Goodbye Surveillance Capitalism, Hello Surveillance Fascism
First they stole your data. Now, they’re stealing your future
Hi, I’m an existential imbecile named Max Murphy. Here on The Murphy Memos we explore the absurdity of existence with crappy cartoons.
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We live in a lonely world. Between school, chores, and work, there’s no time for friendship—not the real kind anyway. But what if you could connect with friends on your own time? Don’t have friends? You can even make new ones! And here’s the kicker—it’s “free.”
And thus began the age of surveillance capitalism.
Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term, describes it plainly: “Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.”1
To them, you are nothing but that behavioral data.
To them, your ideas, tastes, and choices are nothing but trees to chop down for lumber. And just as deforestation wreaks havoc on natural life, so too do they wreak havoc on your mind.
Body dysmorphia from Instagram.
Workism from LinkedIn.
Fascism from 4chan.
But here’s what everyone is missing: the age of surveillance capitalism has come to an end. Now, we live under a system we can call surveillance fascism.
What is Surveillance Fascism?
Surveillance fascism is corporate data extraction weaponized by the state.
Fellow Substack writer,
recently went viral for highlighting an unsettling discovery:Millions use apps like Ovia and Flo to track pregnancies, cycles, and miscarriages—data so intimate it charts the rhythm of their bodies. But when Roe v. Wade fell, this information became a weapon. Louisiana tried to redefine abortion as homicide.2 In Texas, lawmakers empowered vigilantes to sue anyone aiding an abortion. Many red states banned the procedure outright, making it inevitable that prosecutors would subpoena digital records.
Where Zuboff’s “behavioral surplus” once fueled targeted ads, it now fuels search warrants.
The Ovia mandate is a microcosm of this shift. By forcing users to declare their state, the app doesn’t just gather data—it pre-sorts it for easy retrieval by authorities. The line between “service” and “surveillance” is gone.
Welcome to the era where your browser history could be a jury exhibit, your Fitbit steps evidence of “suspicious activity,” and refusal to comply is exile.
Surveillance fascism is made up of 3 planks:
1. Opting Out Means Economic & Social Death
Imagine a world where refusal to participate isn’t rebellion—it’s ruin. I recently spoke with a local fence contractor who told me why his business was thriving: “Google.” To survive, he had to pour money into ads and endlessly solicit 5-star reviews, surrendering his livelihood to algorithms that dictate visibility. Small businesses, from bakeries to bike shops, now face an ultimatum: pay the digital toll or vanish.
In small town America, if you’re not on Facebook, you simply don’t exist. Deleting my Facebook account exiled me from town gossip, community events, and even basic recognition. I became a ghost in my own life.
Whatever sense of community we once had has been replaced—buried in a feed optimized for outrage, not connection.
Even if you flee the screen, there’s nowhere left to go. America’s third places—libraries, parks, diners—have evaporated3, replaced by buggy apps that monetize loneliness. You’re free to touch grass, but you’ll do it alone. I went outside one time, only to be met with an eerie absence. Where is everyone?
They’re online feeding their data to the tech broligarchs who are using it for less than noble purposes.
2. State-Corporate Fusion
Surveillance fascism thrives where corporate greed and state power merge. Nvidia, famed for gaming chips, sells AI processors to militaries racing to automate war. Google, the “Don’t Be Evil” pioneer, builds cloud infrastructure for the Department of Defense and aids the Israeli Ministry of Defense in terrorizing Palestinians. Apple, the chic lifestyle brand, develops sensors for the US military. Amazon’s AWS provides cloud storage to the government, while Dell licenses surveillance tools to ICE. Ovia’s parent company, Labcorp, is partners with ICE as well.4
This isn’t just collaboration—it’s symbiosis.
Tech firms court defense contracts to offset market volatility, while governments outsource their dirty work to avoid scrutiny. The result? The most invasive surveillance system in human history has aligned with the most powerful military on Earth.
Now, the tech broligarchs hold near infinite influence, and they’re not afraid to use it.
