Musk finally leaving the government was a big story this past week. A theme of good riddance prevails in what's left of the credible press, naturally -- so outside his Tech Bros and gamer foot soldiers, anyway-- but in various takes there also appears, and I share, a note of incredulousness.
"The implications of DOGE’s actions for Americans are huge. DOGE operatives are now embedded in the U.S. government, where they are mining Americans’ data to create a master database that can sort and find individuals. Former Ohio Democratic Party chair David Pepper called it “a full-scale redirection of the government’s digital nervous system into the hands of an unelected billionaire.”
Letters from an American Historian
Specifically, an unelected billionaire relentlessly disdainful of any government service, all of which he apparently understands as reducible to standing in line at the DMV, condemning all the wasteful deficit spending by the government. But makes no mention of his own massive tax cuts and his own government contracts in the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars. Is he leaving because he's finally being driven out for his callous inhumanity and destructive incompetence,* as he should be, or did he just finish his phase of the campaign, a blitzkrieg (which, more or less, appears to be his celebrated business mode of operations; a Nazi military strategy, "move fast and break things"; known in tech business circles as Blitzscaling), leaving the independent departments of the US government in disarray and so ready to be reorganized by his brother in digital arms, Peter Thiel's Palantir; ready to be reorganized into a fascist surveillance state apparatus?
(I know I'm a crazy paranoid with TDS. I hope you're right.)
"The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said."
NY Times on Trump's Big Database
I've always thought that I was for expanding database links across administrative bureaucracies in our communities and government. Hell, one of my first jobs in Seattle was setting up a paradox database system for an energy assistance program at a local non-profit. My own budding techno-optimism going all the way back to the 1980s. To this day it feels backwards when I encounter a lack of such links in the health care system. It came as a humiliating slap in the face when I finally learned after my sister's death that the missing person's reports my family filed in Oregon and Washington, many years before, were completely inaccessible to missing person searches in any of the other 48 states, including California where she ended up. And I was astounded to learn some years ago that there is not only no national database tracking guns and gun violence but the NRA has consistently and successfully lobbied to thwart any efforts to develop such a database for decades. Moreover, conservatives like to complain about election integrity, without any evidence let's stipulate, and then use their scaremongering to create greater obstacles to voting. Why not establish a national database for all eligible voters? For one reason, of course, because conservatives really don't want to solve the problem but actually suppress the vote. But why not make it easier for all eligible voters to vote in elections? Or so I've always thought. But all these reflections are based on my perhaps naive assumption that we live in a functioning democracy with laws and basic legal protections for individual privacy and human rights. But when the two billionaire technocrats behind the development of these new proposed national databases are, in fact, openly and flagrantly disdainful of democracy and the rule of law and basic human rights, one cannot help but think this big database they are building cannot be good. This whole AI project evokes Skynet more than good governance or a public service; apparently, even many people working for Palantir think so.
*-"Internationally, Musk’s destruction of the United States Agency for International Development, slashing about 80% of its grants, is killing about 103 people an hour, most of them children. The total so far is about 300,000 people, according to Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeller Dr. Brooke Nichols. Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect reported today that about 1,500 babies a day are born HIV-positive because Musk’s cuts stopped their mothers’ medication." -HCR
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