Apologies for inundating your inboxes yesterday. The extra post was sent in error.
A large number of older Americans (I’m one) reached adulthood before what I like to call the “digital age.” Unlike our grandchildren, use of email, texting and instant access to a universe of information was not–and is not–intuitive to us. Most of us have learned to “make do”–we have our smartphones, use our computers, increasingly rely upon google–but I think we can be forgiven for not recognizing how dramatically technology is constantly changing the world we inhabit.
Or the ways that technology can be–and is being– employed to threaten the very foundations of our individual liberties.
Donald Trump doesn’t understand that process–but Elon Musk does. Trump is merely an ignorant and self-engrossed buffoon; Musk comes from that “intuitive” generation, and despite his clear mental and moral defects, does understand the various ways our emerging information environment can be employed–weaponized, to use a phrase popular these days–to amass power at the expense of us “little people.”
I’ve previously posted on the hugely negative effects of Trump’s erasures of factual information from government websites, but that is only one aspect of the threat we face.
In a recent “Letter from an American,” Heather Cox Richardson illuminated that threat. In her closing paragraphs, she described how technology was used to skew the 2016 election.
The story of how Cambridge Analytica used information harvested from about 87 million Facebook users to target political ads in 2016 is well known, but the misuse of data was back in the news earlier this month when Corey G. Johnson and Byard Duncan of ProPublica reported that the gun industry also shared data with Cambridge Analytica to influence the 2016 election.
Johnson and Duncan reported that after a spate of gun violence, including the attempted assassination of then-representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the mass shootings at Fort Hood in Texas, a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, had increased public pressure for commonsense gun safety legislation, the gun industry’s chief lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, worked with gun makers and retailers to collect data on gun owners without their knowledge or consent. That data included names, ages, addresses, income, debts, religious affiliations, and even details like which charities people supported, shopping habits, and “whether they liked the work of the painter Thomas Kinkade and whether the underwear women had purchased was plus size or petite.”
Analysts ran that information through an algorithm that created a psychological profile of an individual to enable precise targeting of potential voters. Ads based on these profiles reached almost 378 million views on social media and sent more than 60 million visitors to the National Shooting Sports Foundation website. When Trump won in 2016, the NSSF took partial credit for the results. Not only was Trump in office, it reported, but also, “thanks in part to our efforts, there is a pro-gun majority in the U.S. House and Senate.”
That was ten years ago–before the “flowering” of AI. As I write this, Musk’s techie nerds are gaining access to the private information of millions of Americans, and anyone who thinks they’re looking for “fraud and waste” is smoking something.
Checks and balances were designed to prevent any one branch of government from wielding unbounded power. They should prevent the Executive Branch from employing the ever-increasing sophistication of digital technology to target/mislead unsuspecting citizens or punish those who are unwilling to bend the knee. But right now, one branch–Congress–has been neutered. Thanks to the nation-wide gerrymandering that the GOP perfected with RedMap in 2010, the House has devolved into a clown show of radicals, ignoramuses, Christian Nationalists and performative egomaniacs. Vote suppression, civic ignorance and digitally-sophisticated targeting have allowed MAGA to gain (slim) control of the Senate.
Thus far, the courts are doing their duty, but there are increasing signs that our would-be monarchs will simply defy them. The so-called “legacy media” warns that such defiance “would be” a constitutional crisis, ignoring the fact that we are already experiencing a constitutional crisis.
As empowering as having a lot of money has been (and still is), possession of information is even more so. Just as computerization allowed gerrymandering to become ever more precise, ever-expanding digital tools can enable those with access to citizens’ information to gain–and keep–unprecedented control over huge segments of the population.
Those of us who are beginning to understand the dimensions of the threat we face need to take to the streets. Peacefully, but in huge numbers.
We aren’t in Kansas anymore.
Sheila; I read your two blogs yesterday as companion pieces, thought they were posted deliberately.
“Or the ways that technology can be–and is being– employed to threaten the very foundations of our individual liberties.”
