turnkey tyranny
turnkey tyranny noun: an institutional, legal, and technical infrastructure — particularly mass surveillance, data collection, and centralized state power — that is built up to a point where it is likely to be abused for authoritarian ends, or could be activated by any government so inclined with little additional effort.
Noun
turnkey tyranny (uncountable)
- An institutional, legal, and technical infrastructure — particularly mass surveillance, data collection, and centralized state power — that is built up to a point where it is likely to be abused for authoritarian ends, or could be activated by any government so inclined with little additional effort.
- Civil-liberties advocates warned that the expanding surveillance apparatus had created turnkey tyranny.
- And it will be turnkey tyranny.2016 November 10, Alex Hern, “Worried about the NSA under Trump? Here's how to protect yourself”, in The Guardian
Origin of turnkey tyranny
From turnkey + tyranny.
Questions about turnkey tyranny
- What does turnkey tyranny mean?
- Turnkey tyranny means an institutional, legal, and technical infrastructure — particularly mass surveillance, data collection, and centralized state power — that is built up to a point where it is likely to be abused for authoritarian ends, or could be activated by any government so inclined with little additional effort.
- What part of speech is turnkey tyranny?
- Turnkey tyranny is a noun.
Words near turnkey tyranny in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: turnkey tyranny (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “turnkey tyranny.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/turnkey_tyranny. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.