3. Subversion of Democracy
Democracy is on life support. Remember Cambridge Analytica? The Facebook scandal wasn’t a glitch—it was a blueprint. By harvesting data from millions, they built psychographic profiles to manipulate voters, turning elections into auctions, even more than they already were.5
But the plot thickened when Elon Musk, the “free speech absolutist,” transformed Twitter into a MAGA megaphone6, boosting conspiracies and banning dissenters leading up to the 2024 election. Overnight, the richest man on Earth could tilt public discourse with a tweet, proving that platforms aren’t town squares—they’re puppet theaters.
The stakes are clear: when private companies control the infrastructure of democracy, every election is for sale.
The search results are rigged.
The algorithms are rigged.
The elections are rigged.
Is it even possible to be well-informed when they control access to all information?
And let’s be clear—Cambridge Analytica was just the beta test. We live in a society where whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Reality Winner, and Julian Assange aren’t just ignored—they’re exiled, prosecuted, or found dead in “suicides.” Daphne Caruana Galizia was blown up for exposing the Panama Papers. John Barnett “killed himself” after exposing Boeing’s safety failures.
No matter how deep you dig into the rabbit hole, there’s always more rot. No matter how paranoid you are, you’re not paranoid enough.
This is not a conspiracy. This is not an accident. This is surveillance fascism.
Broken Economies Create Broken Societies
Surveillance fascism isn’t just a political regime—it’s an economic one, built on a new feudalism. Thomas Piketty’s infamous formula, R > G 7 explains how returns on capital gains outpace economic growth, creating a feedback loop of inequality.
There is a finite amount of economic growth each year—normally around 2% of the GDP. All this wealth, and more, gets funneled to the top via stocks, rent, interest on debt, and subscription services.
It’s as if the real economy is the board game monopoly. Late stage monopoly, to be exact. All the valuable properties are already owned and optimized to extract as much money—from you—as humanly possible.
Piketty warned that left unchecked, this dynamic would “automatically generate arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities.”
The old aristocracy held deeds to land. Today’s oligarchs own algorithms and unlike soil, data never stops yielding.
Enter techno-feudalism, a term coined by Yanis Varoufakis to describe the new economic order. Platforms like Amazon, Meta, and Google act as digital lords, extracting rent not from land, but from every click, swipe, and heartbeat.
Your data isn’t just harvested—it’s tithed.
We now live under an economic regime where a handful of corporations own the digital fiefdoms where humanity works, shops, and fucks. The gig worker delivering your takeout? The rapper streaming songs for pennies? The single parent swiping on Tinder?
We’re all serfs in a kingdom where the cloud is the castle and Zuck is the duke.
The Digital Enclosure Movement
This isn’t the first time the powerful have stolen what was once ours. In the Middle Ages, many peasants lived on land that belonged to everyone and no one—the commons. It was a space of shared survival: forests for foraging, fields for grazing, rivers for sustenance.
Then came the aristocracy’s revelation: Why let peasants live for free when we can charge them for simply existing?
Thus began the enclosure movement—the violent privatization of communal land. Fences penetrated forests. Rent replaced reciprocity. A way of life was erased, displaced by a never-ending series of business transactions.
As an anonymous poem8 lamented:
“The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.”
Adam Smith saw the rot early. In The Wealth of Nations, he skewered landlords as parasites:
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords… love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”
Smith’s warning was ignored.
The government didn’t just side with landlords—it became their personal security guard. Laws were rewritten, armies mobilized, and peasants criminalized for “trespassing” on land their ancestors had freely roamed for centuries. The state and capital had fused into a single beast, its jaws clamped around the throat of the commoners.
This is the oldest story in history: financial power aligning with political power.
Centuries later, the felons are back, and this time, they’re not stealing land—they’re stealing us.
The 21st century’s commons isn’t physical—it’s relational. Before the internet, friendship thrived in parks, love blossomed in diners, and dissent brewed in town halls. These were spaces where life unfolded organically. Then came the digital enclosure movement: they erected fences around human connection, privatizing nearly all human social relations.
Tinder sells romance as a subscription. Facebook auctions your outrage to advertisers. Discord simulates community.
Tech broligarchs have done to social bonds what landlords did to land: seized them, sliced them into sellable lots, and charged us rent to enjoy what was once ours.
And just like the felons, the tech broligarchs did not act alone.
All the Dystopias at Once
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley both saw the future—they just split the nightmare into two books. Orwell feared a boot stamping on a human face forever. Huxley warned we’d drown in pleasure, pacified by pills and propaganda.
