Technofascism
The Zone of Impunity
Zahid R. Chaudhary
A new phrase entered public discourse in 2026 and has circulated through the words of journalists, members of Congress, and social media commentators: “the Epstein class.” One immediately has a sense of the group designated by this moniker, and this is what gives the descriptor its political traction. As rich and powerful people around the world—men as well as women, but mostly men—across law firms, the finance sector, academia, government, entertainment, medicine, and European royalty anxiously explain to the public the reasons for their connections to Jeffrey Epstein with each release of the files, the depths of depravity to which many were able to turn a blind eye do not fail to scandalize. As journalists have combed through the redacted documents and reported on their findings, not a single American figure implicated in the Epstein files has been held accountable. Although some personalities, such as Larry Summers and Kathryn Ruemmler, have stepped down from their positions, these demotions are discretionary and have occurred unevenly across the cast of otherwise very famous or very respected people now revealed to have bantered with Epstein about obscene jokes; written to him about hiding their STIs from their wives by secretly slipping antibiotics in their wives’ meals; or made comments about a particularly young and pretty girl being naughty. While the Americans in Epstein’s orbit have not been held to account thus far, the former Prince Andrew and a former Norwegian prime minister are among the people who have faced consequences—one investigated for sharing sensitive trade information and arrested, the other charged with gross corruption. Such is the puzzle, if you will, of impunity—that even those characters being legally held to account in Europe are charged only with such administrative crimes and not the trafficking, rape, or abuse of young girls.
What does this group have to do with technofascism? The connections, it turns out, are not only literal, because Epstein’s network included Silicon Valley titans, but also psychopolitical, in that the defining feature of both the Epstein class and technofascism is the practice and fantasy of impunity. The descriptor “Epstein class” apprehends something of this social reality. Thus, the Epstein files limn an aspect of the contemporary social order: They delineate a group formation that is an excrescence produced by contemporary arrangements of political and economic power governed by libidinal excess. Viewed in this way, the puzzling and scandalous impunity of Epstein’s vast network appears in all its complexity, and technofascism is an element within this network. Take, for example, Iranian academic Foad Izadi’s indictment of the United States, expressed to an Al Jazeera reporter after the catastrophic strike on a girls’ primary school at the very start of the Israel-US war on Iran, a strike that killed 165 people, mostly schoolgirls, and wounded about one hundred more. Izadi explained, “[the] American government is a vicious imperialist government that attacks other countries and kills little children. [Iranians] understand they are fighting the Epstein class that either rapes little girls or bombs little girls.” Izadi’s indictment grasps the connections among elite power, gender violence, warmongering, and libidinal satisfaction. Each of these elements is entailed in practices of impunity; when considering the linkages between these two atrocities—“raping little girls” and “bombing little girls”—perhaps it is necessary to consider impunity as a psychopolitical category. A purely legal definition would not be sufficient for the task, since the categorical forms of interpretation on which the law must depend separate the spheres of sex and war, except in those instances in which sexual violation is deployed as an instrument of war. Yet the phrase “Epstein class” bespeaks a deeper and non-literal connection between the surplus enjoyment of these different types of aggressions and crimes; psychoanalysis enables analysis of the entwinement of war with sexuality.
The ur-figure of impunity in psychoanalysis is the primal father, that mythic patriarch from Sigmund Freud’s speculative anthropology in Totem and Taboo. In this work, Freud readily admits that the story he tells of the primal father has no basis in historical record or anthropological observation, but is a heuristic that assists him in deciphering the repressed traces of this presence in his patient’s psyches. This is how Freud’s just-so story goes: In human prehistory, people organized themselves in primal hordes, each led by a domineering father who claimed exclusive conjugal rights over all the women. The sons unite against the father, kill him, and eat his flesh to claim the power he represented; thus the primal antagonism results in the first “totem meal.” Following this brutal consumption of the father’s body, the sons are struck with guilt and so deify the primal father and establish the laws and taboos that become the basis of morality and culture. Through these laws, women become communal property. Notable in this tale are the enmeshed elements of elite power, gender violence, warmongering, and libidinal satisfaction. Women do not fare so well, even at the conclusion of the story, though Freud seems not to have noticed this part and does not account for it. One wonders why the inauguration of law and morality merely distributes women’s sexual availability for the satisfaction of men’s desire differently, as if it were women’s sexual availability that was primarily at stake in the erection of laws and stricture, for which, however sublimated, it is only men’s desires that matter. Extrapolating from the itinerary of desire and guilt that Freud maps out, one could speculate that the primal father, although murdered, becomes embedded even more deeply into the society, since his authority transmutes into law, morality, and culture, as Herbert Marcuse noted long ago. Even as law, morality, and culture seek to regulate violence and libidinal excess, such regulation is haunted by the specter of the primal father, who persists as a fantasy of indulging in excess, of being unconstrained by laws and norms and strictures—or, at least, acting as if they do not apply to oneself. The status of women as communal property, too, can be understood as one of the expression of the perverse primal father’s ongoing presence. This also explains why, for the Epstein class, law, morality, and culture can become mere pretense. The more important conclusion we can draw from the persistence of the primal father beyond his death is that where impunity is concerned, gender difference may well be one of its most durable channels.
