What’s happening in America is technofascism. It could happen here

I’VE been writing about technology for nearly two decades. For half that time, my beat has been the headlong car crash of Silicon Valley and democracy. And here we are in 2026, and I’m at a loss at how to convey the extreme existential danger of this moment. 

It is less than two weeks since Trump threatened a Nato ally. Less than a week since a masked paramilitary gunman in Minnesota executed a civilian in cold blood. And yet, here in Britain, it’s business as normal, politics as normal, Radio 4’s Today show and all the platitudes of minor Westminster spats as normal. 

But nothing is normal right now. And Britain is not a peripheral bystander to what is happening in America. The UK government is Palantir’s second biggest customer. Taxpayers’ money is supporting its bottom line. And there’s every reason to think that we could be next.

The use of armed militia to terrorise the inhabitants of Minneapolis is not just beyond the rule of law, it is fascistic. It’s the final evidential point between what is happening today and the political forces that ripped Europe apart in the last century: and that’s not just me saying this, it’s some of the most eminent historians of authoritarianism.

But it also goes well beyond that. What we are witnessing in America is technofascism. This is fascism partnered with advanced surveillance technologies. And this is what we see playing out in Minneapolis in real time, and with one company playing a pre-eminent role: Palantir.

It’s not just Palantir. We’ve seen other data-harvesting monopolies and Silicon Valley companies paying homage to Trump: Meta and Google and OpenAI and Oracle and Amazon and Nvidia, many of which have financial and other links to Thiel. Palantir is the very tip of this extremely poisonous spear.

What is happening in Minneapolis is a trial balloon. It’s where Trump is testing the limits of his power. That includes his ability to suppress dissent, to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, to break people’s will. And surveillance is at the heart of this. 

It’s no coincidence that ICE officers wear masks. For them, privacy is impunity. That’s what the killing of Alex Pretti showed last week: that no one would be held to account. But for everyone else, there was another lesson: that there is nowhere to hide. 

Personal data is the key to Trump’s political project. It’s an essential part of ICE’s work, the foundation for what is now under construction, and Minneapolis is where you can see it being built: an authoritarian surveillance state. 

This week, US tech site 404 Media revealed details behind what Palantir is doing for ICE. A leaked user guide describes the company’s role in creating the technological apparatus ICE to find and locate alleged illegal immigrants for detention and removal: “Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement (ELITE) is a targeting tool designed to improve capabilities for identifying and prioritizing high-value targets through advanced analytics,”

The app populates a map “with potential deportation targets, brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address”. To do so, it ingests multiple sets of personal data including address records from Health and Human Services, a government department. It was previously revealed that Medicaid records of 79 million US citizens would be shared with ICE.

On social media, a video shows an ICE enforcement officer filming a protester. “We have a nice little database,” he says. “And now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

And that’s why, in Britain, we cannot and must not ignore this.

Here, the UK state already has a more sophisticated and complete Palantir-based surveillance structure. Palantir has access to not just to our basic records but to our most sensitive personal data. To the entire nation’s medical records. A Nerve investigation revealed this week that it also underpins much of the UK’s critical infrastructure and even plays a role in managing our nuclear weapons. 

This is not a normal company. And these are not normal commercial contracts; it’s an act of either incredible naivete or wilful denial at this point to believe they are. Palantir is less a technology company than a political project. That’s not speculation: for its co-founder, Peter Thiel, technology is politics. He said so at a libertarian  conference – Libertopia – in 2010:

“The basic idea was that we could never win an election based on certain things because we were in such a small minority but maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means. And this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

Read that again: technology is an alternative to politics. And that’s why we have to start to understand Palantir not as a contractor, but as what a national security expert interviewed in the Nerve this week called “a vector of malign influence”. 

And what are Thiel’s politics? He Thiel doesn’t believe in democracy. Again, that’s not speculation. He has said that he doesn’t believe “freedom and democracy” are compatible. He’s one of the most prominent backers of privatised mini-fiefdoms, so-called “startup cities” – experimental labs for future states run as private companies, with CEOs in place of elected officials. 

(To take just one so-called “upside” of such places: the ability to conduct human experiments for drug trials without any legal, medical or ethical oversight or ethical considerations. Thiel is, of course, a financial backer.

In Thiel’s universe, the only humans who have rights are rich ones. And it’s not just Thiel. Alex Karp, his Palantir co-founder and the company’s CEO, talks about the company’s mission to support “the west and the United States of America” and to “when necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them”.

Earlier this month, Joe Lonsdale, the third co-founder of Palantir, tweeted in response to a post about the US kidnap of the Venezuelan president that celebrated the killing of “Commies”. Lonsdale said: “What do you think founding Palantir was supposed to be about?”

It’s 2026, and Trump’s authoritarian intent is clear. Palantir has made its ideological bent abundantly clear. This company should be nowhere near any UK government department, let alone our NHS and nuclear weapons. We have handed control of the most important and vital instruments of state to what amounts to a hostile foreign power. We haven’t just jeopardised our present and future security – what happens if or when we have a change of government? Peter Thiel’s network - and we have mapped some of the biggest names on our graphic below - is already connected to a circle of UK Reform supporters and ideologues. 

But we are also betraying the American people. As you watch the protesters in the streets of Minneapolis, remember that the UK government is funnelling hundreds of millions of pounds in contracts to the company that is instrumental in finding and deporting those alleged illegal immigrants and labelling protestors “domestic terrorists”. Without UK government contracts, Palantir would be a shadow of the company it currently is. British taxpayers’ support is crucial to its commercial bottom line. 

The ignorance and denial about the UK’s relationship with Palantir must end. This is technofascism. And it’s coming here next.