.

Who is the Enemy?

Oligarchy has no ontological enemy, insofar as its actions, through maneuvers of deregulation, target regulatory frameworks rather than specific human groups. We might recall Peter Thiel’s idea that, according to him, democracy is not compatible with freedom; this is more a question of framework than a definition of its enemies. It is also a way of making opponents invisible. The problem is that the political project of Big Tech is not merely a strategy of deregulation by an oligarchy.

In fact, techno-fascism identifies and stalks a precise existential enemy: the indocile individual. And we all are, to varying degrees and for various reasons. While historical fascism persecuted well-defined identities (national, racial, gender, religious, physical, etc.), the technological system establishes behavioral deviance and technical incompatibility as absolute threats. The enemy is defined as any subject who claims their epistemic singularity, their psychic sovereignty, or their self-determination in the face of capture infrastructures.

The refusal of any political alterity and the requirement for a complete subordination of society to managerial rationality constitute the deep identity of this fascism. Behavioral engineering does not seek to convince through ideological dogma and discourse (we are no longer in the age of radio broadcasting); it integrates the norm directly into the user’s daily experience. Consequently, any resistance to the alignment of minds or any attempt to escape traceability is treated as a systemic anomaly to be corrected or neutralized. That being said, this is not entirely new: it is the case for any society under an authoritarian regime; everything depends on where the cursor is placed.

The invisibilization of censorship

We always think of the spectacular censorship of fascist regimes: book burnings, publication bans, press seizures. And often, the advent of the mainstream Internet was seen as a great advance in informational fluidity. Any censorship claimed as such in the digital world is perceived as one of the worst sacrileges against informational freedoms. But now that we have seen at work the large-scale manipulation operations in the vein of the Cambridge Analytica affair, or those of mass surveillance (revealed by E. Snowden), we know well that it is a lure. The mechanisms of mind control have mutated considerably.

Techno-fascism does not operate through the subtraction of information, but through saturation and cognitive reconfiguration. Contemporary censorship proceeds by invisibilization (shadow banning, modification of referencing criteria, gag lawsuits, deprivation of previously open spaces, privatization of arts and knowledge to limit their sharing, etc.). The fascism of yesterday made constraint manifest; it admitted and even claimed it: it designated the locus of power, thus creating martyrs, dissent, and a clear consciousness of oppression. Techno-fascism eliminates this resistance by making it technically inaudible or impossible before it can even be consciously articulated.

This control relies on an economy of attention capture and cognitive sorting. By exploiting the most archaic psychic mechanisms through interfaces designed to maximize engagement (infinite flows, intermittent notifications), Big Tech installs a regime of pulsionality. The objective of this behavioral engineering is to lower critical thinking faculties through permanent attentional overload. The dissolution of knowledge and culture into uninterrupted flows of interchangeable content acts as a general sedation project. This pacification device neutralizes insurrectional potential. As F. Lordon rightly points out, the daily confrontation with the obscene accumulation of oligarchic wealth no longer produces revolt, but finds itself transformed—through shock and the continuous entertainment of mainstream TV channels or YouTuber influencers—into passive admiration or an individualistic and bourgeois envy.

Transhumanism

The ideological project of Big Tech fully aligns with fascism through its transhumanist doctrine. The ideal of historical fascism rested on the myth of the “New Man,” an attempt to rationalize and format bodies in order to subject them to the requirements of the State’s industrial and military power. The post-humanism promoted by the Big Tech oligarchy materializes and radicalizes this eugenicist fantasy in a market-based and technological form.

This contemporary eugenics is no longer organized around coercive State policies but is articulated through specific industrial projects aimed at modifying or surpassing human biological limits. This is not new; as early as 2016, Peter Thiel was publicizing his dream of immortality. There are two main axes:

1. Neural augmentation and machine interface: initiatives such as Neuralink (founded by Elon Musk) aim to directly merge human consciousness with computer processing power. Under the guise of medical applications for people with disabilities, the explicit goal is to create a layer of cognitive symbiosis with artificial intelligence. The cost is obviously prohibitive and restricted.
2. Biological reprogramming: the massive investments by Big Tech oligarchs in biotechnology, longevity, or pre-implantation genomic selection—so-called “predictive” or “preventive” genomics—show a desire to break free from biological “chance” in favor of programmed optimization.

This project draws an anthropological line of demarcation. Biological and cognitive augmentation and life extension are conceived as privileges, reserved for the oligarchic elite capable of paying the price. Conversely, the rest of the population is relegated to the status of “obsolete humanity.” Working and middle classes are no longer viewed as political subjects, but as a mere data substrate, a residual biological mass useful only for feeding and training artificial intelligence systems, their energy needs, and industry (and even agriculture). Historical fascism’s contempt for the vulnerable, autonomous, or non-productive human finds its perfect technical translation here.