It is notable that in the last ten years, scholars and researchers who are usually not particularly drawn to psychoanalysis have deployed the figure of the primal father to understand contemporary far-right politics. Among the most recent examples is Melinda Cooper, a social and political theorist and historian of neoliberalism and American conservatism. In a brilliant essay on the Epstein files (notably titled “Epstein Family Values”), she reads the primal father as a figure that illuminates both the business forms and kinship forms for people like Jeffrey Epstein. She astutely describes Peter Thiel, who was in Epstein’s network, as echoing Freud’s Totem and Taboo in his own book, Zero to One, in which he characterizes Silicon Valley’s founder-controlled firms as akin to bands of brothers poised to overthrow established monopolies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Thiel warns the would-be entrepreneur reading his book that the status of the founder is ultimately insecure, since another band of brothers will one day come and usurp you. The most recent batch of the Epstein files included email correspondence in which Epstein tells Thiel that Brexit is the mere beginning of a large-scale “return of tribalism” that could prove lucrative to people like them. Thiel has expressed his deep-seated fear of death multiple times, usually in the recalcitrant language of taking a stand—a posture familiar to any child faced with the intolerable or the unacceptable. As Thiel declares at the start of a 2009 essay, “I stand against . . . the ideology of the inevitability of death”—that is, he claims impunity with respect to the law and immunity from death. He himself practices a cunning strategy that aims to accumulate power and wealth even as he seeks immunity from the violent fate of the primal father: He promotes and invests in allies—bands of brothers, if you will—who are often more publicly visible than he is, like Vice President J. D. Vance, Blake Masters, who lost a Senate election in Arizona, and Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, among others. At the same time, Thiel also invests in transhumanist ventures that seek to extend one’s life by augmenting it through technology. Insofar as Epstein and Thiel and their ilk consider themselves not only above the law, but in a position to make the laws or make their own lawlessness the law, impunity is this class’s fundamental defining feature. They obviously secure it through power and money, yet continue to wish for it as well. Desire, psychoanalysis teaches us, always overreaches the object that would satisfy it. And so the practice of impunity compounds the desire for impunity and thus amplifies the will to power such that the zone of impunity becomes a limitless fantasy space. This space is not wholly imaginary, because the lived practice of impunity grounds the desire for as-yet unimagined violations. In this sense, impunity must be understood not only as a key feature of the psychopolitics of fascism but also as one of the preconditions for the devastating violence it unleashes.
“Thus, the Epstein files limn an aspect of the contemporary social order: They delineate a group formation that is an excrescence produced by contemporary arrangements of political and economic power governed by libidinal excess.”
There were once spirited debates among scholars, beginning with Trump’s first election, about whether the political winds of the time could be signs of fascism. These discussions have now become absurd: They resemble a scene out of a Eugène Ionesco play in which characters unable to face a jarring reality fight and argue with each other about its finer details instead. It is clear by now that fascism refers not only to mid-twentieth-century European realities, but to tendencies and logics that can subtend any political formation. It is a given that the reemergence of fascism would not replicate the exact political priorities and conditions of midcentury fascisms, and an assumption that it must do so is one of the false problems created by historicist idealism. As Robert Paxton has argued, fascism is a flexible and adaptive formation for which there is no “fascist minimum” that one can adduce. Decades before Paxton’s analysis, Theodor Adorno had offered a more far-reaching warning: Upon his return to Frankfurt from his exile in the United States, he explained to an audience that the survival of fascist tendencies within democracy is potentially more dangerous than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.
