Fascist Smart Meters and Other Tricky Controls

The Hidden Tools of Modern Repression

Jul 07, 2025

“Smart meters are just one example. When combined with financial blacklists, social credit systems, and AI surveillance, they form a web of control that is almost impossible to escape.”

In the 21st century, the tools of tyranny have evolved. Where once power was maintained through brute force, today it is increasingly preserved through technology, data, and the silent coercion of infrastructure. The rise of smart meters, digital ID systems, and algorithmic surveillance represent a new kind of authoritarianism, one that cloaks itself in efficiency and innovation while tightening its grip on individual autonomy. Beneath the surface of convenience lies a quiet, creeping threat to freedom. This essay explores how technologies designed for public benefit can be weaponized under fascist regimes, turning everyday systems into mechanisms of control.

The Allure and Danger of Smart Meters

Smart meters are electronic devices that record energy usage in real time and transmit this data back to utility providers. On the surface, they promise improved energy efficiency, more accurate billing, and quicker service restoration. However, their real power lies in their ability to control. With the flick of a switch, utility companies, or government agencies working with them, can disconnect a household's electricity without ever stepping foot on the property.

In democratic societies, this feature might be regulated and rarely used. But in authoritarian contexts, it becomes a potent tool for punishment. Imagine a dissident, activist, or journalist being cut off from power just before a deadline. Consider entire neighborhoods going dark because they are deemed politically problematic. The infrastructure already exists. All it takes is the will to misuse it.

There are no documented cases of fascist states using smart meters to target individuals, yet. But that is not a reason for complacency. Once these systems are installed, the temptation to use them as tools of suppression grows, especially when other forms of control begin to erode.

Energy Blackmail and Strategic Deprivation

Even before smart meters, energy has long been used as a weapon. States like Russia have cut off gas supplies to neighboring countries as a geopolitical tool. Domestically, governments can and have restricted electricity or gas to populations they seek to discipline.

In Ghana during the 2010s, selective blackouts disproportionately affected regions that opposed the ruling party. In China, minority regions often experience "infrastructure failures" just as politically sensitive events unfold. These measures rarely get labeled as repression in the media, but the impact is clear: control behavior by controlling comfort.

Smart meters make this tactic more precise. Instead of cutting power to an entire grid, a government can now target individuals or households. Energy becomes conditional, not a right but a privilege that can be revoked.

Social Credit: Punishment Through Data

Nowhere is the fusion of data and discipline more advanced than in China’s social credit system. While still evolving, it already demonstrates the frightening potential of digital authoritarianism. Citizens with low scores may be denied access to fast trains, flights, or even basic financial services. Your ability to move, work, or live with dignity depends on your digital reputation.

Social credit systems aggregate vast amounts of data: financial behavior, social media posts, even your friends’ activities. Algorithms then determine your worthiness as a citizen. A single critical post, a friend who attends a protest, or a late loan payment can result in tangible punishment.

Under fascism, such systems wouldn’t merely reflect behavior, they would be designed to enforce conformity. The technology is neutral; the application is not. And when that application is handled by authoritarian hands, the result is a population hemmed in not by walls, but by digital fences.

Banking and Economic Repression

Controlling people through their wallets has always been effective. Modern regimes are refining this tactic with precision. Freezing bank accounts, blocking access to credit, or blacklisting individuals from employment are now easy to implement.

With most banking digitalized, dissenters can find themselves locked out of financial life instantly. Their crime? Attending a protest. Liking the wrong post. Donating to an unapproved charity. This has already happened in democracies. In Canada, accounts of protesters involved in the trucker convoy were frozen under emergency powers. One doesn’t have to agree with the convoy’s cause to see the precedent: financial punishment for political behavior.

In fascist regimes, where opposition is criminalized by default, these tools become routine. Cashless societies, digital wallets, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) are efficient, but they centralize control in ways that terrify anyone who values autonomy. Once all transactions are traceable, they are also stoppable.

Legal Persecution and Bureaucratic Harassment

Fascism doesn’t always need guns. Sometimes, forms, fines, and court summonses work just as well. Authoritarian states are known to weaponize their legal systems to wear down dissenters. From endless audits to sudden zoning violations, from tax charges to revoked licenses, the bureaucracy becomes the bludgeon.

This is particularly insidious because it appears lawful. The process is cloaked in rules, even if those rules are selectively enforced. When a government wants to silence someone, it often doesn’t imprison them directly. It drowns them in paperwork, fees, and legal jeopardy until they give up.

Technology now assists this persecution. AI flagging systems, predictive policing, and data matching can be used not to improve services, but to identify and punish non-conformists with chilling accuracy.

Psychological and Social Pressure

Not all control is overt. Authoritarian states understand the value of shame and isolation. Digital tools enable not just surveillance, but social scoring, public naming and shaming, and community reporting. In some Chinese cities, the names and ID numbers of jaywalkers are displayed on large screens. Similar tactics can and are used to humiliate political critics.

The goal is not just to punish the individual but to make them a cautionary tale. If speaking out means losing your job, your apartment, or your children’s school placement, most people will stay silent.

The more embedded these controls become in everyday systems, the less they resemble oppression and the more they look like life. That is the point. Fascism is no longer jackboots in the street, it is lost privileges, blocked access, and a slowly closing vise of bureaucratic normalcy.

Infrastructure as Ideological Enforcer

From smart grids to urban planning, even city design can enforce ideological obedience. In some countries, protest permits are rarely granted unless in remote, controlled zones. Cameras line every corner. Public transportation may be shut down during planned demonstrations.

Smart city infrastructure, which is often pitched as progressive and green, can double as a map of compliance. If every lamp post has a camera and every street has a facial recognition scanner, protest becomes a declaration of identity, not just belief. Under fascism, that’s enough to ruin a life.

These tools are not inherently evil. What makes them dangerous is the lack of transparency, oversight, and consent. When accountability is absent, power is always abused.

The Silence of Convenience

Perhaps the greatest danger is how quietly these systems take root. Smart meters, digital wallets, biometric IDs, they are sold to the public as upgrades. Who wouldn’t want faster service, easier payments, or safer streets? But efficiency is not the same as justice. Speed is not the same as fairness.

By the time people notice what has been lost, it is often too late. The infrastructure of repression becomes indistinguishable from the infrastructure of daily life. The tools used to manage society become the chains that hold it down.

What Can Be Done?

The answer is not to reject technology but to demand democratic control over it. This means:

Strong privacy laws that prevent governments or corporations from misusing data.
Open-source software for public infrastructure to ensure accountability.
Robust oversight bodies with real power to intervene when abuses occur.
Citizen control over disconnection systems, especially for essential utilities.
Financial alternatives that allow people to exist outside centralized digital control.

Public education is essential. People must understand not just how these technologies work, but how they can be misused. Silence and ignorance are the fuel of authoritarianism.

We must also refuse to normalize the creeping erosion of rights. A disconnected smart meter here, a blocked bank card there, these are not isolated glitches. They are signals. Every citizen should be asking: Who holds the off switch?

Conclusion

Fascism in the digital age looks different. It doesn’t always announce itself with uniforms and salutes. It seeps in through updates, apps, and dashboards. The future of repression is not overt brutality but systemic exclusion, controlled by algorithms and justified by policy.

Smart meters are just one example. When combined with financial blacklists, social credit systems, and AI surveillance, they form a web of control that is almost impossible to escape. The more interconnected our infrastructure becomes, the more vital it is that democratic values keep pace.

We are not powerless. But we must not be passive. Every technology is a fork in the road: one path leads to convenience and empowerment, the other to silent obedience. The choice, as always, is ours to make, while we still can.

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