Who knew the battleground for control over government wouldn’t be on the streets or in the courts, but deep inside the backend of federal databases? Yet that is what we’re confronting as Elon Musk has plugged into the Treasury’s $6 trillion payment system to defund entire government programs. More broadly, the world’s wealthiest person is flexing control over critical internet, space, and energy infrastructure.
It’s easy to conclude from this that the country has an Elon problem, but our predicament stems from something much deeper. What we actually have is a centralization problem where Big Tech and the state have fused into a single ruling force under the guise of security, efficiency, and innovation. Tech titans don’t just influence government; they have become it.
We’ve seen this before: theocracy, where rulers merge religion and state to justify absolute power. Monarchs and autocrats have wielded divine authority for centuries and, in some parts of the world, theocratic rule is how things are run to this day. We are confronting something similar when it comes to Musk-style government—only this time, the ruling force isn’t religious. It’s data-driven. In place of religious scripture, we have black-boxed algorithms and instead of divine decree, we are expected to submit to AI as an ‘unbiased’ authority justifying control. This is technofascism. And we’re already living under it.
Just consider how central Big Tech has been to running everyday life. Some recent examples: Meta removed fact checkers curbing misinformation. Google deleted Black History Month from its calendar app. Palantir has helped fuel mass deportations. TikTok censors speech. X runs white supremacy ads. Starlink controls the internet in war zones. OpenAI profits off copyrighted material.
These are not isolated events. They are the outcome of a system designed to centralize control of data. Musk is just the most visible product. How did this happen? How do we regain control?
How we got here
To understand how we got here, we need to grasp how far we’ve strayed from the internet’s original purpose. The U.S. government built the internet’s foundations as an open, resilient system—key features of decentralization. It wasn’t designed for surveillance or profit.
Then venture capitalists built a winner-takes-all economy on top of the internet. Startups weren’t just expected to succeed, they had to dominate entire categories. That’s why we ended up with a handful of social networks, one search giant, and one e-commerce empire.
Platforms became walled gardens, locking people in. That’s why you can’t send messages from Facebook to TikTok, why every social media platform forces you to rebuild your friend list, and it’s why your data isn’t yours. It’s fuel for a $257 billion shadow economy.
Part of this stems from the fallout from 9/11. In the name of national security, the U.S. government forged a deep alliance with Silicon Valley, vastly expanding surveillance through the Patriot Act. Soon, tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft weren’t just cooperating with the state; they became its infrastructure.
By the time OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, Big Tech had already built up its lobbying force. Instead of fighting regulators, they befriended them. They framed AI as an existential threat while pushing regulations only they could afford, locking out competitors.
Now, in 2025, Musk and his peers aren’t just outpacing regulators, they’re dismantling them. Oversight agencies are being gutted, watchdogs fired, and rulemakers replaced with tech allies. They’re not just rigging the game; they’re rewriting it.
Building a space Big Tech can’t control
The way to counter Big Tech under Technofascism isn’t by shrinking its turf—it’s by building a new one with its own rules, beyond their control. Decentralization, the federated internet, is an architecture designed to put power back in people’s hands. It revives the early web’s ideals with far more advanced technology.
Imagine an internet where you controlled your identity—your posts, your data, your connections—free to move between platforms instead of being locked in corporate silos. No more rebuilding from scratch. No more lost content. Because in a decentralized world, your data is yours.
A decentralized internet is more resilient, eliminating single points of failure, reducing the risk of manipulation and mass surveillance. No sudden ownership changes or shifting policies based on political influence.
Decentralization already exists. For the past decade, builders, digital freedom advocates and everyday people have been expanding blockchain networks like Bitcoin, and building encrypted tools and open protocols beyond the reach of centralized power. Increasingly popular decentralized apps such as Bluesky and Signal prove that people want services free from centralized control.
A shift to decentralized internet services will bring challenges—including more complex security and less convenience. But these issues are all solvable. In the past, we didn’t let new challenges around democracy lead us to abandon our freedoms. We built systems that protected people while preserving our new rights. The same must happen here.
But without serious investment in open protocols and public infrastructure, alternatives will remain niche and difficult to use. If we don’t make a bold, collective effort across all parts of society, Big Tech’s grip will only tighten, leading to what AI pioneer Gregory Hinton calls the “fertile ground for fascism.”
We’ve fought centralized power before. Societies have overthrown theocratic rule by creating entirely new pluralistic systems, such as democracy in the United States. Now, we must challenge technofascism by building our own.
The only real choice is for us to go all in—building, using, and investing in decentralized technology before centralized control becomes even harder to undo.
Tricia Wang is a tech consultant and the Senior Advisor at DAIS (Decentralized AI Society), a member-driven organization advancing an open AI economy. The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