That forewarning from the 1960s is nearing total takeover of our “individual liberties”; warned of a future of cashless/checkless control over our financial situations with banks in control and our only identification by numbers. “Progress” continues adding to the ever escalating list of electronic gizmos, gadgets, whatchamacallits and things to run all aspects of our lives while the EPA struggles to maintain a high enough level to provide the electric power to run everything while being repealed by Trump and Musk. After ANOTHER power outage here in Indianapolis a few months ago, the local news reported that we do NOT have enough electricity to provide the power necessary to run our no longer “individual liberties”. They are no longer “individual” or “liberties” when we are forced to buy and buy into the demands to use electronic devices to conduct our day-to-day lives.
Currently we are dealing with the total takeover by Trump and Musk with no glimmer of hope of stopping them when they have total support of Congress and the Supreme Court. Trump’s MAGAs have either stuck a pin in the globe or one of the bullets from one of the many mass shooting have punctured the globe and we are now living in the flat earth society of the billionaires.
Before Elon Musk goes to scale with production of robots, we must defeat his initiative that caught us and our government by surprise. He loves being called names that feed his insatiable need for control and power to carry out evil vindictive deconstruction and large scale disruption. He is a brilliant man-child unsupervised in the Oval Office that has turned into a day center for aging elders in intense dire need. donny boy revealed his hand early by a most disrespectful manner in which he dismissed the very top of armed services command. donny boy, a three time draft dodger with support of his lying privileged father, could not gather enough courage to face The General. donny boy has stirred the anger of the entire military command who feel insulted.
Folks, we may not be in Kansas anymore, but just all of sovereign American soil getting ready to gain control of the day center at The White House before Muskrat has a robot to pee on.
What was it in the Wizard of Oz that changed Dorothy’s life? Oh yeah. A tornado.
Tornados are very destructive when they hit things that can be destroyed. Perhaps humanity and our society in particular need a reverse tornado to get us out of the OZ we’re currently in and back to “Kansas” where sanity once prevailed.
I have great hobbies. I can wait.
I have heard people say that the crisis will be when t*ump ignores a direct ruling from the SCOTUS. My concern is that if SCOTUS rules that MAGADOGE is behaving legally, we will truly no longer be a democracy.
We are destroying what made the country great: the image carried in minds around the globe of a noble group of people who could afford to be noble. That image and its reality existed within the minds of what used to be called the “race” of man, the minds of men who saw that nobility could and did enhance human lives worldwide. We represented progress and elevated its possibility globally.
Thinking about other countries that are not noble to us enables us to see what dishonorable countries look like to others.
Becoming noble, out of the ordinary we started as, took us 250 years or approximately 10 generations. It wasn’t easy to achieve, but we are tearing down what we had just accomplished. Why should anyone care?
I do, and we should both morally and economically.
Excellent post, Pete.
Russell Vought and Project 2025 have been working to eliminate democracy in our country for a long time. I wonder if it’s a spin off of ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, of which Indiana Senator Jim Buck is chair emeritus.
I’m afraid way too many Democrats bought into the whole “American exceptionalism” bullshit peddled by Obama. The media has been shining this turd since the ’70s and most likely before as well.
I am the last of the Boomer generation. In high school, we studied keypunch cards; in college, we used Lotus 1-2-3 to create sophisticated financial models that would crash our slow-running computers. At my first professional job in banking, we had to carry these massive “portable phones” with us on client calls. The battery packs were huge. I thought then about my control-freak boss: “He’s using this stupid thing to control us!” It turned out to be true.
A lot has been written about Musk’s genius, but as I follow his posts on X, I see he’s not that smart. However, he knows how to hire smart people, which is what he has done. He also has deep connections to the CIA, as does Peter Thiel.
The CIA is one of the epicenters of the Deep State, so we’ll see what Tulsi Gabbard does to the department. I know the politicians and media attacked her, thinking she would cause lots of damage, but she immediately caved on FISA surveillance. We shall see what actions she takes going forward.
