Given the urgency of these topics, and to ensure the widest possible circulation, we’re making 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑦 𝐵𝑢𝑖𝑙𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝐷𝑜𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒 by #AlbertoToscano available as a free PDF.
> https://aksioma.org/pdf/toscano.pdf
✧ The release coincides with the presentation of ✦ 𝑨𝒓𝒆 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝒂 𝑺𝒐𝒇𝒕𝒘𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝑼𝒑𝒅𝒂𝒕𝒆? ✦ book in #London on 𝟯𝟬 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝗮𝘁 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗮𝗸 𝗛𝗼𝘂𝘀𝗲, where #NoraOMurchú and #AlexQuicho present their essays, followed by a discussion moderated by #GuyMackinnonLittle.
> https://aksioma.org/are-you-a-software-update-2
"the fascist insurrectional machine was a formidable apparatus for the organisation of dis-organisation, the hyperpolitical imposition of a deadening depoliticisation"
("late fascism" by alberto toscano)
also: "ICE agents reveal daily arrest quotas and surveillance app in rare court testimony"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/13/ice-agent-court-testimony-oregon
#LateFascism: #Race, #Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis |
#AlbertoToscano
#VersoBooks
A remarkable obituary for Paolo Virno written by Alberto Toscano: https://www.e-flux.com/notes/6783435/a-materialist-philosopher-paolo-virno-1952-2025
I just read a piece about #Palantir in the latest issue [June 2025] of the #DSA newsletter, "In These Times." A very timely piece indeed!
Palantir and American #TechnoFascism
"A new recruitment campaign appeared on the elite U.S. college campus last April. In schools such as Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and Penn, posters glued to bus stops, with black background, issued a disturbing warning: the time has come for reckoning for the West, before accusing most technology companies of not considering the national interest when they decide what should be built. On the contrary, Palantir, the defense contractor specializing in data analysis and responsible for this recruitment campaign, stated that he does not merely build technological products - to guarantee the future of the United States, but, in fact, to dominate.
"The implicit message of advertising reflects the conviction of Palantir's leaders, including founder #PeterThiel and Chief Executive Officer #AlexKarp, that Silicon Valley's real mandate is to consolidate the military supremacy of the United States and the West, a nostalgic reaction to the happy days of the Cold War and its merger between state, engineering and capital.
"In this version of technological #nationalism, the make America great again translates into an impulse for dominance, of course, against foreign adversaries but also against the "Woke capital," effeminate consumerism and a university system dedicated to social justice and diversity (the Palantir posters were published together with a new initiative that invites talented high school students to "judge the indoctrination" of higher education in exchange for a four-month Palantir scholarship).
"Palantir has strong reason to organize his recruiting career. Although critics retangled when their shares plummeted briefly after Trump's tariff announcement, Palantir's stock market capitalization currently exceeds $270 billion, more than triple its value last September. In addition, the company's ability to establish high-level contacts among national security personnel has generated a series of government contracts linked to the acceleration of #Trumpist #authoritarianism.
"Palantir has already collaborated with #ElonMusk's #SpaceX and the AI and robo robotor #Anduril (another tech company with the theme of The Lord of the Rings led by another #FarRight businessman) to begin building Trump's #GoldenDome, an American version of #Israel's Iron Dome air defense system. It is also working with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (#DOGE) to create an app programming interface that will allow #HomelandSecurity to track tax data for more undocumented taxpayers to expel.
"In April, Palantir, who has long boasted of his collaborations with military, police and border agents, won a $29.8 million contract with #ICE to improve his #dystopian Immigration Lifecycle Operating System. That is, it is intended to provide molecular and real-time information on immigrants that the government seeks to monitor, arrest and expel. The company is preparing to review ICE's investigative case management system to better track target populations across hundreds of data categories, from eye color to tattoos, job management and social security numbers.
"Palantir's #fascist research and development does not stop at the borders of the United States: the company and Karp have proclaimed their ideological and material support for Israel, which carries out the genocide in Gaza. In January 2024, during an extraordinary board meeting in Tel Aviv, the company announced its strategic alliance with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, providing it with technology for war, possibly including its Artificial Intelligence Platform, sold as a way to incorporate language models-fueled chatbots into real-time decision-making processes in war zones. The company's leadership has made it clear that its conception of Western supremacy implies the uncompromising defense of Zionism abroad and far-right nationalism in the country.
"In all this, it has become clear that Palantir represents the alliance between the technology industry and authoritarian nationalism much more than Musk's clumsy Nazi salutes, sensationalist pronatalism or trolling 'dark #MAGA.' As technology academic Jathan Sadowski recently wrote, 'From the beginning, Palantir's purpose has been to provide... the ontological plan to fascism, helping his ideological objectives come true materially.
