Digital control is the bloodstream of modern authoritarianism. From the streets of Hong Kong to the border of Israel, technology has begun to amplify domination. The history of anti-authoritarian organizing has forced fascism to evolve, birthing the era of digital despotism. Left unchecked, the trend threatens to concentrate power into unelected elites, eliminate social movements, and enforce obedience with unprecedented efficiency.
Digital Authoritarianism relies on the constant gaze of the state to keep its subjects in line. One of the most famous examples is the Panopticon, a prison design from the late 18th century that significantly reduced the amount of staff without sacrificing control over its population. In the Panopticon, the cells of prisoners surrounded a watch tower, whose design made it impossible for inmates to know whether they were being watched. It is an architecture of efficiency that enforced docility through the mere possibility of being punished and surveilled. With the election of Donald J. Trump, the warden of the Panopticon now sits in the Oval Office—threatening to imprison democracy itself.
The Rigged Election
In America’s digital Panopticon, Big Tech has become the watchtower. The administration has forged a tested alliance with Silicon Valley, whose vast resources and control over digital life provide the perfect machinery to establish an authoritarian state. Investigations by The Guardian, Observer, and the New York Times revealed that Cambridge Analytica — the digital consulting arm of Trump’s 2016 campaign — illegally harvested the personal data of nearly 50 million Facebook users before the election. Forty-four million dollars were spent on advertisements, and with every dollar, another face and name were stolen to fuel Trump’s rise in public consciousness.
Cambridge Analytica and Trump rigged the election. Armed with a trove of private information, Trump launched a psycho-manipulative campaign designed to undermine democratic decision-making and snare undecided voters. Cambridge weaponized sensitive data to create personalized campaign advertisements that preyed on America’s worst fears. To the detriment of Americans’ sanctity, Trump and Cambridge Analytica had successfully engineered a nation paradoxically enraged by soundbites of issues it barely understood. All the while, the boundaries between Big Tech and politics grew blurrier.
Cambridge’s gamble paid off. Brad Parscale, the digital director under the Trump administration, claimed that “Twitter is how Trump talked to people, Facebook was going to be how he won.” Later studies confirmed Parscale’s claim, showing that political advertising on Facebook alone boosted Trump turnout by up to ten percent in the 2016 elections. In a race decided by just 38 electoral college votes, Big Tech won Trump the election.
Despite the best attempts by the Trump administration to distance itself from the scandal, his campaign undeniably knew what it was doing. Brad Parscale boasted that the campaign’s online advertising was up to 200 times more cost-effective than Clinton’s. The former CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix claimed he met with Donald Trump “many times” to discuss campaign strategy. To make matters worse, the data analytics firm was in part founded by Steve Bannon, Trump’s previous senior council.
To no one’s surprise, Facebook was utterly complicit in Trump’s attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. Documents released by the D.C. attorney general’s office revealed Facebook first learned about Cambridge Analytica’s data violations in September of 2015. To put this in perspective, Trump received the Republican nomination on July 19th, nine months after Facebook was first aware of Cambridge’s illegal data scraping. The 2016 election revealed an unsettling truth — Trump and Big Tech discovered a playbook for reshaping democracy, one they would not abandon for years to come.
The Echo Chamber
Since 2016, Trump’s alliance with Big Tech has only grown stronger. At his inauguration, he stood flanked by the titans of Silicon Valley. Notable attendees included Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, who recently abandoned fact-checking on his platforms, and Elon Musk, the tech magnate who spent a jaw-dropping $277 million supporting the president while brazenly flashing Roman salutes. To put the alliance in perspective, in 2025, Big Tech donated the largest amount of money to any presidential inauguration in history. To make matters worse, those same companies are now bankrolling the construction of Trump’s $200 million golden ballroom. If there was any lingering doubt before, it’s gone. Silicon Valley has bent the knee for America’s authoritarian in chief.
The administration’s alliance with Big Tech is not a one-way street. Trump has a debt to pay, and he’s paying it off well — trading political favors for control over the polis. There are no checks and balances for Big Tech. Nowhere is this clearer than in one of Trump’s core legislative priorities, clawing back regulations for the tech industry. The Supreme Court, packed by the Trump administration, continues to shield tech companies from state regulations. When the interests of an authoritarian and the most powerful businesses on the planet are aligned, the stage is set for the emergence of digital fascism.