The right-wing attacks on civil employee unions are already beginning by the right-wing media. Musk gave federal employees 48 hours to give him five bullet points of what they accomplished today, meaning last Friday. He’s posting all the negative responses, and his followers are attacking the employees. MAGATs have gone so far down the rabbit hole of propaganda media that they are attacking other working-class citizens.
I said that to say this: I am not worried too much about Musk. His DOGE website is riddled with errors and poorly written code, and amateur sleuths are picking it apart. What worries me is that DOGE is opening backdoors to our federal databases to Peter Thiel and his team at Palantir et al. We’ll have issues if the private sector can control the federal government via our computer systems.
Technology advances are neutral, just like the Internet. Einstein said they should be tools to enhance worker’s productivity, but when used as control and manipulation, there will be issues.
Kash Patel + Dan Bongino = FAFO
The liberals are about to get an anal exam and the shit is gonna fly.
HCR can try and spin it all she wants but no amount of gaslighting will cover what’s going to be exposed!
I don’t believe we have a Department of Information. Our government data is siloed all over the place and is not consolidated like it might be in China. A goal of the Doge Bros is to find fraud and waste. But, I wonder if one of Musk’s goals is to gain unfettered access to government, public and commercial databases in order to develop an AI application capable of analyzing our personal information in novel ways. That would create a powerful weapon to be used for good or ill. Perhaps this line of thinking is far-fetched and stuff of the science fiction realm. In any case, shouldn’t our legislators be all about protecting our individual liberties, privacy and personal information?
Goodness Gail! Does this comment equate with your comment several days ago when you loudly proclaimed your list of programs that were eliminated, saving us untold sums of taxpayer money – actually a very small percentage, most all directed in a manner completely exposing your deep rooted hatred of all things LGBT. Got news flash for you. Us “liberals” ain’t going anywhere. And, the “gaslighting” is coming your side of the fence. Bring us some empirically verified facts and you might be considered more than simple minded comic relief!
We don’t have a democracy anymore because IQ45 doesn’t lead. He orders. He demands. He declares. I just watched a town hall in Idaho where a woman was physically removed from speaking out during this lecture from a republican by goons without police uniforms while she’s screaming take your hands off of me and who the F are you? Who are you men?
If the GOP thinks we’re just going to sit back and fold our arms, they are in for 4 years of misery because I will not shut up, I will not calm down and I will be hoarse from screaming that we’re lost our democracy.
Gail, they aren’t going to find any fraud and abuse except by republicans that can’t keep their hands out of the till. Because that’s all your party has become, social outcasts and authoritarians. We don’t want to follow your lead.
I used to dabble in computing, building my own desktops and understanding the hardware/firmware/software basics, but that quickly ceased to be true as more and more layers and algorithms became powered by microchips containing millions, even billions of transistors (one new chip has 2.6 trillion). I cannot get my head around those numbers, let alone the billions and even trillions of operations the newest chips are capable of. Who knows that the muskrats are doing with the complex systems in our government infrastructure? Anyone? muskrat’s commentary as to how openly transparent everything they are doing is complete BS. Wait a minute: are they the new deep state? The actual one, as the one the magas have railed against didn’t exist. Come on, Congress: do your job!!
Today’s young people aren’t more intuitive than any other generation. They have simply grown up with a smart phone in their hands. They type with their thumbs and they really have no concept of a typewriter. I’m not sure they really understand the toys they use – or perhaps abuse – since it seems they seldom look up from their screens.
Most of them seem to be playing at being wizards or warriors. They don’t deal with the real world any more than necessary. Does that bode well for the future? I have no idea.
I am comforted by the emergence of David Hogg and Maxwell Frost as influential voices for young people. They are both in our lives because of mass shootings. The Democratic Party needs to elevate their voices.
If you sponsored a debate between Marko Elez and David Hogg, my money would be on Hogg. Elez is IMO a DOGE punk, great at tearing down, but incapable of building anything. I’m still waiting to hear or read of one cogent sentence from any DOGE staffer, including Musk.
