by Musa T. Bey

“Every empire rebrands its violence. But Black resistance remembers the code.”

I. THIS AIN’T SCIENCE FICTION—IT’S COUNTERINSURGENCY

We are not living in some futuristic sci-fi nightmare—we are living in the evolved form of the old colonial order. What they now call technology is just a more sophisticated method of conquest. The plantation has gone wireless. The overseer is an algorithm. The police have drones instead of dogs, databases instead of dossiers. Empire didn’t disappear. It just updated its software.

This is Digital Fascism—where empire rules not only with bullets and prisons, but with data, predictive policing, biometric borders, and algorithmic punishment. It is racial capitalism in crisis mode—automating its repression, outsourcing its terror, and digitizing its war on the Black and colonized poor.

But we’ve seen this before. From the transatlantic slave trade to COINTELPRO, from apartheid ID cards to predictive analytics in policing—Black people have always lived under surveillance, under control, under siege. What’s new is not the oppression. What’s new is the interface.

The Black radical tradition teaches us this: every time we rise, the system reconfigures itself to crush us. Digital fascism is the empire’s latest counterinsurgency tactic.

II. FROM SHACKLES TO SIGNALS: THE EVOLUTION OF CARCERAL TECH

Black people didn’t need Edward Snowden to tell us we were being watched. We’ve always been watched. Slave patrols were the original police. Branding irons were the first biometric tags. The plantation ledger was the original database. This is not history—it’s continuity.

What is predictive policing but a modern slave pass system? What is facial recognition but a digital branding of Black faces? What is surveillance capitalism but the same plantation economy—harvesting Black life to power a white supremacist empire?

The system collects our data to refine its domination. The more it knows about us, the more efficient its control becomes. Whether it’s ShotSpotter tech that maps our neighborhoods like enemy zones, or gang databases that criminalize kinship and culture, we are not being protected—we are being pre-targeted.

Digital fascism is the algorithmic extension of the plantation, the prison, and the police state. It is not a glitch in the system—it is the system.

III. THE FACELESS FÜHRER: HOW FASCISM GOT UPGRADED

Fascism has always been capitalism in decay, armed to the teeth and desperate to survive. But today, it doesn’t always need a Mussolini or a Hitler. It doesn’t need a uniform or a rally. The new fascism wears a hoodie and works at Google. It speaks in code. It claims to be neutral. But its violence is precise.

Digital fascism is the convergence of three forces:

Corporate monopoly capital (Big Tech, Big Data, Big Defense), Militarized, digitized policing, and Algorithmic governance that controls access to housing, jobs, health care, freedom.

It’s what happens when the empire decides it no longer needs to persuade the people—it just needs to predict, profile, and pre-empt them.

This is counterinsurgency without tanks. Censorship without censors. Colonization without colonies.

And make no mistake—it targets the same people: the rebellious Black poor, Indigenous land defenders, migrant workers, queer and trans street kids, radical organizers, and revolutionaries. This is class war, wrapped in code.

IV. THE LIBERAL MACHINE: SMILING WHILE IT STRANGLES

Let’s be clear: this digital terror isn’t only coming from MAGA. Liberals, too, are fully complicit. Democratic mayors sign off on police drone programs. Liberal foundations bankroll “data equity” projects that still map and monitor the same oppressed communities. “Smart city” projects become smart prisons.

What the liberal class does is sanitize the language. They call it “innovation.” They say it’s for “inclusion.” They paint the boot that stomps us with rainbow flags and DEI buzzwords. But as Claudia Jones said, “The most oppressed must lead, or liberation is a myth.” And the Black poor were not consulted on this digital dystopia.

Liberalism is the firmware of empire—making domination look like progress.

V. GLOBAL CONTINUITY: DIGITAL COLONIALISM

Digital fascism doesn’t stop at U.S. borders. The same tools used in Black neighborhoods in Detroit or Philly are exported to crush uprisings in Nairobi, Rio, Gaza, Kingston, and Cape Town. U.S. tech companies test facial recognition on African populations. Israeli spyware is used on Black activists from Ferguson to Uganda. The data empire is global—and so is the resistance.

This is digital colonialism—the extraction of our data, our culture, and our labor to fuel the algorithms of domination. As Walter Rodney showed us, colonization was always about theft—land, labor, and life. Now, it’s about data too.

Our struggle is not local. It is planetary. And so our response must be internationalist, abolitionist, and revolutionary.

VI. BLACK RADICAL RESISTANCE: WE BUILD, WE FIGHT, WE ABOLISH

The Black radical tradition teaches us this: We don’t reform systems built to destroy us. We resist. We dismantle. We build new ones. In the face of digital fascism, we must organize—not as consumers or “users,” but as revolutionaries.

1. Abolish Digital Policing

No to predictive policing, no to facial recognition, no to gang databases. We don’t fix tools of oppression—we abolish them. The police cannot be reformed. Surveillance cannot be democratized. Dismantle the carceral machine.

2. Build Black Tech from Below

We need tech that serves the people—not capital. Community mesh networks. Encrypted comms. Black-owned tech co-ops. Radical hackers. Liberation coders. Our own media. Our own platforms. Controlled by us. Not Bezos. Not Musk.

3. Organize Against Tech Imperialism

From Soweto to South Central, we must build an internationalist movement against the tech empire. Boycott, sabotage, expose. Link our struggles across borders. What they do to us here, they do to our kin abroad.

4. Political Education Everywhere

We must raise the political tech consciousness of the people. Workshops in the hood. Zines in the classroom. Teach-ins on the block. We must break down the myth of neutrality and expose the machine. Organize from the bottom up.

5. Dual Power or Death

We need independent Black institutions. Schools, servers, security, everything. The state cannot protect us. The market cannot free us. We build power from below—or we perish under the boot of the cloud.

VII. THIS IS A WAR FOR OUR FUTURE

This ain’t about privacy. It’s about power. It’s about liberation. And if we’re not careful, the empire will not only colonize our land and labor—it will colonize our minds, our movements, our memories, and our resistance.

We are fighting for a future where technology does not chain us, where algorithms do not define us, and where our communities are sovereign over their data, land, and destiny.

This is our line in the sand. Our ancestors broke the whip. We must smash the chip.

No compromise with empire. No truce with its tools. Only struggle. Only liberation. Only power from below.