We Are The Terrorists
Tech Bros and Us
Lovingly edit by Mark F. Johnson
This post refers to
Imperial Policing: Weaponized Data in Carceral Chicago. Andy Clarno, Janaé Bonsu-Love, Enrique Alvear Moreno, Lydia Dana, Michael De Anda Muñiz, Ilā Ravichandran and Haley Volpintesta. University Of Minnesota Press. 2024.
Carceral Capitalism. Jackie Wang. Semiotexte. 2018.
From Economy Of Occupation To Economy Of Genocide – (A/HRC/59/23) Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. Francesca Albanese. United Nations. 2025
People keep talking about ‘tech bros.’ Some even say that capitalism has been replaced by ‘technofeudalism.’ The economic rise of tech is evident in the stock indexes: since 2009 the S&P 500, which has a higher concentration of tech equity, has constantly outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Just this year, Palantir Technologies, a company that makes data analytics software saw its stock rise 100%. In a previous post, about the Second Empire and our predicament, I mentioned that Trump’s second term is supported by the ascendant tech bourgeoisie, and their allies in private equity. The current administration is in many ways the poetical instrument of those ruling class cliques.
One might ask:
How did the tech bourgeoisie establish economic dominance?
What is the source of its increased political power?
How did a social layer once associated with billboards enjoining people to ‘think different’ illustrated with pictures of the Dali Lama, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Henson with Kermit the Frog as well as the slogan ‘don’t be evil’ come to embrace neo-fascism?
Imperial Policing, Carceral Capitalism, and From Economy Of Occupation To Economy Of Genocide furnish preliminary materials for answering those questions. Since those works are about other things, I will try to indicate how their observations might be extended into a profile of the forces attempting to destroy the world wide dispossessed class.
The current panic over AI and the future of employment is a symptom of software capital’s attempt to profit from every sector of the economy. While software companies were famously integrating themselves with the evil market through online shopping, and food delivery, and and ride hailing services creating a gig and/or or concierge economy, they were also selling products to police, militaries, and intelligence agencies around the world. Over the past decade the coercion market has become the apical meristem of the tech bourgeoisie’s toxic economic and political growth.
They have accumulated money and power selling algorithms and hardware designed to brutalize, and eventually liquidate, the dispossessed class, starting with its Black and Brown fragments: drones, robot attack dogs, target selection software, surveillance cameras, facial recognition software, social media scraping software, target selection software, risk assessment software that supposedly analyzes which individuals in a group are most likely to commit crimes, and so on and so on. Those technologies can and have been sold on the basis of eliminating bias from the policing and the military, and protecting their victims from abuse — a cynical promotional scheme encouraging the illusion that its use can somehow be progressive, even though the organizations in the market for such technology are structurally reactionary.
Imperial Policing, and Carceral Capitalism analyze the adoption of software by the state repressive apparatus in the US, and its use against Latinx, Arab, and dispossessed communities. The white, male venture capitalists of Silicon Valley saw the widespread calls for reform of the justice system in wake of a decade of abolitionism asserting itself in the streets as a marketing opportunity. The Chicago Police Department was an early market for digital data collection and analysis tools. Like many if not all major metropolitan police departments, CPD has bought access to data from Palantir, PredPol, LexisNexis, Cambridge Analytica, Thompson Reuters, and HunchLab. They monitor social media with Oracle, LexisNexis, Geofeedia, and PathAR ( (Clarno et al., 55). In order to defend their emerging market from opposition to mass surveillance from US ‘civil society,’ and, nominally, the law, the tech bourgeoisie began to recommend its buyers occlude their use of it, and began to articulate neo-fascist political ideologies such as the Dark Enlightenment, and the “defense of Western civilization.”
According to Imperial Policing between 2001 and 2015 The Chicago Police Department spent at least 63 million dollars working with Oracle Corporation to build and refine relational databases known as the Citizen and Law Enforcement Analysis and Reporting system (Clarno et al., 48). CLEAR is the culmination of a long term project to replace Chicago law enforcement agencies’ old systems of storing crime data on paper. It correlates data from arrest records, warrants, contact cards, gang arrest cards, investigatory stop reports, suspicious activity reports crime maps, victim information, witness statements, crime scene data, 911 calls, mug shots, tattoos, finger prints, data on who an individual was with when stopped or arrested. According to Wikipedia, the older, more difficult to use database at CLEAR’s core, the Criminal History Records Information System, was designed by the Chicago Police’s in-house IT department. The shift from CHRIS to CLEAR replaced code written by public sector employees with private sector product as well as increasing the amount of data available to the police, making that data easier to navigate. Privatization of police IT in Chicago and beyond concentrated means of data collection and analysis in the hands of the tech bourgeoisie, and although they sold their products in part as a solution to racist policing, the new interfaces collected data produced by police stops, and reports by ‘the public,” among other racist sources, and turned it into equally racist information.
