Fascism is back. And Big Tech is its willing enabler. Both statements are hardly controversial. Both statements are also deeper related than widely accepted. This post explains how (digital) capitalism and the rising far-right in the US as well as in Germany are related. It will dive into the role of bureaucracy as an anti-fascist instrument. I will argue that public regulatory authorities are part of this necessary bureaucracy. They can play a vital part in fighting what is called “tech fascism”. This article will elaborate this using the example of Germany, where the recently elected government has decided to centralize the data protection supervision at the state level with a new focus on enabling the German data economy.
Digital capitalism and tech fascism
In order to understand the role of bureaucracy within resistance against far-right projects, it is helpful to recall the intimate link between capitalism and facism. Historically, there is compelling evidence of a clear connection between the fundamental ideologies of both. So much so that German philosopher Max Horkheimer – at the eve of World War 2 – felt compelled to demand that those who are not willing to talk about capitalism should stay quiet when it comes to fascism. Rightfully so: At the core of free-market economic liberalism lies the belief that the material inequality produced by capitalism is the result of a fair system and failing individuals. Far-right ideologies find nourishing soil in this ideology because they can build on existing class inequality and supercharge it with racial and gender-based justifications. In fascism, these ideologies reach their peak. The Israeli historian Ishay Landa explains this in his book “The Apprentice’s Sorcerer – Liberal Tradition and Fascism“. He meticulously shows how the ideas of free-market capitalism of the early 1900s found their full socio-darwinistic realisation in 1930s Nazi Germany.
Today, not much has changed. Both the German fascist party AfD and German liberals are affectionately referring to Ludwig v. Mises, an Austrian/US-American economist, who spoke in favor of fascism in the late 1920s. He welcomed it as a political movement that rescued the free-market economy from rising socialist demands of the population. Nowhere is this alliance between free-market economists, right-wing libertarianism and outright fascism more obvious than in the recently elected US government. Under the Trump regime, Big Tech has taken a front row seat among the supporters. They profited from legislative and administrative changes in the US regulatory landscape. Among many: Dismantling the US Environmental Protection Agency in order to give corporations access to cheap (and dirty) energy.
American tech corporations in return aligned with the ideological program of the US government by rolling back their diversity programs, adjusting their platform content moderation and providing the digital infrastructure for its mass deportation agenda. This alignment between the American regime and tech capital is not merely pragmatic, but is founded in long standing ideological ties between the cyberlibertarianism of Silicon Valley and right-wing libertarian politics. In the final chapter of “Cyberlibertarianism“, the late David Golumbia explores how “cyberlibertarianism has been one of the primary forces helping to shift global politics to the right”.
Bureaucracy vs authoritarian efficiency
Right-wing and fascist projects are authoritarian, often revolving around ideas of unified control over a nation under a single party and leader. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s, they unified all administrative and governmental powers at the federal level, turning it into the most efficient state-run killing machine history has seen to date. Until the fascist takeover, Germany’s government system had been more decentralised: Administrative power was divided between mostly self-governing states and a federal government. One of the learnings of the horrors of the Nazi regime was to revert Germany’s government system back to a more decentralised federal state and reestablish the states as relevant governmental bodies. Bureaucracy was not seen as a nuisance. It was the result of a deliberate structural decision in order to make future authoritarian takeovers less likely. Deliberation and checks and balances were prioritised over swift and centralised decisions. Understood this way, bureaucracy is as a much needed monkey wrench in the oppressive machineries of power. It purposely renders (political) systems less efficient: intentional inefficiency as bureaucratic anti-fascism.
Intentional inefficiency is not only a structural defense against authoritarian political systems, but also against economic power. In capitalism, economic power is privatised under the liberal construct of property. Ownership of corporations, land or intellectual property confers the right to do with one’s property as one pleases. Ownership is – in principle – an absolute right. Corporations are not bound by the will of the population. There is no democratic participation in the decision about what goods a manufacturer produces or what business model a company chooses. In a free-market liberal economy there is only one acceptable driving force: competition. Companies produce whatever is most profitable. In neoliberalism, the state is reduced to ensure that the market is not hindered and corporate profits are safe. Regulatory oversight is categorically foreign to neoliberalism and bureaucracy is again a derogatory term that hampers innovation and profits.
Once more, liberal market economies and right-wing political projects are ideologically linked. They are united in their contempt for any administrative systems that stand in the way of unchecked economic or political power. This point is again illustrated by the Trump government aggressively dismantling all administrative structures they view as obstacles for their goals of efficient commercial and political power under the label of DOGE. This development however is not exclusive to the United States. Germany’s new conservative coalition is eager to boost efficiency and the head of Deutsche Telekom, one of Germany’s major telecommunication providers, called for Europe’s own DOGE in early March of 2025.
