Why does America need so much spying? Well, because America has always been imperfectly democratic, from its inception as a enslaving nation where millions of people were denied both the ballot and personhood; and as a patriarchal nation where half of the remaining people were *also* denied the franchise; and as a colonialist nation where an entire culture of people had been subject to genocide, land theft, and systematic oppression. This is an obviously unstable arrangement.

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Whether in chains, on a reservation, or under the thumb of a husband or father, there were plenty of Americans who had no reason to buy into the system, accept its legitimacy, or follow its rules. To keep the system intact, it wasn't enough to terrorize these populations - America's rulers had to know where to inflict terror, which is to say, where order was closest to collapsing.

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Some of America's first spies were private sector union-busters, the Pinkerton agency, who served as a private spy army for bosses who wanted to find the leverage points in the worker uprisings that swept the country. The Pinkerton's pitch was that it was cheaper to pay them to figure out who the most important union leaders were and target them for violence, kidnapping, and killing than it was to give all your workers a raise.

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This is an important aspect of the surveillance project. Spying is part of a broader class of activities called "guard labor" - anything you might pay someone to do that results in fewer guillotines being built on your lawn. Guard labor can be paying someone to build a wall around your estate or neighborhood. It can be paying security guards to patrol the wall. It can be paying for CCTV operators, or drone operators. It can be paying for surveillance, too.

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Guard labor isn't free. The pitch for guard labor is that it is a cheaper way to get social stability than the alternative: building schools and hospitals, paying a living wage, lowering prices, etc. It follows that when you make guard labor cheaper, you can build fewer schools and hospitals, pay lower wages, and raise prices more, and buy more guard labor to counter the destabilizing effect of these policies, and still come out ahead.

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American politics have been growing ever more unstable since the 1970s, when oil crisis gave way to the Reagan revolution and its raft of pro-oligarch, anti-human policies. Since then, we've seen an unbroken trend to wage stagnation and widening inequality. As a new American oligarch class emerged, they gained near-total control over the levers of power.

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In a now-famous 2014 paper, political scientists reviewed 1,779 policy fights and found that the only time these cashed out in a way that reflected popular will is when elites favored them, too. When elites objected to something, it literally didn't matter how popular it was with everyone else, it just didn't happen:

cambridge.org/core/journals/pe…

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Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens | Perspectives on Politics | Cambridge Core

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens - Volume 12 Issue 3

^{Cambridge Core}

It's pretty hard to make the case that the system is legitimate when it *only* does things that rich people want, and *never* does things the vast majority of people want when these conflict with rich peoples' desires. Some of these outcomes are merely disgusting and immoral, like abetting genocide in Gaza.

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But more frequently, the policies elites favor are ones that make the rich richer: climate inaction, blocking Medicare for All, smashing unions, dismantling anti-corruption and campaign finance laws.

I don't think it's a coincidence that America's democracy has become significantly less democratic at the same time that mass surveillance has grown.

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Mass surveillance makes guard labor *much* cheaper, which means that the rich can make their lives better at all of our expense and still afford the amount of guard labor it takes to keep the guillotines at bay.

Cheap guard labor also allows the rich to strike devil's bargains that would otherwise be instantaneously destabilizing.

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For example, the second Trump election required an alliance between the tiny minority of ultra-rich with the much larger minority of virulent racists who were promised the realization of their psychotic fantasy of masked, armed goons snatching brown people off the streets and sending them to offshore slave labor camps.

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That alliance might be a good way to elect a president who'll dismantle anticorruption law and slash taxes, but it won't do you much good if the resulting ethnic cleansing terror provokes a popular uprising. But what if ICE can rely on Predator drones and cell-site simulators to track the identities of everyone who comes out to a protest:

wired.com/story/cbp-predator-d…

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What if ICE can buy off-the-shelf facial recognition tools and use them to identify people who are brave enough to step between snatch-squads and their neighbors?

404media.co/ice-is-using-a-new…

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ICE Is Using a New Facial Recognition App to Identify People, Leaked Emails Show

The new tool, called Mobile Fortify, uses the CBP system which ordinarily takes photos of people when they enter or exit the U.S., according to internal ICE emails viewed by 404 Media. Now ICE is using it in the field.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

Each advance in surveillance tech makes worse forms of oppression, misgovernance and corruption possible, by making it cheaper to counter the destabilizing effect of destroying the lives of the populace, through identifying the bravest, angriest, and most effective opposition figures so they can be targeted for harassment, violence, arrest, or kidnapping.

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America's private sector surveillance industry has always served as a means of identifying and punishing people who fought for a better country. The first credit reporting bureau was the Retail Credit Company, which used a network of spies and paid informants to identify "race mixers," queers, union organizers and leftists so that banks could deny them credit, landlords could deny them housing, and employers could deny them jobs:

jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-re…

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Retail Credit continued to do this until *1975*, when, finally, popular opinion turned against the company, so it changed its name...

...to *Equifax*.

Today, Equifax is joined by a whole industry of elite enforcers who use spying, legal harassments, mercenaries and troll armies to offset the socially destabilizing effects of the wealthy's misrule:

pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/lau…

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But despite centuries of American mass surveillance, America's oligarchs keep finding themselves in the midst of great existential crises. That's because guard labor - even surveillance-supercharged guard labor - is no substitute for policies that make the country better off.

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Oligarchs may want to tend the nation like a shepherd tends its flock, leaving enough lambs around to grow next year's wool. But they're all competing with one another, and they understand that the sheep they spare will like as not end up on a rival's dinner table. Under those circumstances, every oligarch ends up in a race to see who can turn us into lambchops first.

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This is the dictator's dilemma, American style. The rich always overestimate how much social stability their guard labor has bought them, and they're easy mark for any creepy, malodorous troll with a barn full of machine-gun equipped drones:

twitter.com/postoctobrist/stat…

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They accumulate mounting democratic debts, as destabilizing rage builds in the public, erupting in the Civil War, in the summer of 68, in the Battle of Seattle, in the Rodney King uprising, in the George Floyd protests, in Los Angeles rebellion. They think they can spy their way into a country where they have everything and we have nothing, and we *like it* (or at least, never dare complain about it).

They're wrong.

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I'm at the end of my 24-city book tour for my new novel *Picks and Shovels*!

Catch me in #LONDON with RILEY QUINN from #TRASHFUTURE NEXT TUESDAY (July 1):

howtoacademy.com/events/cory-d…

And in #MANCHESTER at Blackwell's Bookshop on July 2:

eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-…

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Cryteria (modified)
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil…

CC BY 3.0
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