The Chicago Police department used facial recognition software known to confuse Black faces with one another to enhance their gang database, a program that systematically increased the surveillance of Black communities. For five months, CPD scanned billions of images on social media with Clearview.AI facial recognition software (Clarno et al., 56). Clearview AI was founded in 2017 on an initial investment of $8 million from Peter Thiel and Kirenaga Partners . Thiel, chairman of Palantir, is a reactionary ideologue and one of the leaders of the tech bourgeoisie’s effort to seize political power. By 2020 when it was adopted by CPD, Clearview.AI had grown into a $100 million dollar company, Clear AI executives and board members have included former members of the US Treasury department and National Security advisors. Activist pressure forced CPD to stop using Clearview, but Lucy Parsons Lab finds evidence they still work with DataWorks Plus, NeoFace, and Cogitech (Clarno et al., 56). Moreover, CPD also correlates data from automatic license plate reading programs with facial recognition.
In order to track the movement of cars in real time (Clarno et al., 54), the Chicago Police Department feeds CLEAR data combining automatic license plate readings with facial recognition scrapes of social media and drivers license databases. CPD purchases that data from Vigilant Solutions, a company owned by Motorola, who sell their product to law enforcement agencies across the US. State accountability and transparency laws make the company vulnerable to demands for regulation by citizens concerned about their privacy. According to The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Vigilant Solutions attempts to prevent such regulation with contracts that include “non-disparagement” and “non-publication” clauses binding their clients to Vigilant Solutions’ media messaging, and preventing them from speaking candidly with the press. In addition, training materials created by Vigilant Solutions explicitly recommend that police leave automatic license plate reading out of its reports whenever possible. Vigilant Solutions’ efforts to evade restrictions on how they collect data and how law enforcement agencies can speak about their services constitute an exercise of political power by the owners of information technology to preserve profits, and are part of a trend which has grown massive in recent years.
Writing in 2018, Jackie Wang notes an increase in ‘private probation services, parole, and other forms of custodianship that involve surveillance and monitoring’ (Wang, 40) to replace incarceration for some offenders. Just as predictive policing algorithms were sold as correctives to institutional racism, new carceral technologies are sold as efficient and humane alternatives to incarceration. Nonetheless Wang correctly expresses concern that ankle bracelets, drug and alcohol monitoring bracelets, and convict tagging, will turn the world into a prison without walls. Tech's subsumption of the carceral sector has accelerated ever since then. According to a July 1, 2025 article in The Guardian, a conference chaired by UYK justice secretary Shabana Mahmood featured representatives of ‘Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Palantir, which works closely with the US military and has contracts with the NHS. IBM and the private prison operator Serco also attended alongside tagging and biometric companies.’ The tech companies tried to sell
Tracking devices inserted under offenders’ skin, robots assigned to contain prisoners and driverless vehicles used to transport them … to … ministers who are gathering ideas to tackle the crisis in the UK justice system.
It is clear that the so called crisis in the UK justice system consists primarily of the fact that the tech bourgeoisie has turned it into a marketing opportunity, and are attempting to fully privatize it by flooding it with their wares.
At the beginning of 2025, the tech bourgeoisie sold its services to the US federal government in the form of the Department Of Government Efficiency, and were paid mainly in the currency of political power. The official purpose of Elon Musk’s agency is to cut federal costs by recommending that aid and grant programs as well staff positions be cut in such a way that services which had been provided by the government could in some cases be contracted out to private companies linked to the tech sector. The privatization of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration by Musk’s SpaceX provides an opportunity for what Palantir CEO Alex Karp meant when he described the federal government as ‘fine marbled wagyu,' as if it were waiting to be gobbled up by him and his ravenous friends.
Palantir has turned the US federal government into a market for its software. The company has contracts with the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service, among other agencies. Palantir seems to be serving the unofficial purpose of collecting data about people in the US to increase the political power of the Trump administration and that of the tech bourgeoisie as a whole.
Internationally, Palantir works with NATO, the governments of the UK, Ukraine, and of course, the Zionist entity, where it has had an office since 2015, and solidified a partnership with the ministry of defense in 2024.
In 2025 Palantir’s CEO published The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West with Nicholas W. Zamiska, a book whose purpose seems to be to promote an increase in political power for the tech bourgeoisie. Its promotional copy describes it as follows:
Our most brilliant engineering minds once collaborated with government to advance world-changing technologies. Their efforts secured the West’s dominant place in the geopolitical order. But that relationship has now eroded, with perilous repercussions. Today, the market rewards shallow engagement with the potential of technology. Engineers and founders build photo-sharing apps and marketing algorithms, unwittingly becoming vessels for the ambitions of others. This complacency has spread into academia, politics, and the boardroom.