European data protection supervision as intentional inefficiency
Under the EU Charta of Fundamental Rights and the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) all EU member states are obliged to maintain supervisory authorities that oversee compliance of corporate and public actors. At the European level, all national data protection authorities are represented in the European Data Protection Board. The Board acts as an institution of exchange, discussion and – when necessary – consistency. In cases of disagreement between the national supervisory authorities, the Board adopts binding decisions for all authorities.
A helpful example is the Boards decision regarding data processing of Meta in late 2023. Here the Board adopted a decision stricter than that of the competent Irish data protection authority. The Irish authority in return was forced to enforce this position despite not agreeing with it. This example illustrates the merits of bureaucracy. While the decisions of the Board are known to sometimes take a long time and cause uncertainty for corporations, the positive effects of a decentralized regulatory system are evident as well. This particular decision of the Board was only possible because the Norwegian data protection authority questioned the position of the Irish authority. It is easy to imagine a centralized European oversight system where such a variety of views would not have a similar effect. More so: While it is easy to imagine that a central oversight body might be more efficient and predictable, it is equally imaginable how such a central body would be subject to political instrumentalisation much more easily than the current, decentralised approach. The GDPR is not to be idolized, sure. But in this case, the decentralised bureaucracy of its regulators did manage to render the power of Big Tech less efficient.
Germany and its new centralized regulatory authority
Zooming in on Germany highlights the relevance of decentralised and independent oversight even more. Germany is one of the few EU member states that does not have a single all-competent data protection authority, but 18 (eighteen) regulatory bodies in total: One in every one of the 16 German states (except for Bavaria which for Bavarian reasons has two) and one at the federal level. The state level authorities are competent regarding all state level government institutions and all commercial actors established within the respective states. The federal authority has only limited oversight power. It is competent regarding federal government institutions and some economic sectors like the telecommunication sector and the German railways. This federal oversight structure in Germany is also linked to the aforementioned deliberate decision after the second World War 2 to not unify governmental power at the state level.
Similarly to the European level the German supervisory authorities confere regularly in an institutionalized way (the “data protection conference”). What again sounds like bureaucracy has proven advantageous as well. Milestone cases regarding key questions about the interpretation of the GDPR were only brought before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) as the result of some state authorities independently bringing cases, sometimes against the position of authorities in other German states. Among those cases is the Wirtschaftsakademie case which resulted in the CJEU explaining that corporations who run a site on Facebook are to some degree also responsible for the data protection violations of Meta itself. Issues like the interplay between GDPR and the AI Act, the legality of Microsoft Office 365 or certain paywalls for online content are other examples where the diversity of opinions among the German regulators likely led to much more nuanced and less corporate friendly positions.
German business associations, of course, have long been taking a different position, calling the national oversight structure inefficient and harmful to innovation. Their criticism was not completely unfound. Contrary to the European level, where disagreements could be conciliated by binding decisions of the Board, the German decentralised system lacks such a consistency mechanism. Solutions to this were debated among experts in a public hearing in the German parliament in June of 2024 under the former coalition of social democrats, greens and libertarians. Experts like the head of data protection conference called for a strengthening of the conference. Unfortunately, any chances for improvements were thwarted when the coalition fell apart and early elections were called. The new coalition of conservatives and social democrats agreed on more than just creating a consistency mechanism for the conference. The coalition agreement (lines 2016 to 2019) instead states the following: “In the interests of the economy, we are striving to bundle the responsibilities and competencies of the Federal Data Protection Commissioner”. Germany’s civil society had expressively warned against such a centralisation of power given the rising threat of the German fascist party coming into power. This warning seems even more warranted considering that, according to authorities and experts, Germany is still not complying with the GDPRs requirement to provide a transparent procedure for the appointment of the head of the supervisory authorities.
The new German government has nevertheless decided to choose efficiency over bureaucracy. Based on the short analysis presented here, this development gives cause for concern. Germany and the EU are experiencing their own shift to the political right. Simultaneously the EU is trying to boost its own digital economy and aims for tech sovereignty. The later – as Aline explains – includes proposals that seem dangerously open to being captured by a nationalist agenda. In the midst of all this, Germany’s new government has decided to unify its data protection supervision at the federal level and repurpose it with a focus on economic interests. This situation is obviously still a far cry from the heads of German tech corporations uniting behind a fascist political leadership. The steps taken at the moment certainly are not leading away from such a scenario though. In times where the merits of healthy bureaucratic systems are more evident than ever, streamlining them in the name of efficiency is rendering democratic societies more vulnerable to authoritarian attacks.
Addendum: After publishing, I was made aware of the important distinction between “efficiency” and “effectiveness” and have corrected the wording. Only the permalink still includes “(in)effectiveness” (what is not what the article is about).