Big Tech is a democratic time bomb precisely because of the rise of political information exchanges online. Platforms are the new public square of discourse, allowing unelected officials to determine what counts as acceptable political speech, which content voters see in the run-up to elections, and who is permitted to advertise.
Nearly 20% of Americans get their news from social media, and Big Tech has a history of arbitrarily influencing algorithms to amplify certain political messages. Studies about tweets on Twitter indicate that X’s algorithm significantly skewed towards Republicans during the 2024 elections. After algorithms picked up on someone’s engagement patterns, they were substantially more likely to discover posts that aligned with their own political viewpoints — locking voters into pre-existing biases. Companies have an economic incentive to maximize user interactions, and nothing fuels engagement more than feeling like you were right all along.
With nearly 80 percent of Americans divided among core values, Big Tech’s engagement-driven algorithms don’t just create division — they weave it into the fabric of the republic’s consciousness. By force-feeding users content they already agree with, platforms trap Americans into echo chambers that harden ill-informed beliefs. The result is a political environment where exposure to new perspectives becomes impossible and genuine democratic deliberation is replaced by clickbait. Ultimately, what is the value of free speech if the other side never understands or hears your message?
This is not another shift in public consciousness — it is its own unraveling. Whenever you get a leader in office with a disdain for democracy and a populace that is salivating for bias, the stage is set for the rise of a digital fascist. The normal lever for accountability, a well-informed populace that knows when a line has been crossed, ceases to exist.
In the absence of regulation, anti-democratic algorithms become virtually impossible to prevent, setting the stage for the erosion of discourse. It becomes impossible to convince the other side they are wrong when 30-minute conversations are overshadowed by hours of fine-tuned algorithms that tell Americans: you are right and they are trying to hurt you. What America is witnessing is not a regular shift in the Overton window. This is the collapse of political exchange motivated by profit maximalists who are drooling while the working class enters a death pact with an Orwellian fascist.
Deportation, Freedom of Speech, and the Technological Gestapo
Trump has a checkered past of acting in ways that mimic America’s adversaries more than its founding fathers. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, the leader of the free world called Xi Jinping — the president of the People’s Republic of China — a “brilliant man” who “controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” To put in perspective the severity of Trump’s praise, China houses over half of the world’s surveillance cameras and has a history of imprisoning critics. In a later interview, Trump claimed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — the Turkish leader who has been in power since 2003 — was lifting Turkey to a “new level of prominence and respect.” To make matters worse, Trump proudly proclaimed he wanted to be a dictator “only on day one.” If the past couple months were to tell — Trump was lying. He doesn’t just envy dictators, he’s gunning to join their ranks.
One of the most glaring examples can be found in the administration’s immigration platform. Trump has embarked on an illegal and systematic deportation campaign justified by the ethno-nationalist idea that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the polis. The administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of immigrants to El Salvadorian prisons, going as far as to grant Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the ability to detain people at immigration court. Perhaps the most famous example was the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an immigrant who the administration admitted they racially profiled and deported without due process — a foundational constitutional right.
Regardless of race, rationality, or citizenship status, the idea of an elected official illegally deporting people to a foreign country is nightmarish. A lack of due process is how the Panopticon swallows democracy. Without it, racial profiling and bureaucratic mistakes — evidenced by the case of Kilmar — can upend the lives of anyone caught in the crossfire. In the absence of the ability to defend yourself in court, allegations become unquestionable truth, infractions become death sentences, and stepping out of line becomes unthinkable. When the government claims the power to decide whose rights matter and whose rights can be discarded, it becomes a gun that can be fired on anyone.
The administration understands its newfound power, and in the digital age, the warden’s weapon is no longer the baton but data. ICE has more funding than most of the world’s militaries — granting it the unprecedented ability to technologize its fascist techniques. ICE has begun to utilize mobile location data and facial recognition systems to identify and arrest undocumented immigrants. With the help of technology, the administration has deported nearly 200,000 people since Trump’s inauguration. With everything from social media, the weather app, and mobile games producing real-time data, Trump’s Gestapo has virtually unlimited power to “clean the blood” of America.
Big tech has aligned itself with Trump’s fascistic objective. With the assistance of Palantir, the administration has rolled out a comprehensive ImmigrationOS platform. The technology provides ICE agents with the ability to approve raids, book arrests, and deport immigrants digitally. ImmigrationOS is a pure expression of panoptic governance — an absolute drive to wield technology to perfect an authoritarian agenda. History is repeating itself. Trump’s organized mass form of political persecution is eerily similar to that of Nazi Germany, which utilized IBM technology to efficiently commit genocide against its Jewish population.
