Fighting TechnoFascism from the Heart of the Empire

The threat cannot be reduced to AI, surveillance, data centers, or individual tech companies.

The panel described a much broader convergence in which tech oligarchs are increasingly intertwined with government policy, anti-democratic interference , surveillance, policing, immigration enforcement, militarism, and the broader political agenda of the right. The result is a concentration of power that threatens democracy while expanding the capacity of the state and corporations to monitor, control, and criminalize communities.

This is why the work has to be cross-movement. Immigration justice, climate justice, tech justice, racial justice, labor, democracy, and struggles over land and water are increasingly encountering the same political and economic actors.

Mijente’s work demonstrates this. Immigration enforcement is increasingly able to draw on interconnected systems involving data brokers, license plate readers, facial recognition, police databases, and surveillance platforms. These systems allow government agencies to locate people, track movements, map relationships, and target entire communities.

This is why Mijente’s The Tech Behind ICE: Oligarchs, Immigration Enforcement, and the Threat to Democracy is designed as an organizing resource. The purpose is to map the ecosystem and identify points of intervention, rather than treating ICE, a particular company, or a particular technology as an isolated problem.

The work also points to the need to redefine what “sanctuary” means. In Cook County, organizers discovered that private contracts could undermine protections that were supposed to separate local government from federal immigration enforcement. After roughly six years of organizing, research, public education, and pressure, the campaign pushed the county toward renegotiating a contract that enabled data sharing with immigration enforcement.

Texas offers a particularly powerful example. Project Matador, announced in June 2025 near Amarillo, was presented as a massive data center project involving multiple nuclear reactors. It is a textbook case of corruption: planned byFermi America, co-founded by Rick Perry, it received a Department of Energy grant (the agency led by Rick Perry). The project became a visible example of the relationship between technology, state power, energy interests, and extractive industries.

Organizers were initially told that opposing data centers outright was politically impossible in Texas and that they should instead seek reforms or benefits from the projects. Governor Abbott himself made Texas the second most attractive state for data center development, behind Virginia.
Local organizers rejected that premise and insisted on organizing around a clear demand: no data center in our town. That organizing helped create shifts that had previously seemed impossible, including working across the aisle, bridging white conservatives with Latine and immigrant progressives. In just one year, MediaJustice helped seed a statewide coalition alongside Public Citizen and Climate Justice Alliance.

The organizing has produced concrete narrative shifts and material protections for the community, which is still fighting:

• Governor Abbott has flipped a 180 on his stance on data centers due to polling and political pressures ahead of the midterms.
• In Amarillo, a hearing revealed that Palantir was a possible client, connecting the data center fight directly to surveillance and immigration enforcement. Early in the fight that tenant, worth $150 million, pulled out of the project. 
• During Take Back Tech, organizers learned that the CEO and CFO of Fermi had been asked to step down amid pressure around Project Matador.

Organizing changes public opinion, relationships, political calculations, corporate behavior, and the conditions under which a project can proceed. Now, constituents within the Texas coalition are turning their fights to Flox and Axon’s surveillance technologies, urging cities to cancel their contracts.

MediaJustice launched a place-based data center training for new organizers and community leaders using a just transitions framework. 182 people have since graduated from regional trainings in Memphis and Tucson. At the Tucson training, roughly half of participants were experienced organizers and half were attending their first organizing training.

These spaces created relationships across communities that would not necessarily organize together otherwise. Feminist organizers could find common ground with farmers. Environmental organizers could connect with tech justice organizers. Native folks could share their perspectives and unique governance conditions. First-time organizers could encounter broader political frameworks.

The point is not to build a new organization around every issue. It is to build the relationships, political analysis, skills, and connective tissue that allow communities to recognize that their struggles are connected.

Organizing is experiencing a capacity crisis at precisely the moment when political openings are emerging. If philanthropy waits until a campaign is already successful, it risks funding the last five minutes of a struggle that required six, ten, or twelve years to build.

Amanda Solter from CS Fund offered an important perspective from inside philanthropy: program officers do have agency, even when they do not control their institution’s entire budget. 

The value of a grant is not always visible in an immediate policy win, a campaign metric, or a deliverable. Sometimes the most important thing philanthropy can fund is the capacity to think, build relationships, experiment, develop political analysis, and prepare before the next organizing opportunity arrives.

The panel called for philanthropy to:

• Fund now and fund fast.
• Build long-term partnerships rather than transactional grants.
• Fund experimentation, political education, research, convenings, relationships, and organizing infrastructure.
• Support informal and emerging formations that do not necessarily fit traditional nonprofit structures.
• Follow movements rather than requiring movements to conform to funder frameworks.
• Be willing to go political, particularly when right-wing forces are investing heavily in defining the political meaning of these struggles.
• Remain vigilant as enormous amounts of new tech wealth enter philanthropy and potentially reshape the field.