"In other words, Palantir is building the digital infrastructure to integrate the multiple forms of violence and state control on which contemporary #authoritarianism is based: from the software needed for mass deportations to AI used in wars against #ColonizedPeoples.
"But Palantir not only builds to dominate, he also wants to tell us why. Less than a month after Trump's inauguration, Karp published his book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, written with the head of Palantir's affairs, Nicolas W. - Zamiska. The book is a strange and prolific mix of neoconservative texts, pseudo-erudite reflections and corporate pamphlets (and apparently shows strong signs of possible use of artificial intelligence).
"In its attempt to unite the praise of Silicon Valley engineers with a strident demand for rearmament from the West, The Technological Republic draws a vision of the future in which the intuitions about creativity, taken from the study of swarms of bees or Jackson Pollock's paintings, are put at the service of ensuring a broad spectrum technological dominance. At the centre is the regret that a compact liberal elite has exhausted the moral courage and technological dynamism of the West just as it faces the revolution of artificial intelligence and emerging Chinese hegemony. After the vague rhetoric of the cultural war, it is not difficult to perceive Karp and Palantir's angry reaction to the #resistance organized by technological workers through campaigns such as '#NoTechForIce or #TechWorkersCoalition' to the project of building to dominate.
"Just as Karp has underlined his company's commitment to Israeli supremacy, so does his book speak of a 'left' chased by the spectre of #Palestine. The executive director of a company that reaps huge profits from surveillance and data extraction systems, aimed at expelling dissidents and undocumented people, Karp writes with contempt of those who want to remain anonymous during Israel's war camps in #Gaza. Quote a student who says, 'If I give my name, I lose my future.' With an astonishing lack of self-consciousness he comments: 'The protective veil of #anonymity could [...] rob this generation of the opportunity to develop an instinct for true mastery of an idea, of the reward of victory in the public square, as well as the costs of defeat.
"This is the same book that, in a variant of the conspiracy theory of cultural Marxism, Edward Said's Orientalism is the main culprit of the emasculation of an academic world built around Western civilization and, therefore, as one more factor in the hesitant technological supremacy of the United States. As Karp states, the book of the Palestinian-American critic has destabilized - a whole way of being an academic in the university establishment, has been the vehicle through which the academic world would be remade.
"The Technological Republic reveals that contemporary #TechnoNationalism and #TechnoMilitarism have nothing to do with building infrastructure for state control and violence, but also with the promotion of an indistinguishable ideology of those who try to sell you something. Palantir reaps benefits not only from the way fear of migrants, artificial intelligence, the upcoming wars waged by drone swarms, mobilizes the resources of governments, but also from speech and uproar. His company's stock market capitalization has quadrupled in the past year, far surpassing revenue-derived growth. This vacuum is filled with speculation, that is, with words and ideas about the future. The future Karp sells is one in which the alternative is ruin (China geopolitical supremacy) or (American) dominance. Behind all the complaints of The Technological Republic about the crisis of confidence in the West, what Karp really wants us to believe is in Palantir, that is, the old business of war, racism and repression marketed through a brilliant new interface."
[Original - in Spanish]
https://ficciondelarazon.org/2025/05/14/alberto-toscano-palantir-y-el-tecno-fascismo-estadounidense/
#BigBrother #ICERaids #CorporateColonialism #Colonialism #Fascism #USPol #WorldPol
redmay schedule: there must be some way out of here
src:
https://www.redmayseattle.org/schedule
Red May 2025 Schedule
There must be some way out of here
https://www.redmayseattle.org/
https://www.facebook.com/redmayseattle/
Some Way Out of Here?
