Across the globe, democratic institutions decay as techno-authoritarian and neo-fascist formations consolidate. The rise of neo-Trumpism and the settler-colonial genocide in Palestine exemplify this condition: data colonialism, militarised persecution, and automated domination fused into a single infrastructure of power. Australia is not exempt. Here, it manifests through state and corporate complicity with the same global apparatus—partnerships with Silicon Valley oligarchs for data extraction, the exploitation of workers and migrants, and the integration of Australian industry into the U.S.–Israeli military supply chain.

The government continues to deny any direct role in Israel’s war crimes, insisting that Australia’s contributions are merely “components” within multinational defence partnerships. Yet investigative records reveal that Australian-manufactured F-35 fighter-jet parts have been exported to Israel as recently as September 2025 (ABC News 2025; Declassified Australia 2025; Michael West Media 2025). Defence Minister Richard Marles claims that Australia has “contributed to the F-35 program for decades” as part of a multilateral agreement with Lockheed Martin, while maintaining that this is “not a direct arrangement with Israel” (SBS News 2025; The Guardian 2025). Such bureaucratic evasions conceal a deeper truth: genocidal participation disguised as infrastructural participation. The circuitry of Australian industry, policy, and intelligence is entangled with genocide (Amnesty International Australia 2025).

The F-35 supply chain epitomises the political economy of contemporary militarism—a planetary network of contractors, AI systems, data infrastructures, and production nodes so vast that no single nation can claim innocence. As analysts note, the F-35 is “too big to cancel,” its survival guaranteed by the interdependence of states and corporations woven into its design (National Security Journal 2025; Region 2025). This distributed architecture of war collapses the boundary between civilian industry and military enterprise: aerospace engineering, cloud computing, logistics software, and predictive analytics converge into a single technical organism. Within this ecology of empire, big-tech corporations emerge as its cognitive infrastructure—the data nervous system through which militarised capitalism perceives, calculates, and acts. Australia’s role within this complex is not peripheral but infrastructural: that sustains western imperialism while laundering it through alliance, innovation, and economic growth (Defence.gov 2025).

This is the logic of infrastructural fascism—a regime in which domination is embedded not in spectacle or ideology but in the techno-fascist substrates of life. The neo-fascist no longer needs a single dictator or party; it is emboldened and dispersed through the technological architectures that sustain modern power. It is an infrastructural condition: authority administered through systems that gaze upon us in a permanent, algorithmic vigilance—an Orwellian-Foucauldian nightmare rendered ordinary. Here, the techno-fascist Nazi banality of evil is rendered perpetually more invisible—its violence automated, ambient, and banalised by the interfaces of the online age.

No company more fully embodies the infrastructural fascist regime of surveillance, capital, and domination than Palantir Technologies—“among the most secretive and understudied surveillance firms globally” (Iliadis & Acker 2022: 2). Founded in 2003 with seed funding from the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir emerged in the aftermath of 9/11—the offspring of American imperial paranoia, born from the marriage of 'counter-terrorism’ and capital.

Palantir describes itself as a software company, rather than surveillance firm—a provider of “data-driven infrastructure” that allows institutions to integrate and act upon information. Its platforms, like Foundry Ontology, form the connective tissue between data, analytics, and operational decision-making across industries. From defense and policing to banking, healthcare, energy, automotive manufacturing, and global logistics, Palantir’s software quietly underwrites the functioning of contemporary capitalism. Its systems are used to monitor financial crime, coordinate military operations, manage hospital networks, streamline supply chains, and analyse satellite constellations. Few corporations have embedded themselves so completely across the material and administrative strata of modern life.

This omniscient control is precisely what makes Palantir the emblem of infrastructural fascism. It does not enforce ideology; it administers it. By providing the digital architecture through which governments, militaries, and corporations see, sort, and act, Palantir has become a planetary apparatus of legibility—an engine of governance disguised as infrastructure and advancement. The company’s own rhetoric of neutrality—its insistence that “we are not a data broker; we do not sell personal data”—is less a denial than a confirmation of its insidious role. Domination rendered technical becomes domination plausibly denied. Every institution that adopts its platforms extends the reach of this architecture, binding the operations of capital, security, and bureaucracy into a single algorithmic regime. Beneath its language of efficiency and ethics lies the reality of empire re-engineered. Palantir does not merely serve the infrastructures of power—it is their infrastructure: the invisible operating system of late techno-capitalism, where the logic of surveillance becomes indistinguishable from the logic of life itself.

Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, departs from the company’s public relations restraint to reveal the crusader at the core of its ideology. His rhetoric channels the same civilisational logic that once sanctified conquest—the belief that violence can redeem the world by purifying it. From the medieval crusades to Nazi technocracy, and now to the algorithmic architectures of techno-fascism, this lineage persists, constantly mutating. Karp’s public statements form a cold-hearted manifesto of algorithmic supremacy, where corporate narcissism fuses with militarist theology and the faith of empire reborn. “We will be the most important software company in the world,” he proclaims—promising not innovation but dominion. Palantir, he says, exists “to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.” He boasts: “We are dedicating our company to the service of the West, and the United States of America… especially in places we can’t talk about.” “The West” here operates as a racial-civilisational signifier—an invocation of white supremacy veiled in the language of innovation and security. The cowardice of that final clause—bragging of cruelty in lands rendered unspeakable—reveals how the idea of a “civilised West” depends on the violent erasure of the colonised. “Places we can’t talk about” gestures toward the erased geographies of settler-colonial violence—most visibly the genocide in Palestine—where these very systems are deployed and continually refined for extermination.

In 2024, Palantir announced an “upgraded agreement with Israel’s Ministry of Defense” to “harness [its] advanced technology in support of war-related missions” (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre 2024). “We stand with Israel,” the company declared. “Our work in the region has never been more vital, and it will continue.” This was not mere corporate rhetoric but a declaration of allegiance. Palantir’s data-integration platforms—used by militaries, police, and intelligence agencies across the United States and Europe—have been repurposed to manage the digital infrastructure of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Through its AI-driven targeting systems, Palantir supplies what its CEO calls “algorithmic warfare.” These systems fuse surveillance feeds, communications intercepts, and biometric data into predictive models that identify, rank, and authorise human targets with minimal human oversight—the very capabilities that enabled Israel to fire three drone-launched missiles into three clearly marked aid vehicles (Business & Human Rights Resource Centre 2024). This is but one instance of how Palantir automates the war crimes of genocidal regimes, advancing the systematic killing of colonised peoples under the guise of technological neutrality.

This reduction of life to data is not unique to Palantir but symptomatic of a broader infrastructural techno-fascist complex. Under Project Nimbus, Google and Amazon provide the Israeli military with AI and cloud infrastructure, while Microsoft supplies its Azure platforms and OpenAI’s GPT-4 model to the Ministry of Defense (AP News 2024; The Guardian 2024). As investigations have shown, Israel’s Unit 8200 has deployed AI programs such as Lavender to generate thousands of “kill lists” from intercepted Palestinian communications. Within this context, Palantir’s necrotechnologies represent the paradigm of the industry: the culmination of a world where death itself has been automated, optimised, and industrialised.

While Palantir’s systems are deployed in the war crimes of Palestine, they are also used domestically by police departments accused of racial profiling across the United States, as well as by federal agencies such as the FBI and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). As Mijente’s investigation of Palantir’s contracts with ICE reveals, “the Trump administration’s war on migrants has been turbocharged by big tech,” arming agencies “with military-grade digital tools they need to commit atrocities along the southern border and the interior” (Mijente 2019: 2).

Palantir’s data-integration platforms function as instruments of racial governance. As MIT Technology Review notes, predictive-policing algorithms “inherit the racial bias of the data that trains them,” automating the over-policing of Black, brown, and poor communities (Technology Review 2020). The Intercept documents the same dynamic in Los Angeles, where Palantir’s systems helped the LAPD “build a massive database of names, vehicles, addresses, and associations—turning entire neighbourhoods into potential suspects” (The Intercept 2021). These systems form what The Guardian calls “the invisible nervous system of state surveillance—technology that underpins decisions which can ruin lives, while remaining largely beyond democratic oversight” (The Guardian 2025).

By embedding predictive analytics into police and immigration infrastructures, Palantir reproduces and automates the historical violence of border control and carceral power under a digital guise—systemic racist violence and xenophobic abduction reminiscent of fascist systems like the Nazi Gestapo. Marketed as a “precision tool,” its platforms instead facilitate dragnet operations. During one ICE campaign against so-called “transnational criminal networks,” 634 of 1,416 arrests were of individuals who had committed no crime (Mijente 2019: 10). The racial dimension of this infrastructure is not incidental but structural: the digital continuation of the bureaucratic violence that powered colonial and fascist regimes. “Today, IBM’s work for Nazi Germany is universally condemned,” Mijente writes. “The same is happening now within tech firms across the country. Saying ‘never again’ means recognising historical analogies and opposing human-rights abusers—and their enablers—at every step” (Mijente 2019: 5).