There could not be a clearer expression of fascist rationality than the statements we have been hearing from tech billionaires. To take a recent example, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told an interviewer at the IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026, “[P]eople talk about how much energy it takes to train an AI model . . . but it also takes a lot of energy to train a human. It takes, like, twenty years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart.” The cold calculations of reason have not only reduced all values to economic units but made the commodities that OpenAI sells equivalent to the standard for measuring the worth of humans. Instrumental reason, when pushed to such an extreme, changes its quality and becomes a form of magical thinking. Apart from presuming equivalence between humans and AI, this kind of magical thinking that purports to give insight into the most advanced contemporary technological realities is a mere repetition of a familiar and mistaken calculus of societal values. Like many pundits before him, Altman seems incapable of understanding the social reproduction of the household, which depends on gendered labor that remains unrecognized and uncompensated. One could ignore such self-interested forms of obfuscation if tech capital—the combination of big tech corporations and venture capitalists—had not accrued such political power over the last twenty years. Just hours after the Trump administration banned the use of Anthropic’s AI by federal agencies and some hours before it launched strikes against Iran, the Department of War struck a deal with competitor OpenAI based on alarming terms Anthropic had rejected (to do with the use of their technology for mass surveillance of the US population and with autonomous weapons systems). In his farewell address, Joe Biden had warned Americans of “an oligarchy [that] is taking shape in America,” manifest in the rise of what Biden called “a tech-industrial complex” poised to undermine democracy. Yet the mutually reinforcing interests between tech capital, government, and the security state were consolidated and sanctified under Barack Obama’s administration (when Biden was vice president). We must remember that Adorno’s warning about fascist tendencies within liberal democracy emerged from insights he gleaned during his time in California.
The historical reinforcements between the security state and tech capital have expanded the field of impunity for technology companies. It is no accident that Elon Musk, now a trillionaire, was at the head of DOGE, the short-term federal agency that sought to cut the administrative state down to size and supported an expansion of executive powers. Musk also openly aspires to be a patriarch, having sired fourteen children and expressed a willingness to have many more, particularly to disseminate his seed on other planets. Humanity would begin its next chapter with Musk as its origin; this fantasy imagines an exit from “the ideology of death” in its oldest patriarchal form. Mars is particularly alluring to Musk’s primal paternal longings as the location for unchecked personal freedom and a place for a new humanity whose origin would be him. The eugenicist, natalist, and overtly racist implications of Musk’s reproductive fantasies and his promotion of “white genocide” conspiracism are of a piece with the tendencies of his right-leaning South African technofascist companions, Peter Thiel and David Sacks.
Whatever unchecked and unregulated forms of Martian human development might be dreamed of by Musk, there is plenty of impunity right here on Earth. In July 2024, the Supreme Court granted the presidency absolute immunity for actions within the president’s core Constitutional authority and presumptive immunity for all official acts. But most instances of impunity, as indulged by corporate actors and elite circles, are not backed by legal sanction. Evidence of the quotidian perversity of such impunity is available for perusal in the Epstein files, which have shown most starkly how elites support each other in consolidating impunity, even across ideological divides, and how gender and class condition the very (im)possibility of redress and justice. The problem of impunity is simultaneously juridical and psychopolitical, and it has material consequences. Much of its practice bypasses legal oversight; perhaps this is one of the fascist tendencies within democracy to which Adorno was referring.