Karp’s concern trolling on behalf of ‘the future of Western civilization’ aligns him with the most reactionary contemporary ideologies such as “the great replacement theory,” Zionism, and resurgent Nazi thought. Meanwhile his book’s critique of firms that design software to facilitate consumption serves as a justification for the rise of military, policing, incarceration, and security tech companies, the sub-sector most directly linked to political power. The book itself exemplifies the tech bourgeoisie’s adoption of ideologies for the sake of expanding, and protecting, markets.
From Economy Of Occupation To Economy Of Genocide, Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese shows that the tech bourgeoisie has used the genocide in Gaza as an opportunity to expand its markets and political power even further. Albanese notes that “Surveillance and incarceration technologies, ordinarily used to enforce segregation/apartheid, have evolved into tools for indiscriminate targeting of the Palestinian population.” The integration between the Zionist state and the tech bourgeoisie could be said to have started in 1966 with the founding of Elbit Computers Ltd (now Elbit Systems), a partnership between the public and private sectors which developed and sold minicomputers. In 1970, Control Data bought the Zionist government’s stake in Elbit, integrating the company with US based bourgeoisie. In the early 1980s, Elbit shifted its focus to producing electronic components for military hardware such as tanks and fighter jets. Late in the first decade of the twentieth century Elbit Systems began providing surveillance equipment for the so called West Bank Barrier. Elbit currently produces 85% of the Zionist military’s drones and land equipment as well as selling arms and security equipment to at least 17 countries, including a contract to build 307 surveillance towers along the border between the US and Mexico.
Just as tech companies sell products that integrate data collection and surveillance to US police so that they can better target Black and Brown people, Albanese’s report shows they sell these products to the Zionist military so they can destroy Palestinian people.
Palantir Technology Inc., whose tech collaboration with Israel long predates October 2023, expanded its support to the Israeli military post-October 2023. There are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir has provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making. In January 2024, Palantir announced a new strategic partnership with Israel and held a board meeting in Tel Aviv “in solidarity”;[109] in April 2025, Palantir’s CEO [Alex Karp] responded to accusations that Palantir had killed Palestinians in Gaza by saying, “mostly terrorists, that’s true”. Both incidents are indicative of executive-level knowledge and purpose vis-à-vis Israel’s unlawful use of force, and failure to prevent such acts or withdraw involvement.
Karp’s statement about Palantir killing “mostly terrorists” was made in response to a protestor, and as Albanese points out its evidence that he knew what the Zionist military was using the technology for. Additionally it’s another example of the tech bourgeoisie protecting a market by providing a false ideological justification for the genocide that’s driving sales in the region. The same can be said for Karp’s vile slander that campus anti Zionist protests “[pray] to their high god of antisemitism." Protecting their necro-market in Palestine from a movement of the dispossessed attempting to end a genocide is even more important to the tech bourgeoisie than deflecting moral criticism of their products’ applications because such movement is a threat to the their growing global political power.
Albanese’s report also calcifies the international alliance between the tech bourgeoisie and those other Trumpist defenders of “Western civilization”: private equity bourgeoisie.
Blackrock (and its subsidiary, iShares) and Vanguard are among the largest institutional investors in many companies, holding these shares for distribution among their indexes of mutual funds and electronically traded funds (ETFs). Blackrock is the second largest institutional investor in Palantir (8.6 per cent), Microsoft (7.8 per cent), Amazon.com (6.6 per cent), Alphabet (6.6 per cent) and IBM (8.6 per cent), … Vanguard is the largest institutional investor in… Palantir (9.1 per cent), and second largest in … and Elbit Systems (2.0 per cent).
Private equity’s commitment to helping the tech bourgeoisie grow in economic power, and hence in the political power necessary to protect and grow the markets for their products, means that both sectors will soon enough grow their military, security, and policing market by supporting the deportation and liquidation of the dispossessed class in the US, just as they are doing by supporting the genocide of the dispossessed class in Gaza.
Once we understand that market subjectivity drives neofascism’s growth, we can see that racism, xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, the defense of ‘Western Civilization,’ eugenics, and national greatness, all present contingent opportunities for the tech bourgeoisie to grow economically, and to articulate a politics against the only force capable of abolishing it: the global dispossessed class. Tech’s products kill, deport, and incarcerate sectors of the class around the world, and they invoke a politics that attempts to mutilate the class’s body politic even more brutally than the class decomposition inflicted by the 20th Century bourgeoisie. The only way out for us is through recognizing that those they call ‘terrorists,’ ‘illegals,” “mentally ill,” “autistic,” “gender ideologues,” and on and on are us. In order to compose ourselves as a collective historical actor capable of articulating through action a politics that doesn’t emerge from the murderous convenience of markets we must first recognize ourselves.