If enough citizens make angry phone calls to our Representatives and Senators and hound them with frequent angry calls about various issues, they will realize that their gerrymandered reelection may not be as safe as it used to be.
Gil, the only reason that government computing systems is so complex is that most of them are cobbled together one on top of another, with the base being code from the nineties. At VA the system programs were written in a code named M that I used to call Assembler for Dummies. Interfaced with that was code in C++. Interfaced with that would be something newer. I’m fairly certain they never used Java, but I was out of the loop for the later iterations.
I agree Sheila. It’s time to get get loud and keep the pressure on. I don’t know if there is anything in my town where I could show up… my guess is city hall.
Trump has the highest IQ of almost every president ever in office. I know, cuz I seent it on duh interweb. Y’all can’t comprehenday the letters of rich people talk
.
The ballad of Don, musk’rat Love:
This is a story bout a duck named Don-
The simple minded duck Loved to grab them by the cat-
Then one day he was looking for some dude-
But he found a Musk’rat wearing jack’boots-
he says The public trough is where he likes to eat,
He’ll rig the system so they both can cheat.
The first thing you know the duck’s a trillionaire-
The MAGA said move away from there-
Said Mara Lago is the place you are to be-
So we grabbed the nuke football and moved toward the sea-
Nazi that is, fascism, it’s all about me!
The MAGA people LOVE Trump. you won’t move them much.
BUT do believe we can turn them against MUSK.
posting on their sites. This is Musks THIRED country. When he has bled us for
all the money he can get where will he go next.
And details about his messed up personal life. They like the small stuff.
Todd, here’s a more nuanced view of where Obama’s use of American exceptionalism falls: https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/06/18/american-exceptionalism-a-short-history/
Gil,
Peggy is correct about the government’s infrastructure. It’s well beyond dated and has way too many patches. I tried to help our County improve its databases and software systems because the auditor’s system couldn’t communicate with the treasurer’s system. The auditor’s office printed the needed data onto a worksheet and then handed it to the Treasurer’s office, where they would input the new numbers by hand.
It was appalling, and neither party has allowed a populist or any outsider to view their patchwork of a 1990 system. I suspect it is riddled with fraud, corruption, and intentional waste.
When I worked for the FSSA, I was trained on their antiquated system for six months, and it was supposed to be updated within a year of completing the training. It was ridiculous. You had to stop the file you were working on to access another system, and then another. The job was overly complex, but that was 100% due to the ancient software used.
DOGE that SS was sending dead people payments because of the COBOL coding in our systems. COBOL was taught in the ’80s after DOS.
On the one hand, the systems need a significant overhaul, and AI could be used much more extensively to eliminate federal jobs. Still, I am uncomfortable with Musk or DOGE doing it because they have too many conflicts of interest.
I feel the best way to draw attention to these scoundrels is to march. Those capable of attending a rally should do so.
On FB, 50501 Movement – Indiana is having their next one March 4th at the statehouse at noon. Let’s make the news again.
https://www.wishtv.com/news/politics/indiana-statehouse-protests-50501-movement/
When I worked at State Farm, I was given access to the entire database of auto customers. I needed to make a few thousand fixes, but, all changes were logged, as were simple queries (i.e. just looking). If I had so much as looked at my own auto policy, it was grounds for immediate dismissal.
I hope our Democracy gets saved, and if it does, that everyone of those DOGEboys, their master Musk, and everyone else involved gets convicted of whatever laws might apply to improper access to information, security breaches, and anything else that might be applicable. I would also like to see an enormous class-action lawsuit for invading the privacy of every American.
It probably won’t happen, even if Democracy is restored, but I can dream [it beats listening to the news].
On the bright side, this old guy just learned the meme of face-eating leopards (said I’m old).
“I didn’t think the leopard would eat MY face.”
That seems to begin to be hitting home in “Red” America.
This reconciliation bill that they are trying to force through Congress needs to be stopped. We need Republicans and Democrats in Congress to say loud and clear “NO! Not gonna happen!” I see Bernie Sanders out there but where is everyone else!?