If you’re in or near Cleveland, Ohio, I’ll be at The Rhizome House for the May Day celebrations on May 1. Skillshares running from 2-8pm. I’ll be presenting about the history of May Day, like at dinner at around 6pm. Newcomers are welcome to the whole day!
Last week I talked about the book Avalon, Rise by Madeline Ffitch, and it’s now being carried for pre-order by my favorite online bookstore Firestorm Books, a cooperative in North Carolina. It’s a book about small town antifascists and it’s been on my mind ever since I finished it. So I added it to my recommended list (which is a referral program. You get 10% off and I get 10%, to be upfront about that).
The Coming Privacy Apocalypse
There’s a privacy apocalypse coming, and the Democrats are just as responsible as the Republicans.
There’s this series of books that you’ve probably never heard me talk about, written by a Catholic anarcho-monarchist who hated Nazis but never really unpacked his own instinctive racism. The Lord of the Rings, by JRR Tolkien. I don’t know if you knew this, but I’m pretty into The Lord of the Rings. (This is a joke, for anyone who doesn’t know me. I reference Tolkien uncomfortably often.)
Tolkien wasn’t a subtle writer. He writes valiant soldiers of light and he writes mindless (and racially coded, to his discredit) villains of darkness. And his villain-of-villains, the archetypical Big Bad from which all 20th century Big Bads are derived, was Sauron.
And Sauron had a cell phone. A crystal ball he could use to call up his best minion, Saruman. There was a whole network of these phones, and Sauron could spy on anyone who had one.
Those crystal balls? Tolkien called them the Palantir.
Maybe the single most influential company that works to expand the surveillance state in the United States, Palantir, named itself after those stones. They named themselves after a tool used by evil by the embodiment of evil and power. You probably know that.
Last year, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, co-authored a book called The Technological Republic. Theorists have referred to it soberly as technofascism, and it’s transparently an effort to pave the way for AI killing machines. Since no one can be fucked to read whole books anymore (and to be fair, I don’t want to read this particular tome), Palantir posted a 22 point summary
It’s something out of Starship Troopers. They propose that Silicon Valley has a duty to the nation and a duty to not just protect Western values, but project them across the world. Individuals have an obligation to serve the state and perform military service. Some cultures are degenerate and less worthy than others. Plurality was a mistake. Leaders should not be held accountable to the public. It goes on and on.
The Republican Party has spent the last ten years restructuring itself from the conservative neoliberal party to the fascist party. Economically, unbridled capitalism has been replaced with nationalism. Geopolitically, soft power has been replaced with hard power (well, really, it’s been replaced with incompetence).
Palantir aims to force Silicon Valley into the same transition, from capitalism and innovation for their own sake (which was already bad) towards “civic duty” and hard power and cultural supremacy (which is worse). The Republicans went fascist, Palantir says, so why can’t the billionaires?
I’ve long been critical of both sides of the political aisle in US politics. For the whole of my life, the two-party system has operated like a ratchet system: the Republicans did evil stuff, then Democrats came to power and didn’t bother rolling those changes back. The easiest example I can point to is Guantanamo Bay. When Bush Jr. opened the torture site and imprisoned men who hadn’t been charged with a crime, it was a blatantly illegal act. Obama campaigned on shutting the place down, but instead he legalized it—as if the problem with the place was that the fact that it was illegal and not the fact that it was a torture prison for men who hadn’t been charged with a crime.
Meanwhile, Democrats seemed to simply refuse to encode abortion rights into federal law, presumably because those rights being under threat was such a powerful fundraising tool.
Democrats and Republicans alike are working to expand the surveillance system and to destroy privacy in the US, and they likely have different motives for doing so. Palantir is open about their desire for technofascism, but the Democrats largely claim to empower the surveillance state for our own protection. Whenever they expand the powers of the state, they never discuss what will happen to those powers the next time the state is run by Republicans. The Democrats often build the weapons that are wielded by the Republicans.
One of Sauron’s distinguishing characteristics was his network of spies and scrying that allowed him to keep tabs on everything happening in Middle Earth, through the all powerful “Eye of Sauron.” This power was so important that his troops used the red “lidless eye” as their symbol.