Coles’ partnership with Palantir marks the implementation of data-fascist infrastructures into the everyday governance of Australian labour. The U.S. war and intelligence contractor—whose software underpins settler-colonial genocide and neo-fascist regimes—now powers the surveillance of Australian retail workers. The same infrastructures once used to identify targets for destruction or detention are now repurposed to oversee every Coles grocery store in the country. Through Palantir’s Foundry platform, Coles’ surveillance acquires new scale and precision. The system integrates billions of data points each day, consolidating them into an apparatus for monitoring and so-called “operational optimisation.” In conjunction with AI-enabled tracking, biometric cameras, and predictive analytics, the workplace becomes an neo-Foucauldian panopticon. As Mark Coeckelbergh observes, “AI can be understood as contributing to all kinds of less visible panopticons… Current governance by data, or ‘algorithmic governance,’ leads to what Foucault (1975) called a ‘disciplinary society’…now pervading all aspects of social life: the effects of disciplinary power are ‘not exercised from a single vantage point, but are mobile, multivalent and internal to the very fabric of our everyday life’” (Coeckelbergh 2022: 108–109).

The Coles–Palantir partnership embodies this panopticism: an infrastructural regime extending through logistics systems, data collection, and predictive analytics. “The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single gaze to see everything constantly… a perfect eye that nothing would escape” (Foucault 1975: 173–174). Within Coles’ algorithmic workplace, this gaze is realised through automated supervision—“hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance… both absolutely indiscreet, since it is everywhere and always alert, and absolutely discreet, for it functions permanently and largely in silence” (Foucault 1975: 176). Here, the disciplinary gaze becomes non-human—what Coeckelbergh calls “invisible chains and ever-watching non-human eyes.” “This negative freedom is at stake when AI technology is used for surveillance to keep people in a state of enslavement or exploitation. The technology creates invisible chains and ever-watching non-human eyes… Knowing that you are being watched all the time, or could be watched all the time, is enough to discipline you” (Coeckelbergh 2022: 113).

In Coles’ data-driven management, this condition finds its infrastructural form: a labour regime governed by the invisible architecture of the Palantir gaze, in which docility silently becomes an operational outcome.“Everyone will be fully analysed and accounted for. Their every action monitored, their every preference known, their entire life calculated and made predictable” (Bloom 2019, cited in Coeckelbergh 2022: 113). Within such architectures, life itself becomes a data object, reduced to the variables of efficiency and profit. In this sense, Palantir’s algorithmic gaze is not merely disciplinary—it is ontological. It does not simply observe behaviour; it defines it in advance, producing subjects whose actions are already anticipated by code—“in which AI knows us better than—and before—we do” (Coeckelbergh 2022: 113–114). The normalisation of AI-accelerated “background” surveillance represents what Foucault described as “innumerable petty mechanisms” of control: unremarkable, automated, and ceaseless. “This infinitely scrupulous concern with surveillance is expressed in the architecture by innumerable petty mechanisms… minor but flawless instrumentation in the progressive objectification and partitioning of individual behaviour” (Foucault 1975: 173). “The disciplinary institutions secreted a machinery of control that functioned like a microscope of conduct” (Foucault 1975: 173).

In the Coles–Palantir apparatus, this microscopic gaze expands to an industrial scale—a seamless fusion of profit, discipline, and visibility. Coles’ partnership with Palantir crystallises this microscopy of conduct: the transformation of retail labour into dataset. Surveillance becomes ambient, seemingly harmless, yet it perfects the exploitation of labour through algorithmic quantification. What appears as neutral optimisation conceals an intensified microphysics of power—a silent, perpetual calibration of bodies, time, and behaviour in the service of profit.

Within contemporary Australia, the affective economy of fear has become a technological node of governance: a circulatory system through which emotion becomes policy, and policy becomes profit. Nowhere is this more visible than in the symbiosis between media, police, politicians, and corporate interests. Each element of this assemblage amplifies and feeds off the other, forming what might be called an affective–industrial complex.

The Victoria Police Union’s recent campaign for harsher sentencing “amid record crime” (ABC News 2025) exemplifies this dynamic. Sensationalist coverage by commercial outlets—headlines warning of “rising crime” in Melbourne or a “wave of lawlessness” sweeping retail spaces (9News 2025)—produces the emotional climate in which state and corporate surveillance appear not only reasonable but necessary. Fear legitimises both policing and profit. Retailers have capitalised on this atmosphere. Industry groups have lobbied for “urgent action to combat retail crime” (RetailBiz 2025), positioning theft as an existential threat to business rather than a symptom of systemic inequality. Coles, for instance, has amplified this narrative, claiming a “crime surge” in key states (News.com.au 2025) while simultaneously rolling out new surveillance infrastructures under the guise of worker and customer safety. The corporation’s rhetoric aligns perfectly with the state’s securitisation discourse: fear of theft becomes a moral and affective justification for intensified monitoring.

