American Panopticon

Can we stop this Orwellian Nightmare?

I admit I feel a deep yearning to stop writing about the geopolitical and technocratic emergency confronting us. I doubt that my little words have much, if any, effect at this juncture. I could be writing about European avant-garde literature of the 1920s, about the shape of clouds, about fascinating rodents and other small mammals.

It feels painful to keep pointing out what I find painfully obvious, while most people in my social milieux remain detached, distracted, and oblivious. They don’t read the news anymore. Many of them seem to lack knowledge of basic concepts such as “Habeus Corpus.” They barely know why maintaining due process is essential to a law-based social order. They’ve been indoctrinated into cynicism and defeatism.

As the old saying has it: “You cannot wake up people who are pretending to be asleep.” I don’t see people waking up from their pretend coma as of yet.

We’re experiencing an ever-intensifying coup. If we don’t find a way to successfully resist and overcome this authoritarian attack, we will wake up in a few years to find that the United States has become a tightly-controlled totalitarian society, similar to what we see in North Korea, Russia, or Saudi Arabia. I know for most people here this prospect still seems very remote and absurd. But that doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen. Human beings are fragile and malleable. Fear is a strong motivator.

Trump is a public-facing buffoon with a bizarre but effective charismatic hold over tens of millions of cult followers who remain totally mind-controlled by Fox News and QANON conspiracy theories. Behind Trump, there are cadres of very serious and highly motivated extremists — an all-American Taliban — who seek permanent one-party dictatorship in the US. The alliance between the tech oligarchs and the Christian White nationalists is extremely dangerous for the future of liberty and the future of the planet.

Just as the American revolution of 1776 created the model for the modern liberal semi-democratic nation-state, this new NeoReactionary, Libertarian, ethno-nationalist counter-revolution also seeks to establish an enduring model for the future of the world. If it wins and takes root here, the gangster oligarchs will seek to export it everywhere. They are just getting going!

As an aside, we are seeing the correct model for how to defeat authoritarian despotism in the Ukrainian resistance to Putin, including the magnificent counter-attack they just launched against Russian bombers, using $600 drones to obliterate $100 million planes, seriously degrading Russia’s capacity for waging nuclear war. We are also seeing a revival of Gandhi-esque nonviolence tactics with the “freedom flotilla,” where Greta Thunberg, as its public face, seeks to bring humanitarian supplies to Gaza. This takes real courage: When Turkish human rights activists attempted a similar mission in 2014, the Israeli military killed nine of them. Nonviolence, as a technique, is based on the idealistic belief that public perception — public opinion — ultimately represents a meaningful political force. It isn’t clear if this kind of nonviolent strategy is something that can still influence the hard-core regime in Israel — or the one in the U.S., for that matter.

I’ve mentioned before that Trump can be seen as the AI President — he only won in 2016 because of the machine-learning tools used by Cambridge Analytica to assemble massive dossiers on every adult in America and relentlessly target our “inner demons” on Facebook. Trump now seeks an unprecedented expansion of surveillance capabilities, driven by collaborations between government agencies and private tech giants, along with his ongoing efforts to restrict free speech (using Anti-Semitism as test case) and destroy independent media. Central to this project is the merging of Palantir Technologies, co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, and Elon Musk's DOGE initiative. DOGE accomplished a central objective in aggregating our personal data to make it possible for us to be blackmailed or more easily manipulated in the future. According to Wired, Palantir is “becoming an operating system for the entire government.”

According to The Verge article, ‘House Democrats: DOGE is building a ‘master database’ of Americans’ DOGE is currently “constructing a “cross-agency master database” of sensitive personal information… held by SSA, the IRS, HHS, and other agencies.” The article notes:

The privacy implications of this cross-agency database would not only violate numerous privacy laws and cause cybersecurity risks, but could also become a potent weapon for whomever can access said database: it could be used by the government to conduct mass surveillance of whomever they wished to target, such as immigrants, or become a target for outside actors seeking a trove of private and personal data. Either way, “it’s terrifying,” John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told Nextgov, adding that this was exactly what the Privacy Act was supposed to prevent. “Aggregation of data is building a weapon, essentially, and it’s one that can be used in a lot of different ways.”

