Your Data or Your Life

The greatest public theft in history is happening now.

Our social imaginations have failed to keep pace with our technological imaginations. That has left us unguarded against today’s fast-moving, multi-pronged assault on our individual and collective autonomy.

DOGE isn’t just a power play for the levers of government power. It’s also the greatest theft of a public resource in human history. That resource is data: our aggregated data, in the form of research studies, along with some very personal individual information.

In a very real sense, the fight for this data is a fight for the future.

Our Data Belongs to Us

Last year, I wrote a piece for Current Affairs magazine entitled, “The Only Ethical Model for AI is Socialism.” My main argument was, and is, that the “large language models” (LLMs) behind today’s “chatbot” AI are both a public product and a public good. As I wrote then, “LLM AI was created by humans, billions of them, as they used the internet ... a chatbot is a collectivity. Because it’s produced by everyone, it can’t ethically be owned by anyone.”

I’m willing to defend that argument with anyone—socialist, Keynesian, or libertarian. In retrospect, however, I probably failed to fully convey the ruthlessness and brutality of Big Tech’s executives. Maybe I didn’t fully believe it myself. Now, everyone can see it.

Which gets us to the news of the day. The dozens of executive orders, the mass firings, the bizarre flurry of unauthorized memos to workers, the name-calling and intimidation: they’re all important. But the data dimension of this assault has been underemphasized. That must change.

Musk et al. are thinking big—bigger than most of their opponents can imagine.

The Great Theft

In the 20^th century, military juntas seized radio stations whenever their coups began. Today’s data hijackings represent something similar, but with even more draconian implications.

People became rightfully alarmed when “DOGE” apparatchiks, some barely out of their teens, demanded access to federal payment systems. But there’s an even bigger target; information. The federal government’s massive databases have incalculable value. Their data can be used to manipulate public opinion, reshape policy, and accelerate the privatization of public resources. In a real sense, it can be used to reshape reality.

The leaders of DOGE’s tech jugend understand this. They proved that when they shut down more than 8,000 pages from more than a dozen government websites, going well beyond Trump’s anti-DEI directive. They took down over 3,000 pages from the US Census Bureau, for example—mostly data sets and surveys used in debates about government policy. They also deleted nearly 1,000 pages from the CDC on innocent topics like preventing chronic disease, early detection of Alzheimer’s, and guidelines for treating sexually transmitted diseases. Some of these deletions may be the work of overzealous youngsters, but there are too to dismiss as happenstance.

These databases contain collective or amalgamated data—on income, labor status, health, environment, and more. They represent millions of person-hours of research intended to benefit the public, not private entrepreneurs or totalitarian leaders.

Digital Big Brother

The assault on our individual data is equally frightening, if not more so. This data can be used to change our behavior, to target vulnerable groups for exploitation—even for blackmail, if it should come to that.

Take just one resource: health information. The federal government’s health data could be used to profile virtually anyone’s overall health, their past care, their mental state (if treated), and in some cases their sexual or recreational drug preferences. Equally sensitive information can be found at the IRS, the Treasury Department, and throughout government.

This information is also invaluable to Musk and his business associates, providing a competitive advantage that could help them build new monopolies. The highly competitive AI economy runs on data, and the US government is the largest untapped data source in the Western world.

Again, let’s use health as an example. The federal government manages one-third of the US health economy. With that data, a corporation could predict doctor and patient behavior. They could map prescription habits by doctor, doctor specialty, medical facility, and patient. They could project the likelihood of any individual experiencing a costly medical emergency in the next year, which could lead to the return of discriminatory “medical underwriting.”

And that’s just the beginning. With that data, a corporation could name its price with pharmaceutical companies, health insurers, and many other companies. Multiply that by every government database in existence and you can build an information mega-monopoly. Don’t think Musk and his friends haven’t thought about that.

The data currently being hijacked can also be used to automate federal jobs, potentially on a mass scale. AI isn’t likely to do these jobs well, but making government more efficient isn’t the real goal. The goal is to dismantle government and replace it with private contractors wherever possible.

And who will be best positioned to bid on those automated jobs? The corporation that holds this data—our data.

A Fight for Survival

Without access some of these scientific reports, some people will die. Without the government’s medical, economic, and demographic information, many policy debates will be stifled. And this hijacked data can be used to divide us even more: sick vs. healthy, young vs. old, urban vs. rural, White vs. Black ...

The bottom line? Data is power. If the right-wing coup officiants succeed in seizing it, that power could be theirs forever. If we don’t stop them now, we may be unable to stop them later.