Democratic cover for fascist tendencies comes in various forms, including ideological, juridical, and political-economic. Additionally, the entwinement of technology with fascism has a long history, stretching back to the Italian Futurists and their valorization of speed, acceleration, and war. Yet this entwinement is now expressed in the language of democracy and egalitarianism. Its ideological variant is an abiding faith that technological progress is inherently democratic. This includes the belief that digital participation and content creation are, in themselves, democratizing practices and that pushing digital frontiers means creating a larger arena for democratic deliberation. Its juridical variants are a battery of provisions, exemptions, and legal immunities that liberal democracies, especially under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s administrations, have granted to platforms; such accommodations have been key to incubating what we now call Big Tech. Democratic cover additionally takes the form of political-economic policies—in effect, neoliberal reordering that converts states into instruments of unchecked and unaccountable capital accumulation in the increasingly faint hope that the market will advance progress, disseminate truth, and shape freedom. This ethos was exemplified by Margaret Thatcher’s pithy slogan “There is no alternative”; neoliberal restructuring was presented simultaneously as a political ultimatum and an inescapable fate. At the level of ideology, juridical protection, and political-economic reordering, the figure of democracy has served contradictory ends. Democracy was both presumed and held out as a hope: Politicians and CEOs said democracy was the condition for technological advancement while assuming that democracy is a promise such technology will deliver, a goal yet to be realized. In other words, in this collectively produced fairy tale, dating from the mid-1990s to Trump’s first election, technology was deemed aligned with democratic ends, either as the means for their refinement or as the fruit of their success. As a result, lobbyists and CEOs from Silicon Valley were given positions in the Obama administration and were granted any number of wishes, including tax incentives, loose regulations, and government contracts, even during the 2008 financial crisis, which introduced the world to the spurious political-economic concept of “Too big to fail.” This canard, presented as a kind of natural law, is akin to Thatcher’s dictum. Both utterances present the result of political-economic interpretation as a kind of inescapable fate, one which will brook neither contestation nor any choice other than a preordained one.
In any case, we are witnessing the afterlife of tech capital’s granted wishes, and as we know from fairy tales, a wish granted usually comes with consequences. To such fairy tale wisdom, Freud would add the reminder that wish fulfillment offers, at best, temporary satisfaction. Big Tech has now elevated itself to the lofty realm of being “too big to fail.” The gloves have come off, and Big Tech is less concerned with the pretense of aligning itself with democratic values. Venture capitalists and tech CEOs have openly taken up anti-democratic positions, as anticipated by Thiel’s 2009 statement, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In April 2026, Palantir released a twenty-two-point manifesto on X that explicitly critiqued pluralism and glorified war. The hubristic language of the manifesto suggested that, in spite of its status as a mere government contractor, Palantir considers itself to be directly engaged in governance. The manifesto, based on Alex Karp and Nicholas Zaminska’s book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, privileged Schmittian decisionism over democratic deliberation, promoted Western supremacy backed with military force, and called for the optimization of surveillance to suppress dissent. Figures such as Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, self-described “neo-reactionaries” and pseudo-intellectuals of so-called Dark Enlightenment, have sought to provide philosophical heft for a fascism they wish would emerge more rapidly. Yarvin is famous for promoting absolute monarchy and has criticized Trump for being too soft in exercising his executive power, while Land is a well-known accelerationist whose solution to societal collapse is to encourage people to bring it about more quickly.
Despite their unsurpassed political and economic power, the titans of the tech industry are perennially aggrieved, even as they position themselves as the solution to the end-times over which they cannot stop obsessing. Thiel, for example, regularly invokes collapse and the apocalypse. In the fall of 2025, he delivered four portentous lectures about the Antichrist, triumphantly repeated in March 2026 in Rome. As he put it at the start of the third lecture, “I’m a libertarian, or a classical liberal, who deviates in one minor detail, where I’m worried about the Antichrist.” These lectures, delivered to friendly paying customers eager for an audience with Thiel, further developed the political theological position he had expressed in a 2004 essay, “The Straussian Moment.” This essay, written shortly after Thiel founded Palantir, is a Christian call to action in the wake of 9/11 that takes detours through Leo Strauss, John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, and René Girard. The essay embroiders political theology onto a familiar post-9/11 Samuel Huntington-style discourse about the clash of civilizations and, for all its urgent bombast and end-times rhetoric and expressions of the necessity of rethinking civilizational constraints, perplexingly ends in a call for the Christian “steward of our time” to side with peace. But, in the essay, Thiel ruminates on Leo Strauss’s esoteric forms of communication with such admiration and at such great length that an attentive reader could only understand Thiel to be aspiring to Straussian writerly maneuvers himself. Indeed, this is what has led Paul Leslie, who knew Thiel in his Stanford days, to consider a pivotal turn in the essay as its ultimate statement. Buried in the middle of the essay is the only text Thiel leaves untranslated (German and, in the final line, Latin), from Oswald Spengler’s work Decline of the West (or, as he wrote, Der Untergang des Abendlandes):
But for us, who have been placed by fate into this culture and this moment of its becoming in which money celebrates its final victories and its heir, Caesarism, quietly and inexorably approaches—the direction of our will and necessity is marked out within a narrow circle, without which life is not worth living. We do not have the freedom to achieve this or that, but only the freedom to do what is necessary or to do nothing. And a task that has been set by the necessity of history will be accomplished, with the individual or against him.