Trump has pledged $500 billion to the Stargate project, an ambitious AI infrastructure initiative co-led by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle's Larry Ellison. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wants invasive AI surveillance to become an integral part of everyday life in the immediate future. He has stated that AI will soon significantly impact society through an extensive network of interconnected cameras, including security systems, police body cams, and vehicle dash cams.

According to Ellison (a long-time supporter of Trump and a mentor of Musk’s), police officers will be motivated to remain on their “best behavior," as body cams continually transmit live recordings. Similarly, citizens will also be forced to “behave better” at all times, because they will be constantly monitored and recorded. Ironically, the tech oligarchs intend to implement the precise New World Order total control system hated by the MAGA masses.

Once this system is implemented, the U.S. will be similar to China, where people lack privacy, political agency, and personal freedom. At least the Chinese government tries to take decent care of its population. In the U.S., the current regime actively seek to harm the people, making U.S. citizens more vulnerable to financial predation and natural disasters, while removing protections on food, water, and the environment, cutting research on cancer cures and vaccines, reducing social services, and so on.

Joni Evans, the Republican Senator from Iowa, recently said the quiet part out loud.

At a town hall, she told her constituents that they shouldn’t worry about Medicaid cuts because they were all going to die anyway. She then reiterated this in a follow-up video, which she shot in a cemetery. Evans reminded her constituents that while they would all die (and much sooner because of Republican policies), they could find eternal life through Jesus.

MAGA really is an Apocalyptic death cult!

Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel (who loves to talk about the Apocalypse and the Antichrist), has long been involved in data analytics and surveillance, particularly through its contracts with U.S. government agencies. Now Palantir has partnered with DOGE to develop a "master database" that consolidates sensitive information from various federal agencies, including the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Department of Health and Human Services. The database's integration of various data sources — that were carefully kept silo’d by the government until now to prevent abuses of power — could enable near real-time tracking of individuals. Such a system could lead to unwarranted surveillance of U.S. citizens, given the breadth of data being aggregated.

There are some activist organizations working on this issue, including the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.). Here is a 2022 Ted talk from their Executive Director, attorney. Albert Fox Cahn. They focus on local legislation. Other organizations who are making efforts to resist our descent into Orwellian hell include Defending Rights & Dissent, which is building a grassroots nationwide movement to protect the Bill of Rights. You can start a local chapter, if inspired.

If we are going to stop this assault of AI-driven surveillance and behavioral modification/control, we will need to mobilize a large social movement with clarity, resolve, and strategic focus. Public awareness must be raised. Many citizens don't even realize how deeply integrated surveillance has become in everyday life—from police bodycams and facial recognition to mass data scraping by firms like Palantir. We need public workshops, social media campaigns, and investigative journalism are useful tools to unmask these technologies. As difficult as it is to imagine how to accomplish this now, we need to restore informed consent to the U.S. political system, whatever it takes.

Legal resistance is essential. Litigation against unconstitutional surveillance practices has historically acted as a means of fight back against government overreach, from the Church Committee's exposure of COINTELPRO to recent lawsuits against predictive policing algorithms. Today, organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU are filing FOIA requests and initiating suits to halt unauthorized data sharing between agencies and corporate actors. The ACLU states, “Democracy cannot survive the surveillance state.” We need targeted legal challenges against this dystopian control system, which is moving fast.

Laws and policies must enshrine privacy as a fundamental right. Future legislation can mandate independent audits of AI systems, ban real-time facial recognition in public spaces, and prevent the consolidation of our biometric and behavioral data into unaccountable “master databases.” Edward Snowden wrote, “Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” People need to reclaim the moral and imaginative space to question the world being built in their name, with their tax dollars, using their data, which will be weaponized against them.

Ultimately, if people don’t care enough to educate themselves and resist, it will be their own fault they get enslaved. Whoever said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” was correct, and we’ve taken our eyes off the ball.