Resistance Is Not Futile

Sounding the Alert on DOGE's "data colonialism"

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I often yearn to stop trying to raise awareness about the U.S. political situation. At times, it seems futile and masochistic. The situation is both frustrating and tragic. We are sliding toward autocracy, or kakistocracy (government by the worst people in a society, such as Stephen Miller, whose background is explored here). We are not even four months into this nightmare, with no end in sight. In that short time period, Trump and his family have increased their personal wealth by over four billion dollars while dismantling programs that kept millions of poor children alive.

Many if not most people I know — friends and acquaintances — have disconnected from what’s happening. This is understandable but unacceptable. I want to be honest about what I am seeing, feeling, and sensing around me. At a certain point, if that is the choice people in this society are making, then they deserve to suffer the consequences of that choice. Unfortunately, they also ruin the lives of many other people by making this choice.

Among younger people in their twenties and thirties, the ones I know seem to have little or no awareness of the meaning of due process or Habeus Corpus. They don’t seem to have much desire to make an effort to learn about these things. They hardly care. As of yet, they aren’t showing up at protests in large numbers. They don’t particularly trust any source of news or information.

Before Trump, they already felt the government was totally corrupt and not on their side. They never thought they were going to be the beneficiaries of social security and so on. Many of them believe the climate and ecological catastrophe will engulf everything long before they get anywhere near retirement age. They have been effectively conditioned into passivity.

Considering the general ambience of cynical defeat and dissociation — which I totally understand — it is an uphill struggle to get people involved in political struggle, activism, and protest. It is not a very inspiring pitch to say that mass protest and mass resistance now can stop the situation from becoming unimaginably worse in the immediate future. Due process and Habeus Corpus are not sexy topics. But if we allow the Trump regime to do away with these basic rights that the U.S. Constitution protects, it basically means that anyone — illegal immigrant, legal resident, or U.S. citizen — can be grabbed at any time and taken to a hellish concentration camp for the rest of their lives. I realize it is hard to convince people that mass protests can even have an impact on this military-industrial-Gestapo monstrosity, but, historically, mass protests do slow down or even stop Fascist juggernauts. Even psychopaths can feel embarrassment, shame, or fear public humiliation.

According to political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s comparative study of uprisings from 1900-2006, non-violent movements that draw at least 3.5 percent of the population into the streets “have never failed to bring about change. Non-violent campaigns are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts.” This threshold number is large but not unimaginable: We could reach it here, quickly. In the U.S., this would be twelve million people. Mass mobilizations put pressure on politicians, but they also shake the apathetic out of their stupor and increase the strength and reach of the movement. If cruelty is contagious, so is courage.

Generally, the media focuses myopically on the news, moment by moment, and rarely steps back to offer systemic analysis. Also, establishment organs like The New York Times have a historical tendency to normalize and make excuses (partly because they are infiltrated by intelligence agencies as we learned via Operation Mockingbird decades ago, and partly because of financial interests). As Trump and his people well know, the most horrifying outrages can become banal and uninteresting after a while, unless we continue to insist, every day, on an ethical code of principles that is universal.

Trump and his allies — including the tech oligarchs and Christian extremists — are building an authoritarian political machine rooted in corruption and based on a fundamental disregard for truth or fact when it impedes their quest for power and control. According to The Washington Post back in February:

Candidates for top national security positions in the Trump administration have faced questions that appear designed to determine whether they have embraced the president’s false claims about the outcome of the 2020 election and its aftermath, according to people familiar with cases of such screening.

The questions asked of several current and former officials up for top intelligence agency and law enforcement posts revolved around two events that have become President Donald Trump’s litmus test to distinguish friend from foe: the result of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, according to the people, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

These people said that two individuals, both former officials who were being considered for positions within the intelligence community, were asked to give “yes” or “no” responses to the questions: Was Jan. 6 “an inside job?” And was the 2020 presidential election “stolen?”

These individuals, who did not give the desired straight “yes” answers, were not selected.

Apparently, thousands of people now employed at the top levels of national security have passed this loyalty litmus test to enter the Orwellian dark mirror.