The Palantir Manifesto

Published in French in Le Grand Continent on April 20, 2026, the “Palantir Manifesto for Domination” is quite exemplary. This text synthesizes in 22 theses the strategic vision of Alex Karp from his book The Technological Republic. It is a blueprint designed to forge a techno-fascist order. This is not merely a provocation to claim its inevitability; it precisely documents the end of the State’s formal autonomy (though not its disappearance as a power structure) and its definitive absorption by techno-capitalism.

Under the guise of responding to global geopolitical rivalry and redefining Western power against strategic adversaries, this project contains three system characteristics:

1. The liquidation of the State/Market separation: The manifesto posits that the survival of institutions depends on integrating artificial intelligence and mass data processing at the heart of sovereignty apparatuses. For Palantir, repressive and military efficiency is no longer an internal prerogative of the State, but a technological service provided by private (and monopolistic) companies. The State apparatus renounces its bureaucratic sovereignty to become a legal shell dependent on the private operating system that administers it.
2. Governing by transforming the cognitive space: As shown by the operational use of Palantir’s systems in war-torn countries or in border management, the firm does not sell simple calculation tools, but constructs the cognitive environment upon which political and military decisions are based. Power is exercised through saturation, suggestion, and algorithmic proof (see Alain Supiot). This mode of government dissolves political deliberation in favor of an automated and indisputable managerial rationality.
3. Militarizing the social space: By elevating mass data management into a tool of perpetual hybrid warfare, the manifesto erases the boundary between external defense and the control of the domestic population. The indocile citizen, the behavioral deviant, or the migrant are treated as targets, through the same algorithmic sorting grids as those applied to military objectives.

The Palantir Manifesto is not a military coup against parliamentary institutions. It aims to initiate a technocratic transition. The oligarchy does not seek to destroy the State from the outside: it privatizes its functions, merging police constraint and capital accumulation within a single infrastructure. This is the roadmap for total domination where the private technical network becomes the sovereign, installing a resilient and permanent biopolitical order. A fascism v2.0.

Beyond navel-gazing

It would be false to limit techno-fascism to a sectoral drift of Silicon Valley. While the system was initially guided by North American oligarchs, its current deployment demonstrates a global capillarity. This is true, first, because American firms are multinationals, but that is not all. Technological and political interconnections reveal that techno-fascism has formed a global network based on historical geopolitical and geoeconomic globalization. While reinforcing economic inequalities, it imposes a universal biopolitical order.

In this context, a protective Europe is an illusion unless there is a major political upheaval. Its regulatory arsenal is contradicted by the facts. American surveillance technologies have long since invaded European state structures. Consequently, they are structurally linked to private operators. Examples include the use of Palantir’s software solutions by European institutions, including the DGSI in France. One could also cite the dissemination of Microsoft software at all levels of public services, even if major efforts toward strategic autonomy are beginning to take shape.

One cannot forget the case of China. There, power does not revolve around a private techno-oligarchy but proceeds from a direct fusion between State capitalism and the Party apparatus. From a Western perspective, we still have great difficulty conceiving exactly what the social credit system and the omnipresence of facial recognition technologies (through networks like the Sky Net) truly imply culturally. This is not a simple bureaucratic dictatorship. It is a process of total homogenization of the collective through digital means. As in the West, the enemy is defined by behavioral deviance and indocility. The Chinese power does not only demand political submission; it organizes a biopolitical normalization where every gesture is evaluated to format existences according to the imperatives of stability. It is a project for the alignment of minds with sometimes very subtle contours.

Despite the already substantial body of work on these aspects, country by country, it would take considerable time to closely study the new mechanisms of fascism, without limiting it solely to its technological dimensions. One could, however, proceed through an analysis of trajectories in various countries across the world: the trajectories of companies such as AggregateIQ, the trajectories of services like those of Palantir Technologies, the trajectories of software artifacts such as Pegasus, the trajectories of governmental tools like the NSA’s SKYNET project, or even the technology bundles like the Chinese Skynet. Changing perspectives would allow for a comprehensive view of the mechanisms at play and a better understanding of the universal scope of techno-fascism.

This globalization of techno-fascism raises many questions regarding the ineffectiveness or inadequacy of regulatory responses, and even the collusion and conflicts of interest among decision-makers. These shortcomings allow techno-fascist networks to play their hand at a supranational level, rendering local counter-powers obsolete. Resistance cannot be satisfied with marginal adjustments or defensive stances. It mandates a strategy of radical rupture aimed at the abolition of the for-profit ownership of these capture companies and the democratic and self-managed reappropriation of technical networks. We have already spoken of this on this blog…