The Fates lead the willing; the unwilling they drag.
Thiel cites this passage approvingly as a call to action, aligning himself with a thinker who promoted the razing of democratic norms to make way for a post-liberal social order ruled by a group of powerful elites. This new social order will be driven by fate, and Caesarism is best embraced willingly, so one may avoid being dragged by it. Such a notion of fate coerces by the force of an expression that is both a warning (you will be left behind or crushed by forces you do not join) and an invitation (you can join right now and be among the elect). Such a notion of fate is the psychosocial heart of technofascism; its more familiar expression is the urgency with which everyone is told to adopt a new technology because it is coming whether you like it or not. Such inexorability may or may not be true, but the consequence of such reasoning is that the world and one’s choices in it appear dramatically reduced. Notably, such exhortation is directed at both consumers and producers: One must shift corporate strategy toward a technological paradigm that everyone else seems to be adopting. This means that the injunction to get in line plays a role in the cycles of mimetic desire otherwise known as business competition and, additionally, has consequences for statecraft and governance and across a full array of private and public institutions. Such expressions of fate and inevitability combine the feeling of vulnerability or exposure with the promise that the only escape from that troubling feeling is to align with the preordained necessity—otherwise you will be among those left behind or turned into a resource for those who better understood the iron laws of necessity that dominate us. By this logic, capitulating to fateful necessity is also a sign of intelligence or cunning, and so the exhortation to get in line appeals to one’s own narcissism. It promises proximity to an abstract sovereign power whose forceful will has shrunk the space of freedom for others to a single choice: “to do what is necessary or to do nothing.”
It is obvious why this psychosocial logic was appealing to Peter Thiel decades ago, in the context of the era of impunity known as the War on Terror, an era that is, surprisingly, not usually considered as a part of the historical arc of technofascism. Yet it is urgent to consider this form of political power as one of the effects of the War on Terror. The company Thiel founded then, amid his feverish civilizational panic, was Palantir. In February 2025, after a particularly lucrative year for the company, Palantir CEO Alex Karp quoted Samuel Huntington in a letter to his shareholders: “The rise of the West was not made possible ‘by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence . . . Westerners forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.’”
Palantir has recently been granted some of the biggest US and Israeli government contracts, including one with ICE as this militia shot people around the US and one with Israel’s Ministry of Defense as it continues its genocide in Gaza. Notably, the Epstein files include an audio recording of a conversation between Jeffrey Epstein and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in which Epstein recommends that Barak try to join the board of Palantir. Epstein has to spell out the name of the company for Barak and misspells it as P-A-L-L-E-N-T-I-E-R; Barak repeats the misspelling and introduces an additional error in it, and Epstein affirms Barak’s new misspelling. In the Epstein files, the frequency of misspelled words is proportional to the writer or speaker’s assumed powers. (The psychopolitics of power’s contortion of language into mere babble that nevertheless continues to signify requires a fuller analysis than can be done here.)
“In any case, we are witnessing the afterlife of tech capital’s granted wishes, and as we know from fairy tales, a wish granted usually comes with consequences.”
For its part, Palantir explicitly advertises itself as a company that is not aiming at simply building products “to ensure America’s future,” but “to dominate”; its profitability has shot up exponentially in the last six years.[1] In 1950, Aimé Césaire referred to fascism as the “boomerang effect” of European colonialism, describing how the techniques of governance, punishment, and repression that Europe practiced in the colonies rebounded on Europeans themselves in the form of fascist violence. But this customary translation is somewhat inaccurate—the original French does not metaphorize an indigenous tool or weapon, but indicates something closer to a natural law. The European bourgeoisie, Césaire notes, wakes up one fine day to “un formidable choc en retour” as the Gestapo starts taking prisoners. Choc en retour signifies a backlash or an aftershock, something closer to Newton’s third law of motion, where every force meets an equal and opposite reaction. Backfiring, kickbacks, and other such unintended consequences that exceed political calculation but are the natural result of forces greater than human intention are embedded in Césaire’s condensed description of the colonial etiology of fascism. “Before they were its victims,” he wrote, Europeans “were its accomplices” because they shut their eyes to the violence being visited on non-Europeans and even legitimized it. It is in this light that many commentators have rightly understood the militarization of American and European police forces and the expansion of a violent discretionary police power that is increasingly difficult to hold to account legally.