In March, Trump signed an executive order requiring the federal government to share data across agencies, enabling Palantir to compile a “master list” of personal information. Everything from bank account numbers, student debt, and medical status is about to flow into the hands of a private corporation hell-bent on carrying out Trump’s authoritarian agenda. No one is untouchable. When the government can build a comprehensive digital profile on residents, it can be used to flag people for investigation and pre-emptively stifle dissent before it even begins. Trump’s “master list” is nothing short of an attempt to create a digital Panopticon — one that violates privacy, enforces docility, and grants the administration uninterrupted control over the polis. After all, how can you fight against fascism if the government is always watching?
The recent wave of technologically enabled deportations is just the tip of the iceberg. Regardless of one’s citizenship status, any feeling of safety is a comfortable attachment to a distant memory of democracy. Officials in the U.S. The State Department revealed they are planning to use AI to revoke the visas of “foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups,” scanning the social media accounts of over 33 million people. The State Department’s usage of the words “support” and “foreign national” as the litmus test for deportation is bloodcurdling. It is deliberately vague, opening the door for deportation of any American on the basis of protesting the Gaza genocide to speaking out against Trump. It’s easy to believe some Americans are safe because they are not “foreign nationals,” but in a nation built on stolen land, only one group can truly call themselves Native.
Trump weaponizing AI to mass arrest political opponents is not a matter of if, but when. Since 2022, Trump has made over 100 threats to prosecute political opponents, referring to leftists as the “enemy within.” Most recently, the administration has weaponized the death of Charlie Kirk in a disgusting attempt to advance dangerous political narratives. Trump blamed the democrats for Kirk’s murder and, when asked about how the right should proceed, he replied, “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.” This should not be taken lightly. The president of the free world is calling for political persecution and violence against citizens utilizing their First Amendment right — a textbook authoritarian impulse.
Trump has seized on the opportunity, redrawing the lines of accepted speech to crack down on leftist organizing. After Kirk’s assassination, Pam Bondi, the US attorney general under the Trump administration, proclaimed she would “absolutely target” people who use “hate speech” in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. Shortly after Pam Bondi’s declaration of war against the left, Trump classified Antifa as a “major” terrorist organization — greenlighting DOJ prosecution of individuals who have donated to anti-fascist organizing. The vital thing to recognize is that Antifa is not a designated group of people or movement; it’s an ideology. By labeling “anti-fascism” terrorism, the president of the United States has criminalized a political belief — one that a leader with nothing to hide would embrace.
Despite widespread misinformation about the dangers of Antifa, the empirical record shows the ideology is significantly less dangerous than right-wing extremism. Studies have shown that since 1994, only one person’s death can be attributed to Antifa. The Trump administration is well aware of this reality. Shortly after Antifa was designated a major terrorist organization — placed on par with groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda — the DOJ quietly scrubbed studies from its website that documented the dangers of right-wing extremism. This is the authoritarian impulse at work. By suppressing facts that contradict the administration’s call to violence against leftists, Trump is attempting to convince the public the true danger to America is anti-fascism, not the criminalization of free speech.
Suppose America fails to confront Trump’s weaponization of technology. In this world, the nation will have traded protests for persecution, criticism for deportation, and with it the freedom to restrain the administration’s worst authoritarian impulses. Now that Trump has the technological means to advance his agenda, the only question is whether he can make the process as efficient and inescapable as the Panopticon.
The End of the American Experiment
Trump has traded the sanctity and stability of the polis in the pursuit for absolute power. The president has allied himself with an industry with insatiable bloodlust—one that profits off declining discourse, surveillance of citizens, and illegal deportations of immigrants. The traditional lever of democratic accountability — the ability to utilize one’s voice and form an uninfluenced opinion — is on the brink of collapse.
America is living in the twilight of digital authoritarianism: a democracy fractured from within where the possibility of surveillance and penalization ensures obedience and control without the need for physical chains. This danger is uniquely bipartisan. Unless Americans band together and confront the fusion of technology and authoritarianism, the end of the Trump administration will not be remembered as the time America solved its immigration problems, crime rate, or economic instability, but rather, the final chapter of the American experiment.
Featured Image Source: Visual Culture
