Techno-authoritarianism

When people try to diminish the damage of the current regime by referring to other difficult periods in US history, which were successfully overcome, I keep pointing out the one factor that is dramatically different (and in my view) almost insurmountable: the complete control of data by a new agency with vast reach and minimal oversight: DOGE ( or Muskrat’s band of merry tech bros). And in today’s world, those who control data, control the world: no need for tanks and armies.

Since its formation, DOGE has gained access to sensitive data from the Treasury Department, Social Security Administration, and Health and Human Services. Reports indicate that Musk’s own AI tools, including the chatbot Grok, are being used to monitor federal employees, flag communications for ideological disloyalty, and determine who to “eliminate”, as in terminate, under the guise of rooting out waste and fraud. Almost a 100 National Park Service employees (?!) have been subjected to lie detectors…

Journalist Cadwalladr (who exposed the Cambridge Analytica illicit harvesting of data from FB users) sums it up this way: “ DOGE’s actions parallel the Cambridge Analytica playbook, but on a federal scale. This is data harvesting with institutional teeth. It’s not just profiling individuals for ads, it’s making decisions that affect citizenship status, employment, and due process. “Politics is technology now,” she says. “Culture is AI now.” In this world, truth collapses under the weight of personalization and scale. Algorithms replace editors. Billionaires replace legislators. And corporate data replaces democratic consent. Meta and DOGE are not opposites, they are counterparts. One profits from the commodification of human attention; the other seeks to instrumentalize that data for political control.“

And so, here we are: if it can happen here, it can happen in any society where technology plays a major role…