Césaire understood this choc en retour as a historical as well as psychical reality. Historically, the forms of repression practiced at the frontiers of empire spring into action in its metropolitan centers. Psychically, the “habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms [the colonizer] to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.” Tech enthusiasts have always gone one step further, fully embracing notions of human capital and reducing people to economic units with specific inputs and outputs. Transhumanism is a logical extension of this dehumanizing logic, such that even the bodies of technofascist would-be sovereigns are submitted to disassembly and reconfigured as optimized demigods for whom impunity is a birthright. The transhumanist body is a fantasy of inviolable life achieved through painstaking violations of one’s own bodily limits. Choosing such self-optimization means aligning oneself with the Fates, rather than their dragged victims; the transhumanist body, even as it cannot itself be victimized and escapes finitude, benefits from the exploitation and instrumental reduction of others to economic units. Such reduction extends to people, environments, nations, and special economic zones designed to bypass laws and regulations. One of the insights of Césaire’s analysis of fascism is that the distinction between the foreign and the domestic realms collapses if you follow the trajectory of fascist violence. The recoil signified by choc en retour also discloses an interdependent and interconnected world whose self-enclosed field of action can only result in consequences for the entire globe itself. If this resembles a notion of fate, it is of a different order than the Spenglerian fate invoked by Thiel. Césaire’s invocation of choc en retour is informed by his reworking of Surrealism for colonial realities, and so the displacement of a natural law on to social and historical processes becomes, simultaneously, a disclosure of a politically and psychically interconnected world, a warning against the use of excessive violence, and a perverse hope that a catastrophic form of justice can be obtained in spite of so much impunity.
Since Césaire’s time, processes that connect the foreign and the domestic have accelerated, so the practice of state violence elsewhere entails a melding of domestic police power with the sovereign right to declare war. Ted Mabrey, Global Head of Palantir Technologies Commercial, tweeted soon after a winter of ICE killings in the US and the launchings of Israeli-US missiles against Iran, “If you have ever considered returning to Palantir, this is the week to do it. The world is demanding every last unit of creative energy we can muster. If you return, you will be on a plane day one and committing code that matters within hours of getting your laptop” (emphasis mine). Technofascists commit data analysis as a form of state violence, and, from the perspective of vast data sets, the distinction between the domestic and the foreign is as fungible as a digital filter. According to Karp, the most critical software companies are those whose products “power the West to its obvious innate superiority” and “bring violence and death to our enemies.” “Commiting code” and firing bullets at perceived enemies are now functions of the same kind of power—as Palantir puts it in point number seven of their manifesto, “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software.” Software helps to optimize killing, and its targets are not always foreign, as Karp has made clear in his opposition to college students protesting the Gaza genocide and social justice organizations aiming to check state power. One of the enemies Elon Musk has singled out for elimination— what he calls “the woke mind virus”—is a domestic American and European affliction.
The norm-breaking methods of the so-called War on Terror required a perfunctory attempt to create a hegemonic block in support of the Iraq war based on lies about weapons of mass destruction. Now, America’s overt control of Venezuelan oil and the reanimation of nineteenth-century imperial doxa such as the Monroe Doctrine are some examples of a once again unalloyed, even archaic, form of power, one that often does not even require pretexts or ideological justifications. The corollary to this disastrous politics is the futurist fantasies of tech oligarchs, in which the crudest of colonial tropes has become reanimated: The vision of terra nullius, the empty land awaiting conquest, is now being feverishly mapped by billionaires’ imaginations untethered from reality principles. In the technofascist imaginary, images of collapse and the apocalypse are the obverse of images of the frontier. “Moving fast and breaking things” crystallizes this intimacy between collapse and frontier logics—such is the logic of entrepreneurial disruption, which aims at surpassing existing frontiers. As a psychosocial solicitation, impunity is offered up as a promise. For the ultrawealthy tech elite, the desire for impunity is expressed through a variety of wishes: to move to Mars while the Earth burns, to develop new islands in the ocean that would be exempt from laws, or even to upload one’s consciousness into a new host and cheat death itself. It does not matter that each of these wishes is a scientific impossibility largely based on pseudo-rationality. These fantasies conform, instead, to the entrepreneurial logic of the startup, which, encouraged and lavishly rewarded by liberal democracies, has become a ravenous monster that would end democracy by devouring it. The desire for impunity is entangled in double binds. The pleasure of escaping Earthly catastrophes, of secession from reigning global norms and laws, of being granted an exemption, or of remaking oneself at the frontier is dependent on others not having such luxuries. Not only do fantasies of impunity require the law whose violation is a thrill, but the force of law that yokes others is as gratifying as one’s own exemption. Therein lies the fascist sadism at the heart of fantasies of impunity.