What differentiates the current authoritarian movement in the U.S. — making it very dangerous for our children’s future — is its potential application of cutting-edge technology. This includes surveillance tools and Artificial Intelligence. AI can be used for mass behavior modification, as well as targeting of dissidents and political opponents. I was outraged by “Elon Musk Thought He Could Break History. Instead It Broke Him,” a deeply misguided opinion piece that ran in The New York Times last weekend. The author, political scientist David Nasaw, claims, based on scant evidence:

The partnership between the president and the richest man in the world is coming to an end. There is one clear loser in the breakup of this affair, and it is Elon Musk.

He fell from grace as effortlessly as he rose. Like a dime-store Icarus, he took too many chances, never understood the risks and flew too close to the sun. Wrapped in the halo of his social-media superstardom, he was blinded to the reality of his circumstances until it was too late.

The much more crucial, realistic point was made by Julia Angwin, also in The Times, a few weeks ago. In ‘This Is What We Were Always Scared of’: DOGE Is Building a Surveillance State’, she writes:

Elon Musk may be stepping back from running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, but his legacy there is already secured. DOGE is assembling a sprawling domestic surveillance system for the Trump administration — the likes of which we have never seen in the United States.

If Musk has left his public role as co-president, this is not because he was defeated. It is because he got what he wanted. Left unchallenged, DOGE is going to be very bad for all of us who do not subscribe to the tenets of this lawless regime or who value our relative freedom. Musk calculated this government data would be worth far more than the tens of billions of dollars in Tesla stock value he has forfeited by openly embracing despotism and alienating his liberal “green” consumer base. As Techpolicy journalists Nick Couldry and Ulises A Mejias write in “Data Colonialism Comes Home To The US: Resistance Must Too” (I am going to quote at length because it is so essential):

Elon Musk’s radical intervention in the US government through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been called an “AI coup,” a “national heist,” and a “power grab.” Various experts are concerned that it is unconstitutional. But beyond its legal ramifications, the parts of it that involve getting access to government data fit well within the playbook of what we call data colonialism.

It is only through the lens of colonialism that we can understand what is happening— not just as the actions of a broligarch and his cadre of young DOGE hackers, but as a data grab—the largest appropriation of public data by a private individual in the history of a modern state. Elon Musk may have zero experience in government, but he has proven adept at weaponizing a data-extracting platform, and he seems to be applying the lessons he learned at X to seize sensitive federal data, assume control of government payment systems, and even gain access to classified intelligence.

This phenomenon can no longer be explained through the rubric of ‘surveillance capitalism’ since the point is not merely to make money by tracking what users do. The point of DOGE appears to be to put all the data that exists about US citizens in the hands of private corporations and government employees operating outside the law. In neoliberalism, citizens become consumers; in data colonialism, citizens become subjects. If the difference is not apparent, think of how government data, down to their DNA, is used to control the Uyghur population in China. In this version of colonialism, what’s being appropriated is not land but human life through access to data.

Once we view recent events in the US through a colonial lens, the disregard for legality is also unsurprising. Historical colonialism’s doctrine of terra nullius was designed precisely to rewrite the law of new ‘colonies’ simply by the act of seizing the land, with the excuse that no one smart was using it. Strip aside the faux democratic narrative, and that’s Musk’s playbook, too. As Musk ally and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale put it to the Washington Post:

“Everyone in the DC laptop class was extremely arrogant. These people don’t realize there are levels of competence and boldness that are far beyond anything in their sphere.”

In other words, only DOGE’s data manipulators are smart enough to deserve to recognize the potential of government data.

The new alliance between Musk and President Donald Trump’s government might seem shocking, seen from the perspective of recent liberal capitalism. But it makes absolute sense within colonial history where lawless individuals and corporations (from the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in Mexico to the British East India Company) worked in ever-closer alliances with states to produce a mature colonialism that combined corporate and sovereign power.

What do Couldry and Mejas propose as the only useful antidote? Effective resistance will require “something like a popular revolt across many countries,” including the U.S. “Ultimately, the businesses from which the broligarchs profit are global. The new US administration poses risks for countless nations in relation to data platforms, AI, and many other areas. That’s why a long-term global historical perspective is needed.” But this perspective remains in short supply.