Most of what I’ve read about the rise of surveillance understandably focuses on programs like the Flock cameras that track people and cars, or how the FBI admits that it buys location data from app manufacturers and thereby circumvents fourth amendment protections. (Ostensibly, a warrant is required for the government to access the location data produced by communication between your phone and nearby cell towers.) ICE is transparently interested in surveilling its opposition, and it’s developing its own smart glasses to turn its agents into cameras.
But there’s more than that. There’s so much more than that.
Democrats are sweeping elections in the US at the moment, because fascism turns out to be blessedly unpopular with the electorate. Red states are edging purple and purple states are edging blue, and the newly empowered Democratic politicians are, seemingly, putting all their attention into ignoring the rise of fascism and instead “protecting the children” by expanding the nanny state and removing the right to privacy.
Politicians love to use wedge issues. It’s like splitting wood. They pick some topic as the tip of the wedge (trans women participating in sports alongside cis women) and hit it with a mallet over and over again so that the rest of the issue is crammed into the wood (if we’re sticking to our metaphor). Soon it’s not just trans women in sports, it’s HRT for children, then gender confirmation for children, then HRT for adults, then gender confirmation for adults. And it won’t stop with trans women. They are interested in clearly legally defining “womanhood” so as to roll back all women’s rights, not just ours.
The state has all sorts of these wedge issues, and the thing is, you might even agree with the tip of some of them. Blue state politicians seem to be in a frenzied rush to spend their newfound political capital on sweeping gun bans. You might be against guns. But the laws they’re considering (and/or passing) offer the police all kinds of new powers. Who do you think enforces gun laws, and who do you think they’re enforced against?
In Minneapolis, politicians are considering (but to be clear, have not passed, or even fully introduced) a gun ban that would require every firearm to be registered and would give the police the right to enter houses for warrantless searches to ascertain that the gun is being stored safely.
I believe in the safe storage of guns. It’s an issue that is personal to me. If you own a gun, you need to control access to that gun and be certain it is never available to those who should not access it.
But this bill proposes warrantless searches. I don’t expect it to pass, and I don’t want to fall into the ragebait habit of fearmongering with unpassed bills, but it’s the kind of thing we should pay attention to.
More broadly, and more immediately affecting people who aren’t gun owners, state after state is working to pass legislation that demands what is not even currently technologically feasible: a requirement that all 3d printers be prevented from printing gun parts or any other contraband.
3d printers don’t know what they’re printing. They are given something called “g-code” (not the Geto Boys song, unfortunately) that is just numbers. G-code tells the printer to move the print head to the following position at the following time. It’s separate software called a “splicer” that takes 3d models and turns them into code. So in order to comply with these laws, 3d printers would need to have some sort of g-code reversal software that, presumably through AI, detects what is being printed and determines if it is allowed or not. It’s like requiring your hammer to figure out what you’re building and refuse to build a barricade.
There’s no wedge issue more… wedgey? than “protecting the children.” And there’s no incoming bipartisan series of legislation that is more terrifying than the age verification systems that are being built. To put it bluntly, the open, anonymous internet will disappear if politicians get their way. It started with porn. People always come for the sex workers first. State after state has passed laws requiring porn websites to age verify their viewers, as if anyone would want to add their ID to a database of people who watch porn.
Right now it’s in our social media. To protect children, the internet apparently needs to know who we are. But it’s not stopping with websites. Lawmakers want age verification to happen at the operating system level, which will make it illegal to produce operating systems that don’t have a method of verifying people’s IDs. The knock-on effects of this are incalculable. Soon enough, the entire internet might refuse to allow noncompliant computers to access it, and the global south (which heavily relies on older equipment) will be even further isolated. Open source coding will become, in many cases, illegal. Political organizing and outreach might become impossible online. The power that a de-anonymized internet hands to billionaires and their pet politicians is simply beyond understanding. Not to mention the fact that operating systems are embedded into all sorts of objects used by all sorts of people… does the cash register need to know who its operator is? Does a library terminal?
None of this privacy invasion will magically keep children safe. Most abuse isn’t caused by strangers in the first place. If you want to protect children, destroy ICE, institute socialized health care, abolish borders, and dismantle the fossil fuel infrastructure that is destroying their future.