This is also evident in Epstein’s case. In Melinda Cooper’s analysis of the Epstein files, she explains how Epstein encouraged his staff and the girls he abused to think of themselves simultaneously as independent contractors and like family, and the girls were able to escape the worst abuses if they recruited other girls. Thus ensnared in a form of dependency that combined economic and transactional relations with noncontractual pseudo-kinship relations, Epstein’s female victims were beholden to him even as he exempted himself from obligations to them. The victims say that Epstein never followed through on the big promises he had made to them. His libidinal satisfaction entailed exemption from obligations to which others were yoked. Such a sadistic form of impunity subtends technofascist fantasies of libertarian exit.
But there is more to this story, because a kind of exit is also promised to the MAGA base. For the less wealthy, the desire for impunity resolves into more modest aims: finding new exemptions from legal requirements such as vaccines and public education, fantasizing about uncountable wealth through the purchase of meme stock or cryptocurrency, or, even more humbly, posting offensive content online anonymously without repercussion. When liberal democracy craters as it has in the United States, it seems that one of its specters manifests as a frontier logic available to all. If you cannot afford to leave the Earth or buy acres of land in New Zealand in preparation for the coming catastrophe, you can try bypassing legal restraints by finding loopholes or trying your luck at crypto. Thus, impunity as a psychosocial desire runs all the way down in the social order. Our contemporary political formation is about the consolidation of elite impunity conditioned on the development of a perverse kind of hegemonic bloc: cultivating among non-elite groups a willingness to settle for an anti-regulatory, anti-statist ethos, even as the same government ensures their subjection. Many people clamor for legal exemptions, and such a desire for impunity is one of the gifts bequeathed by the Epstein class.
“The victims say that Epstein never followed through on the big promises he had made to them. His libidinal satisfaction entailed exemption from obligations to which others were yoked. Such a sadistic form of impunity subtends technofascist fantasies of libertarian exit.”
It is from such a vantage point that the political economy of impunity can be understood in psychopolitical terms. The contemporary dominance of tech capital has been built on age-old processes of primitive accumulation, the condition on which all of capitalism depends. According to Karl Marx, this is a structural and historical process in which previously non-economic spheres become transformed into economic value. Who knew that public street views, the behavior patterns of platform users, and metadata itself would one day become economically valuable as extracted data? Primitive accumulation once converted producers into wage laborers, so it was labor that transmogrified into labor power. Now it is the patterns of one’s behavior, the content of one’s communications, and the expression of one’s political views or desires that become converted into values. Technology has always promised the surpassing of limits and now it promises the surpassing of law. Thiel once remarked that one of the great things about technological advance is that one can break laws even before they are made, and there is a lot of money to be made in doing so. Yet, as with earlier instances of primitive accumulation, it is often the state and state violence that secure these new values for exploitation by private capital. In the long history of primitive accumulation, democracy itself appears irrelevant to the accumulation of capital, since it is brute sovereign power—in the form of legal accommodation, restrictions, and provisions—that protects the shareholders. Technofascists identify with precisely this kind of sovereign power.