Friday, May 9, 11:00 AM PDT
@YouTube
Michael McCarthy, Jasper Bernes, Jodi Dean, Alberto Toscano, Camila Vergara, Philip Wohlstetter (mod)
Beacon Cinema: The Encampments (2025)
dir: Michael T. Workman &
Kei Pritsker
Sunday, May 11, 5:00 PM
Cybernetic Circulation Complex: Big Tech & Planetary Crisis
Tuesday, May 13, 2:00 PM PDT
@YouTube
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alessandra Mularoni, Nick Srnicek, Kyle Kubler (mod)
Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire
Friday, May 16, 2:00 PM PDT
@YouTube
Sarah Jaffe, Nica Siegel
Delmore Schwartz: Marxism & the Modernist Poet
Saturday, May 17, 11:00 AM PDT @YouTube
Alan Wald, David Lau, Roy Skodnick, Philip Wohlstetter (mod)
Beacon Cinema: Why It Happened Here
Sunday, May 18, 5:00 PM
(Film showing with discussion)
(This is an In-person event)
David Shields, Tommy Swenson, Philip Wohlstetter
The West and the Rest: Capital & Power in a Multipolar World
Tuesday, May 20, 2:00 PM PDT
@YouTube
Sandro Mezzadra, Brett Neilson, Kyle Kubler (mod)
Citizen Marx: Republicanism & Formation of Marx’s Thought
Wednesday, May 21, 11:00 AM PDT @YouTube
Bruno Leipold, Camila Vergara, Michael Hardt, Alyssa Battistoni
American Constitutional Collapse
Thursday, May 22, 11:00 AM PDT
@YouTube
Aziz Rana, Michael Hardt, Camila Vergara, Philip Wohlstetter (mod)
TERFs
Enemy Feminisms: , Policewomen & Girlbosses
Sunday, May 25, 7:00 PM PDT
@Elliott Bay Books
(This is an In-person event)
Sophie Lewis, Emi Koyama (mod)
Beacon Cinema: Fragment of an Empire (1929)
dir: Fridrikh Ermler
Monday, May 26, 7:30 PM
De-reification and Art Now
Tuesday, May 27, 2:00 PM PDT @YouTube
Jaleh Mansoor, Matt Browning, Anita Chari, Minh Nguyen (mod)
Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect, Capitalism Was a Joke
Wednesday, May 28, 2:00 PM PDT @YouTube
Leigh Claire la Berge, Jason Read, Madeline Lane-McKinley, Sarah Jaffe
Whatever Happened to Revolution?
Thursday, May 29, 7:00 PM PDT @TownHall
(This is an In-person event)
Jasper Bernes, Colleen Lye, Nikhil Pal Singh, Idris Robinson
What Just Happened, America?
Friday, May 30 5:00 PM PDT
@Vermillion
Colleen Lye, Idris Robinson, Michael Hardt, Jamie Merchant, Kathi Weeks, Jasper Bernes, Nikhil Pal Singh
Endgame: Economic Nationalism & Global Decline
Saturday, May 31, 12:30 PM PDT
@Elliott Bay Books
(This is an In-person event)
Jamie Merchant, Nikhil Pal Singh (mod)
The Future of Revolution
Saturday, May 31, 2:00 PM PDT @Elliott Bay Books
(This is an In-person event)
Jasper Bernes, Idris Robinson (mod)
#AlanWald #AlbertoToscano #AlessandraMularoni #AlyssaBattistoni #AnitaChari #art #arte #AzizRana #BrettNeilson #BrunoLeipold #CamilaVergara #capitalism #ClassStruggle #ColleenLye #crisis #DavidLau #DavidShields #DelmoreSchwartz #ElliottBayBooks #EmiKoyama #feminism #feminisms #film #FridrikhErmler #IdrisRobinson #JalehMansoor #JamieMerchant #JasonRead #JasperBernes #JodiDean #KathiWeeks #KeiPritsker #KyleKubler #left #LeighClaireLaBerge #MadelineLaneMcKinley #Marxism #MattBrowning #MichaelHardt #MichaelMcCarthy #MichaelTWorkman #MinhNguyen #modernism #Nationalism #NicaSiegel #NickDyerWitheford #NickSrnicek #NikhilPalSingh #PhilipWohlstetter #planetaryCrisis #poetry #politics #RedMay #redmayseattleOrg #revolution #RoySkodnick #SandroMezzadra #SarahJaffe #SophieLewis #TERFs #ThereMustBeSomeWayOutOfHere #TommySwenson #video #wayOut
Comprehending fascism in our time
Lisa Lowe, thinking with Alberto Toscano’s Late Fascism, on Black radical and anticolonial theories of fascism.
#books #AlbertoToscano #fascism #colonialism #history #histodon #PoliticalPhilosophy #bookstodon #europe #AfricanAmericans #FarRight #UnitedStates
https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/making-comprehensible-fascism-in-our-time
The below is a lightly edited version of a presentation given at a book launch for Late Fascism in February of 2024. In our contemporary moment, bombs relentlessly decimate schools, hospitals, and water supplies, driving people from their homes. Austerity measures deepen punishing global economic divides, as authoritar
Komünizm ve Felsefe Üzerine (Söyleşi) Alberto Toscano - Selim Karlıtekin
Aksioma
Alex / catileptic
MusiqueNow 
✡️ 🇵🇸 
Philipp Kender
Eudaimon ꙮ
DoomsdaysCW
slowforward
IndiaNewsWatch
zülâl