The technofascist futures of AI-driven disease surveillance

The digitization of health by biotech firms is sedimenting flows of data for authoritarian rule. In this short commentary I argue for a dialectic approach to understanding how technofascist authoritarianism is being naturalized in the name of combatting disease: I think relationally between the “internal” logics that generate racialized and vulnerable threats, while taking seriously the “external” sociopolitical conditions that make such generations possible. I start from three different sites. First, the map, through which the biotech firm BlueDot Orientalizes disease and sells AI (artificial intelligence)-generated forecasts to cities, airlines, and military alliances. Second, the maternity ward, where Palantir—which has refined its AI systems through Israel's war on Gaza—is collecting patient information to feed new generative AI. And third, the mosquito, whose reproduction Verily (of Alphabet) is arresting via AI to prevent malaria. Drawing lines across these topographies of violence reveals both contradictions and sites for resistance.