This is why the trope of the frontier is so common in technofascist discourse. The most advanced, multimodal, large-scale AI models that could be deployed in warfare are known as “frontier AI.” The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which went full MAGA a while ago, invokes Manifest Destiny in its use of a kind of Marlboro Man figure carrying the flag while galloping on a horse in a January 2026 advertisement for the newly launched American Dynamism Fund II. Superimposed in gold is “$1.776 billion,” the amount raised for the two American Dynamism funds; it invokes both the Declaration of Independence and a willingness to take up arms. The logics of frontier living, where the law is absent, irrelevant, or not yet in place, dictate the modus operandi of big technology companies and entrepreneurial practice in general. To the inventory of technofascist fantasies can be added the lurid fantasy of a New Gaza, expressed most infamously in an AI video created by two Israeli American filmmakers and posted on social media by Donald Trump during the genocide, in which Gaza is rendered as a sexualized techno-utopia. More recently, Jared Kushner adumbrated a more sober fantasy about Gaza at Davos, where his middling corporate presence drew a stark contrast to the sunny Blade Runner-style slides he presented of a Gaza to come. Such are the emerging fantasies of conquering other people’s land; in these fantasies, there are no consequences. Gaza, where an apocalypse has been unfolding for over two years, is also the frontier for new forms of capital accumulation and the emergence of a new form of legality that seeks to bypass existing norms and laws and embraces unilateralism.[2]
How does a technofascist emphasis on fateful inevitability, which would seem to constrict choice and reduce one’s field of action in line with an abstract authority, accord with impunity, which entails a form of personal license unaccountable to any authority? These tendencies appear alongside each other in the discourses and practices of the Epstein class. Most often, fateful inevitability is expressed in language, whether as common sense, an economic injunction, or, as in Thiel’s case, a political theology. Impunity, on the other hand, is usually practiced, rather than remarked or reflected upon, although there are some exceptions to this in the Epstein files. When members of the Epstein class invoke the iron laws of necessity, they identify with the dominating power that contracts the choices of others, and the narcissistic gain of that identification is conditioned on others being crushed by fateful necessity. Thiel founded Palantir to aspire to God-like vision in the service of crushing non-Western threats, and it has become one of the instruments of impunity in war zones. The practice of impunity, therefore, makes the psychosocial identification real. It tilts that identification in the direction of being the one who subjects others to constraints without being constrained. Psychopolitically, then, the violence of fate is avoided while also being enjoyed, through impunity. The expression of fateful inevitability is always an invitation, even to those weaker than oneself, to identify with dominating power.
Such was the case for Epstein’s victims, who could only ever fail to live up to the noncontractual obligations the perverse father imposed on them as fateful necessity, and yet the impossible obligations were dependent on, as one survivor put it, considering Epstein a “friend, father figure, employer and master.” The primary feeling that bound her to Epstein was, as she put it, “fealty.” Fealty is a composite feeling, one that merges indebtedness with identification even as it maintains the distinctions between master and servant, patron and beneficiary. Because all forms of identification indicate some psychical transformation, it is possible that identifying with the master’s impunity also made it workable for Epstein’s victims to live with their own complicity in recruiting other girls. While subject to an increasing intensity of sexual violence, they could momentarily be absolved of the wrongs they knew they were committing for the sake of some security, money, education, or medical treatment. Thus, the psychosocial consequence of impunity is to absolve both the master and his victims, even if the ethics of such absolution differs between them, and to place them both outside the moral and legal calculus of society. Cultivating such forms of psychical identifications is how the Epstein class protects its privilege of impunity.
This essay is an expanded version of the 2026 Culler Lecture in Critical Theory, given at Cornell University on March 4. Special thanks to Joan W. Scott, Nasrin Olla, and Robyn Wiegman for their brilliant insights and feedback on early versions of this essay. Thanks to Noura Erakat for inspiring conversations about legal aspects of impunity. Thanks to Debarati Sanyal, Sharad Chari, and Alex Kantchelian for helping me parse the issues concerning the English translation of Aimé Césaire.
[1] For an account of Palantir’s role in political repression, see Alberto Toscano, “Built to Dominate,” In These Times, inthesetimes .com/article/palantir-designs-infrastructure-of-repression.
[2] Noura Erakat has recently analyzed the formation of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace as the inauguration of a new kind of political sovereignty, one based not on democratic deliberation and multilateral compromise, but on a system of patronage, capital, and brute power. See Erakat’s “Exit and Exception,” the 2026 Edward W. Said ’57 Memorial Lecture at Princeton University, delivered March 26.