At least you can go offline, you might think. But our offline space is increasingly online. Any device you have will be required to know who you are and how old you are. You might literally need to show your ID to own afridge or a watch.
Cars have sensors, cameras, and modems in them that report on your driving habits (and even your sex life, I’m not kidding) to manufacturers, who then sell that data. Increasingly, insurers are pushing “telematic” insurance with your premiums based on the recording of your driving habits. Slam on your brakes too hard when a bicyclist darts into the road and suddenly your premiums go up.
But you aren’t allowed to drive without insurance, and insurance companies are madly in love with telematics and getting far more granular with their data. Home insurance suddenly requires an inspection from an increasing number of insurers. How long until house telematics determine your rates?
And sure, you can buy an older car that doesn’t track your data, but older cars are more expensive to maintain, and gas cars themselves will likely wind up obsolete. (I would absolutely love a “dumb” electric car. I think someone could make billions by making a modern vehicle that doesn’t have a camera pointed at your face that yells at you if you look away from the road.)
Not to mention the fact that your giant TV was so cheap because it collects data about what you watch and sells it.
Lawmakers in New Jersey just passed a law requiring all e-bike riders to carry registration and a license, and for most to carry insurance. These aren’t motorcycles or even mopeds we’re talking about. They’re bicycles. Most of them are capped at 20 miles an hour, and the fastest of them are capped at 28 miles per hour. “Protect the children” by banning them from riding modern bikes, and give those bikes the sort of registration that allows them to be tracked by Flock. I suspect this law has much more to do with social control (and racist policing of Black youth) than it does public safety.
There’s more than this. There’s so much more. Stores are increasingly not bothering to catch shoplifters on the way out the door, but at their houses later—meaning private enterprises are able to weaponize the police, often at people who are targeted by faulty AI systems.
To be honest, I never used to care enough about digital surveillance by this or that megacorporation. Sure, my Instagram ads were creepily well-targeted, but I didn’t mind. But the state has been captured by fascists, and Palantir isn’t alone in trying to move Silicon Valley into lockstep with the new regime. Democrats built the system of surveillance and the Republicans can use it.
For now, there are ways to opt out. To be clear, I haven’t bothered to do so fully. I still use my customer rewards card at the grocery store, even though I know they’re building a profile about me and are aware that I like my tofu extra-firm and am still hooked on almond milk instead of the environmentally correct oat milk.
I’d rather pay a bit more for car insurance than be “rewarded” for my good driving habits, but I don’t refuse to drive cars with modems in them.
You can still buy 3d printers now, and they might be grandfathered in by new laws. They might not be. If age verification at the operating system level hits, there will probably be criminal Linux distributions that refuse to comply. When the internet starts blocking all non-compliant computers, you can join whatever mirror to the internet that is sure to crop up. Maybe we’ll all be using VPNs to access the internet in some safe haven country.
But “opting out” is getting harder and harder. Some digital minimalists have returned to dumb phones only to find out they can’t register for classes without an app for two-factor authentification.
We’re in a unique moment in history, at least in the US. The Democrats are fully aware that they are only popular because of how unpopular Trump is. If we can speak loudly enough about privacy, and stop letting wedge issues (like gun rights, or sex work) divide us from other people who care about privacy, we might be able to tip the scales more than usual. We need to make it clear that privacy is a non-negotiable right.
There’s some movement in that direction. There are some people saying “hey maybe the Feds shouldn’t be able to just buy consumer data to circumvent the process of getting warrants” and that car manufacturers occasionally get told to stop tracking who we fuck in the backseat. We need more of that, and we need to be louder.
It fell out of vogue on the Left to defend free speech, because of right wing trolls who claimed the issue as their own, but we need to defend free speech and not let the right wing claim it as their issue. We need to stop empowering the state to build new methods by which they can control us.
There are people who’ve been working in this field for decades. The best group I know that works on privacy issues is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Wow, you called it on “wedge issues “. The cynical use of our “welfare state” to barely keep people alive and desperate so they can always tank their chain at election-time is enraging!
blehhhh