Yet this “retail crime wave” is less a crisis of morality than a crisis of survival. As a new Foodbank Australia report shows, up to 20 per cent of Australian households are skipping meals or going days without eating. (9news 2025) The cost-of-living emergency—manufactured and sustained by the same duopoly that dominates Australia’s food economy—has driven many to desperation. In this environment, theft emerges as both an act of necessity and an index of systemic collapse. Rather than addressing the exploitative pricing structures that render food unaffordable, Coles Group reframes the outcome as criminality, using the very conditions it helped produce to legitimise expanded surveillance and securitisation.

The cycle is self-perpetuating: economic exploitation breeds scarcity; scarcity breeds theft; theft breeds surveillance; surveillance breeds fear; and fear reinforces the authority of those who profit from it. The public is enlisted emotionally into the expansion of power: shoppers and workers alike internalise the rhetoric of danger, consenting to more cameras, more monitoring, more control. Fear, in this sense, is not simply psychological—it is infrastructural. It lubricates the machinery of extraction, translating emotion into compliance and compliance into data. The affective politics of fear thus functions as capital’s emotional infrastructure: it prepares the ground for economic domination by securing consent to the technologies that enforce it.

This Palantir partnership is nothing out of the ordinary for Coles. For years, the corporation has operated as an instrument of structural exploitation within Australia’s supermarket duopoly. The 2025 ACCC Supermarkets Inquiry found that Coles and Woolworths function within a highly concentrated oligopoly, maintaining dominant control over suppliers, workers, and consumers alike (ACCC 2025: 1). Both were identified among the most profitable supermarket businesses globally, having increased product margins over the last five years—even as the cost-of-living crisis deepened (ACCC 2025: 1). The report also revealed how Coles and Woolworths’ pricing and promotional systems manipulate perception: over half of all products are sold “on promotion,” while complex discounting and loyalty programs make it “difficult for consumers to assess value for money” (ACCC 2025: 2).

Such economic manipulation and domination is inseparable from labour exploitation. Between 2017 and 2020, Coles underpaid 8,700 workers by between A$115 million and A$250 million (FWO 2021; Reuters 2025). Earlier, a 2014 workplace agreement left around 77,000 employees worse off through reduced penalty rates (Fair Work Commission 2016; The Age 2017). In 2021, 350 warehouse workers were locked out after striking against automation (SMH 2021; The Guardian 2021). In the late-capitalist duopoly of Coles and Woolworths, record profits coexist with deepening precarity. Workers are underpaid, surveilled, and replaced; dissent is punished while poverty expands.

The duopoly does not merely produce economic subjugation—it administers a biopolitical regime: a system that governs life through the management of need. To eat is to submit to infrastructure. Coles’ neo-panopticism extends into the sphere of subsistence, where the act of survival becomes an object of corporate optimisation. Through its partnership with Palantir, this surveillance achieves unprecedented reach: the architecture of algorithmic governance fuses survival, labour, and obedience into a single calculus of control. It is the domesticated face of infrastructural fascism, in which biological necessity itself becomes a site of data extraction, capital accumulation, and technological domination—a regime that governs life by engineering its conditions of existence.

As Gilles Deleuze writes, “man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt” (Deleuze 1992: 6). Here, the debt is both the underpaid worker and the citizen compelled to purchase the overpriced means of their own survival. Debt becomes the structure of life itself—the quiet coercion that binds obedience to subsistence. It is an exhaustion both economic and existential, the condition of being governed through need. To borrow Lauren Berlant’s phrasing, it feels “like desperate doggy paddling” (Berlant 2011: 117): a form of truncated endurance in which living becomes indistinguishable from managing crisis. In this affective landscape, biopolitical domination is not only imposed but felt—a diffuse exhaustion that replaces revolt with maintenance and transforms precarity into the normal tempo of survival.

Coles extends this exploitation to those most vulnerable: migrants and First Nations peoples. Through its monopsony power, the corporation exerts near-total control over suppliers—particularly fresh-produce growers—who “lack the information or certainty they need to make efficient investment decisions” and are often forced to absorb additional costs and risk (ACCC 2025: 1). Investigations have repeatedly exposed the exploitation of migrant labour across Coles’ supply chains, where coercive conditions remain systemic (FWO 2018; ABC 2019). Profit is extracted from the most precarious bodies, extending corporate sovereignty into the lives of those least protected.

