Philosophies & Movements
Technofascism
Authoritarian rule run by technical experts and held together by technology: planners and engineers taking political power, and surveillance, data and automated decision-making doing the enforcing. It is a term used by critics — nobody describes their own project this way — and it is used loosely, sometimes as a precise historical description and sometimes as an insult aimed at any powerful tech company. If you meet it in a headline, check whether the writer is naming a specific mechanism or just signaling disapproval.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Used as a formal analytical term by historian Janis Mimura in “Planning for Empire: Reform Bureaucrats and the Japanese Wartime State” (Cornell University Press, 2011), where she defines it as a new form of authoritarian rule controlled by technocrats, describing Japan’s reform bureaucrats of the 1930s and 1940s. The word itself is older and has no single documented coiner — it is simply “techno-” plus “fascism,” and critics of technology were using it well before 2011. Its current application to Silicon Valley and AI is a later borrowing of Mimura’s framing, not her argument.