Musk's spying machine will suck us all in

The damage Elon Musk has done to the brand that built his reputation is so undeniable that he and Tesla’s chairman are being forced to deny a very real-feeling report that the company was looking for a new CEO. As a result of Musk’s mother stalking, the reporters who gave us the scoop have had to lock their X accounts.

But verily, I tell you, the damage Elon Musk has done to all Americans' freedom, health, and prosperity has just begun to be calculated. I had it at $475 billion last week, and Marcy Wheeler busted out her adding machine and found a trillion dollars.

Beyond the destruction of America’s prosperity and the horrific damage done by spreading HIV and Malaria around the globe, Musk is also building a spying machine using the data he’s looted from the American public. 

Taken to its obvious extreme, this massive surveillance operation infused with clumsy “AI” can turn the United States into a sci-fi prison camp without building any new physical fences. Worst of all, it can feed “the concentration camp tendency”—the cruel, potentially genocidal sickness at the heart of Donald Trump’s vision for dominating us all.

What is the “concentration camp tendency?"

In the latest episode of NEXT COMES WHAT, Andrea Pitzer crafts a thesis statement to sum up what her work writing a global history of concentration camps has taught her about the urge of wannabe dictators like Trump:

Call it the concentration camp tendency—the desire to exclude those deemed undesirable from society and carry on as if they didn’t exist. It’s the necklace threading together all the policies that are currently choking the country to death. And taking off one or two beads isn’t going to save us.

And she lucidly adds the warning that underlies the entire mission of NEXT COMES WHAT, at least to me:

Many of the problems with this are obvious—this approach destroys any humane political system, it beggars the country involved, it builds a police state. But I want to mention the most dangerous aspect: this impulse has no bottom. It doesn’t stop until it is stopped. It literally tends to kill more and more people and widen the net as it goes.

I insist you check out the entire episode. It’s just Andrea delivering her latest newsletter post, and it’s as essential to me as anything Thomas Paine wrote in the run-up to the Revolution.

And without it, you will not be able to summon the proper amount of revulsion for what Elon Musk wants to do to our data and our country.

Worse than anything Snowden claimed

Have you heard? The US Postal Service is now in the fascism business.

Jacob Bogage and Hannah Natanson of The Washington Post report:

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service, a little-known police and investigative force for the mail agency, recently joined a Department of Homeland Security task force geared toward finding, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisals.

Immigration officials are seeking photographs of the outside of envelopes and packages — an Inspection Service program known as “mail covers” — and access to the postal investigation agency’s broad surveillance systems, including Postal Service online account data, package- and mail-tracking information, credit card data and financial material and IP addresses, the people said.

And this is the beginning of how Donald Trump and Elon Musk are re-engineering our free (for some and less free for others) society, notes Julia Angwin:

President Trump could soon have the tools to satisfy his many grievances by swiftly locating compromising information about his political opponents or anyone who simply annoys him. The administration has already declared that it plans to comb through tax records to find the addresses of immigrants it is investigating — a plan so morally and legally challenged it prompted several top I.R.S. officials to quit in protest. Some federal workers have also been told that DOGE is using A.I. to sift through their communications to identify people who harbor anti-Musk or -Trump sentiment (and presumably punish or fire them).

This “American Panopticon,” as The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel call it, could give the Trump regime extraordinary power to blackmail opponents and restrict opposition IN ADVANCE:

If the government could stop protests or dissent from happening in the first place by carrying out occasional crackdowns and arrests using available data, it could create a chilling effect. But even worse than a mirror of this particular flavor of authoritarianism is the possibility that it might never even need to be well built or accurate. These systems do not need to work properly to cause harm. Poorly combined data or hasty analysis by AI systems could upend the lives of people the government didn’t even mean to target.

The Fourth Amendment still exists

You could call the 4th Amendment the cleanup batter of the Bill of Rights.

It’s the one that makes all the other rights possible. It reads:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. 

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects” has never been more threatened.

The delicate balance of governments maintaining some but not too much ability to monitor our digital lives has already been tilted too far in favor of corporations that use our data to serve us up as fodder for the algorithms of Cloud Capital, which leftist economist Yanis Varoufakis warns has remarkable powers to modify our behavior.

But while corporations know too much about us, our government knows everything. It can reach into every aspect of our lives, apparently, even our bank accounts. 

Merging Cloud Capital with the “concentration camp tendency” would the government the power to carry out “exclusion” with an efficiency only the Nazis would admire.

The bargain we make with our government in exchange for it's monopoly on power is that it will use the power to protect us. The Trumpian version of that bargain builds on “Wilhoit’s Law.”

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

The Trump/Musk deal is: Give us your power, your devotion, and your hatreds yearning to breathe unchecked, and in return, we will destroy your enemies. 

Today, those enemies are trans people, immigrants who aren’t white South Africans, and anyone who owns a media corporation with a news department that doesn’t succumb to the regime’s propaganda. Tomorrow, it could be members of his regime who turn on him or don’t serve his tendencies fast enough. It will eventually be you if you intend to live as a free human. Count on it.

Universities and law firms are lining up to get off the enemies list and on the list of those who will be punked forever. They understand that the presidency's powers are enormous even without a digital Panopticon operating outside any oversight.

Their fear of what’s next is relatable.

An unprecedented hostile takeover

“This is an unprecedented hostile takeover,” The Nerd Reich’s Gil Durán told the New York Times:

With Elon Musk as their avatar, they openly dismantle the government and disregard the Constitution. They pose an existential threat to American democracy, and they see this as their moment to seize power. Many of the tech billionaires who have merged with Trump believe democracy is an outdated software system that must be replaced. They want a future in which tech elites, armed with all-powerful A.I. systems, are the primary governing force of the planet.

You could argue that the deal the tech fascists have made with Trump is to incorporate his “concentration camp tendency.”

Instead, I’d say that this is where they have the most common ground—the idea that people are disposable or superfluous is at the heart of what Hannah Arendt called “radical evil.” It unites the leader who sees people as simple vessels to dominate and tech titans who see us all as data to be fed into the machines and spat out as profit.

The threat is to our humanity

What has made Musk, DOGE, and the Nerd Reich so effective is that they think about what’s next without being bound by notions of reality or constitutionality. 

We haven’t even begun to come up with sufficient opposition to this threat to our reality. We just know that diminishing Trump’s power in any way diminishes theirs, at least for now.

But just as we need a new vision for fair trade that explains why Trump’s tyranny by trade war is wrong, the left needs to become the true champions of privacy, the Fourth Amendment, and our freedom to exist beyond the algorithm.

I’m not saying this is easy. I’m just saying we have no other choice.