But the 21st century gave us both at the same damn time—surveillance fascism!
The screen—hovering 6 inches from your face, forever—is the ultimate weapon. It’s the confessional where you whisper secrets to Mark Zuckerberg, the slot machine that pays out in dopamine, the panopticon that never blinks. You scroll to numb the doom, but only ever get more doom.
This isn’t an accident.
Surveillance fascism needs you miserable: bored enough to click, lonely enough to overshare, scared enough to tolerate anything. Anything. Huxley’s “Brave New World” understood that tyranny isn’t just fear—it’s frictionless. Why send goons when you can send a notification?
This world we have created here, my friend, is a dystopia. A real one. But dystopias are stories—and stories can be rewritten.
How to Resist Surveillance Fascism
Tiny decisions add up—like tossing sand into the gears of a machine. Resisting surveillance fascism isn’t about purity—it’s about incremental resistance. You don’t need to live in a cabin off the grid (though props if you do).
Privacy is dead. Privacy remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, password123 users of history?
But all is not lost. Here’s how we fight back:
Go Analog, Relentlessly
Swap smartphones for dumbphones. Trade Google Maps for paper ones. Host game nights, not Zoom calls. Every minute offline is a strike against surveillance fascism.
Always Avoid Algorithms
Delete TikTok. Burn your Twitter & Facebook accounts. For creators and fans alike, platforms like Substack offer a viable alternative—a space where words aren’t throttled by engagement metrics and your audience isn’t auctioned to the DOD. And most importantly, if they ever start, we can leave and take our email lists with us.
Lie to the Machines
Give chatbots fake birthdays. Use burner emails for shopping. Let ad trackers think you’re a 70-year-old Marxist nun who loves NFTs. Weaponize absurdity until their datasets implode.
Surveillance fascism thrives on your complacency. Fight back with small, stubborn acts of refusal. As the deeply missed David Graeber reminded us, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
So start making it differently today. Delete one app. Tomorrow, visit a library—a third place that no CEO can monetize. One tiny rebellion at a time, we can dismantle the digital panopticon. Rebellion isn’t a grand gesture—it’s an active refusal to be mined, monitored, and manipulated.
We are the generation staring into the abyss. Mesmerized. Amused. Mildly entertained as humanity stands over the precipice. We have the power to look away. To avert our eyes from what Dale Gribble would call, The Beast.9
If we are going to make a better world for our children, we must act. Now.
There is not much time left.
You can search the US database for defense contracts here. You can find all the examples I listed above and many, many more.
Citizens United, as President Obama put it, "gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington.”
Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.
A funny thing happened to me last summer. I inadvertently left the house without my phone. What makes it more interesting was that I happened to be heading for Ohio Amish country and did so in the old old 56 year old car. Well under way, I reached for the phone to open Google maps since I hadn’t been down there for years. No phone. Momentary panic! And then relaxation and a certain joy washed over me. This is how everything used to be. Not a computer in sight.
A word popped into my head: “autonomy.” I hadn’t felt this autonomy and personal agency in years. Since smart devices came into their own.
I consulted the faded Ohio map folded up neatly in the aptly named map pocket, shook out some dust and a dead fly and presto it worked! Batteries not required. My situational awareness bloomed and I stopped at various places that weren’t on any app, and even asked local folks for a good place to eat. Found a place with home cooking again not on an app. It was the best day trip I’ve had in years. A full tank of gas (in a non computer car) and some cash is all it took. I even felt somewhat subversive that day,haha.
Many of us of a certain age could go back to that if necessary. The young don’t even feel the intrusiveness of the surveillance state. It’s like the air to them. Not their fault really. But the neofeudalists have a lot to answer for. If they are ever asked.
YES. I hadn't made the leap from surveillance capitalism to surveillance fascism in my head yet, but that's what it is. Have been slowly working toward going analog for a few months and yeah, it's a little more lonely but also, the quiet is nice. I think that's the key - you can't just get rid of tech and create a void, you have to work to replace it with actual community (the thing tech stole from us!). Sometimes it's helpful to create a runway using the tools you already have (FB, IG, etc.) to build an offline community, and you can give up less data by using a browser like DuckDuckGo. Also, go create your own website! You'll be invisible to search, but there are IRL ways to work around that.