Coles’ and Woolworths’ control of food supply chains exacerbates existing inequalities in rural areas: prices are higher, options fewer, and dependence entrenched (ACCC 2025: 2). In many remote First Nations communities, the duopoly’s dominance functions as a form of economic punishment—“Indigenous Australians pay more than double capital-city prices for everyday groceries” (The Guardian 2024; News.com.au 2024). Colonial governance becomes logistics: the control of colonised life through its increasingly automated exploitation—an infrastructural continuation of the same technocratic power that surveils, disciplines, and profits from every layer of social existence.

This structural inequity was laid bare in the death of Kumanjayi White, a 24-year-old Warlpiri man who died after being restrained by two plain-clothed police officers inside a Coles supermarket in Mparntwe/Alice Springs (ABC News 2025; SBS NITV 2025). Despite public outcry and repeated requests from his family, neither Coles nor the Northern Territory Police have released the CCTV footage of the incident. The refusal to disclose this evidence exposes the ethical bankruptcy of Australia’s surveillance regime: an extensive corporate apparatus that records everything, yet speaks only when profit demands it. In Alice Springs—a town long subjected to racialised policing and economic extraction—the presence of undercover police inside Coles functions as the protection of technofascist capital itself. Kumanjayi, who lived with disabilities, died on stolen land; in a supermarket built on exploitation; under a police regime built to defend it. His grandfather, Warlpiri Elder Ned Jampijinpa Hargraves, told media outside court: “We have the right to know—but you’re not showing that to us, you’re not telling us, and we cannot trust you with anything” (ABC News 2025). Yet even to write this risks another form of violation. The nature of his death became national news, while the footage remains concealed. The spectacle of loss circulates freely; the truth does not. In this double exposure, Kumanjayi is rendered both visible and erased—denied the right to opacity, the right not to be consumed by the colonial demand for transparency (Glissant 1997). To write in his death is to stand inside that contradiction: to speak against erasure while refusing to turn his life into data once more.

From the colonial violence of the Palestinian genocide to the persecution of migrants in the United States and the Australian oligopolistic panopticon, all participate in what Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias term data colonialism—a system that “combines the predatory extractive practices of historical colonialism with the abstract quantification methods of computing” (Couldry & Mejias 2018: 1). What was once the conquest of land and labour is now the quiet administration of thought, movement, and relation through capital’s digital infrastructures. “The colonial appropriation of life in general and its annexation to capital… through the digital platform” (Couldry & Mejias 2018: 4) reveals how the human subject itself becomes the new frontier of accumulation. Palantir and other technofascist infrastructures materialise what Achille Mbembe—citing Eyal Weizman—identifies as the fusion of surveillance and weaponry within colonial space: “Under the conditions of late modern colonial occupation, surveillance is oriented both inwardly and outwardly, the eye acting as weapon, and vice versa… multiple separations, provisional boundaries, which relate to each other through surveillance and control” (Weizman in Mbembe 2019: 53). In Palestine, this logic manifests as algorithmic ethnic cleansing; in the United States, as automated racial profiling; and in Australia, as biopolitical technocapital extraction—the management of life as data, and need as profit. Each extends the same optical regime of domination: an order in which data itself becomes the architecture of power, and visibility the mechanism of subjugation. Shoshana Zuboff names this the rise of instrumentarian power—a regime that governs behaviour through predictive data and automated feedback. “The rise of instrumentarian power is intended as a bloodless coup… We are expected to cede our authority, relax our concerns, quiet our voices” (Zuboff 2019: 379).

Although, this planetary coup if far from bloodless—merely displaced, harder to see and easier to deny. The blood is rendered technical, absorbed by infrastructure and naturalised into code.

Notes

Achille Mbembe. Necropolitics. Trans. Steven Corcoran. Duke University Press, 2019.

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Routledge, 2004.

Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Supermarkets Inquiry Summary. ACCC, Feb 2025.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.

Coeckelbergh, Mark. The Political Philosophy of AI. Polity Press, 2022.

Couldry, Nick & Mejias, Ulises A. “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to Colonialism.” Television & New Media 20 (4), 2018: 336–349.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Vintage, 1995.

Iliadis, Andrew & Acker, Amelia. “The Seer and the Seen: Surveying Palantir’s Surveillance Platform.” The Information Society 37 (5) 2021

Mijente. Who’s Behind ICE? The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations. Mijente, 2019.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias. “Data Colonialism and the Colonial Appropriation of Life.” Television & New Media20 (4), 2018.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, 2019.