Privacy is an essential form of freedom. In this techno-fascist era, however, privacy has been commodified into a luxury item afforded by the few.

As an affect of privacy, safety under the panoptic eyes of the state feels precarious at best. Fascism demands hypervisibility in order to document and divide us.

Yet there is a strategy to secure our privacy and therefore find safety in these dire times: foregoing the traditional, liberal feminist politics of visibility and representation and adopting a politics of imperceptibility — what I conceive of as taking deliberate actions to become illegible and untraceable to rapidly merging technological and state powers. In broader terms, this work demands relinquishing equality feminism for a freedom feminism; of abdicating superficial identity politics for a politics that keeps us alive, safe, and connected to each other and our communities despite being encumbered with the omnipresent threats inherent in a techno-fascist society.

For Americans, this poses a particularly difficult challenge, given that, since its founding, the United States has granted rights and liberties based on identity. Th 1787 US Constitution, for example, denied rights to enslaved people but demanded that three-fifths of that population be counted for congressional representation and taxation, to the benefit of Southern states. Indigenous people were denied rights wholesale. Since landowning white men — those considered the “Founding Fathers” — established the nation’s laws on the discrimination of identity, the logical, democratic response has been to employ an identity politics to win the rights and liberties long denied to minoritized populations. It is this politics of equality that has served as the basis for American feminism, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, with the goal of winning suffrage and continuing into the present in the in the form of attaining equal rights and representation, from gender parity in the workplace to gender equality in the home.

The institutional adoption of equality, in the form of rights and laws, has proven how equality is an artifice easily torn asunder. Take voting equality, for instance: The United States enacted two constitutional amendments plus several civil rights laws establishing and protecting the equal right to vote for all citizens. Yet sustained conservative efforts — whether gerrymandering districts, voter and election-worker intimidation tactics, or the incremental gutting of these laws that has culminated with the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais to further weaken the 1965 Voting Rights Act — have chipped away at these rights, rending voting equality impossible.

The Trump regime’s pointed attacks on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives not only demonstrate the shortcomings of identity politics but also how equality itself has proven an invaluable weapon for conservatives. Indeed, the regime’s policy mastermind, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has led the charge against DEI and affirmative action efforts by relying on equality — specifically, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His legal nonprofit, America First Legal, has the mission of dismantling DEI and “restor[ing] true equality under the law.” Recall that, in 2023, the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn affirmative action in college admissions was predicated on the Equal Protection Clause.

Beside the fact that equality feminism is premised on and thus perpetuates the harms of the reductive gender binary, the question for proponents of equality feminism is: What is the visibility, the representation, that you seek in this techno-fascist world?

What kind of recognition do we desire from a government that persecutes and dehumanizes trans people? In an America where our activities and movements are surveilled and digital data is used, for example, to track pregnant people in case they end their pregnancy? Or by ICE to surveil and intimidate entire communities of people? Where the federal government has contracted tech companies like Palantir, Meta, and Open AI to gather data — extracting information from everything from social media profiles to tax information — and monitor its citizens and prosecute anyone suspected of “domestic terrorism,” which, according to a 2025 presidential memo, includes harboring and disseminating “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity [ideologies … and] extremism on migration, race, and gender.”

Conservatives claim to loathe identity politics when the fact is their entire political agenda relies on identity politics to oppress, discriminate against, and criminalize us. What we must do is become imperceptible, relinquish our identity politics for an anti-fascist politics of freedom and justice. To be clear, the goal is not to hide oneself or live inauthentically (the notion that this is even possible is a white supremacist one). Just as freedom is relational and conditional, so, too, is privacy. Rather, the goal is to unsettle known categories and identities to the point where male supremacy no longer has a vested interest in their preservation — because supremacist institutions, whether authoritarian regimes or tech companies, need identities in order to codify oppression and persecution.

And unlike many EU nations, there are no federal efforts to protect the privacy of American citizens from the greedy tentacles of Big Tech. The United States does not have a federal privacy law, nor does it have federal entity to ensure the implementation of data and privacy protections for its citizens. Neither is Americans’ privacy protected by a comprehensive piece of legislation like the EU’s AI Act, set to take effect later this summer.

To begin this mindset shift, imagine ways to subvert male supremacist institutions that do not rely, to invoke Audre Lorde, on the master’s tools to deconstruct the master’s house. For example, community organizer Aida Mariam Davis devised an alternative framework to DEI, called BDJJ: Belonging, Dignity, Joy, and Justice. BDJJ is a vision for any organization “where we all are welcome, valued, and safe,” Davis explained. The protection of one’s dignity is a significant form of privacy. For Davis, “Dignity, rather than diversity, is the foundation for building work environments that acknowledge and value the humanity of each person. It is the cornerstone upon which organizations can create environments based in belonging and justice.”

One pragmatic and effective approach is to boycott and divest from Big Tech. Instead of using products and services from American tech companies that are collaborating with authoritarian regimes, try the secure and encrypted messaging service Signal, or privacy-focused tech alternatives like Proton Mail instead of Gmail. Rethink how you use social media in light of its purpose to profit from your personal data. And, please, stop using “AI,” which is just stolen labor filtered through resource-gobbling and cancer-causing data centers.

We must remember that nothing is free: the real cost of software, social media, and email servers purporting to be “free” is our freedom, our lives reduced to profitable “data.”

Relatedly, consider ways to offline your life, not only to protect your privacy but to reconnect with humanity and the world around you. People are already doing this — luddite clubs are popping up across the United States. As we witnessed in the aftermath of last year’s wildfires in Los Angeles County, mutual Aid networks operate largely offline — and if online, only with fully encrypted tools — and primarily on the local level. People are turning to mutual aid networks for community support: A friend of mine is part of a private network of local parents in Minneapolis who alert each other about which playgrounds are safe (free from ICE patrol and tear gas) for their kids. Another friend in Los Angeles is part of a neighborhood collective in which people exchange services (from pediatric to education, from legal to food-bank) as acts of community care, rather than turning to data-hungry corporations for assistance.

These practices remind us that the personal is political and demonstrate the viability and promise of a politics of imperceptibility.