I feel like those of us in the technology sector have a obligation to assist in the counter balance to the police state that is rapidly building up. After all the executives of our companies have clearly chosen their side (Musk, Thiel, Ellison, Cook, Zuckerberg).
One idea is creating a site to track incidents, collect testimony, video evidence of events as they happen. If we can't be physically there to confront them at least we can share evidence and put it in front of as many eyeballs as we can. It wouldn't be a pleasant project, being a sin eater has its own costs. It would at least be something though.
Does anyone else have projects or ideas that can be contributed to?
I see this as a downstream issue of a greater issue needing to be solved.
Many American's risk homelessness and violence outside of the corporate world. The control over money used for housing and healthcare lies entirely within the hands of corporate intrests driven by these executives.
Until a viable alternative can be discovered for addressing housing and healthcare issues, no reasonable resistance amongst tech workers can be organized.
Many within the tech world, would love to build and produce technology that competes with the corporate interests you described, but lack secure housing or healthcare to do so.
Please note, that this does not require a 'solution' to the problem, but rather an alternative.
Consider joining your local Code For America chapter or contributing to whatever local group handles mutual aid. Civic coding and mutual aid will be vital in the near future.
There are plenty of opportunities but many rely on what are effectively "zero days" (some actually are) that aren't suitable for posting on a public forum.
Rather, go find leftist groups and get vetted to participate with them. You'll find like minded people, including other people working on technical countermeasures.
The groups are messy and sometimes incoherent (leftist infighting is a meme) but as of late they've become much more focused on a being pragmatic so nobody is going to make you quote marx or anything.
Donate to mutual aid organizations that provide legal advice and support. The Trump admin is breaking a ton of laws but they aren't breaking all of them. The legal system is more important now than ever. Making sure that people know what they can do to interfere with ICE is important. Funding legal teams for people detained by ICE is important.
Donate to mutual aid organizations that provide financial support. Somebody who is afraid to go to work because ICE might be there still needs to pay rent. An organization that funnels money to these people protects people.
Agitate for dems that give a shit. The way this ends is if dems win in 2026 and 2028 and actually take steps to punish the people who have committed these crimes and to dismantle the systems that enabled this in the first place. If instead we get the dems doing what Labor is doing and trying to be a just-slightly-less-evil nativist organization then we are fucking doomed. Documentation of these crimes will be important for making the libs unable to just say "well let's all move on" like they did in 2021.
Its pretty clear that ICE is being used as a means of forming an industry similar to that of the Military Industrial complex, but focused on law-enforcement and domestic action.
What alarms me here is that once a certain level of investment and industry is built, it will necessitate a means of self-sustaining itself and will attempt to find this through political investment.
I fully expect a domestic version of the "perpetual foreign wars" concept to appear within my lifetime where we go from one domestic emergency requiring huge policing resources to another, ensuring the industry gets funding.
SA was essentially a militia which functioned manly as the NSDAP's non-governmental terror group. As soon as NSDAP took power, Hitler used the SS to take control of the SA and assume its functions. The transition was bloody, the top commander of the SA was executed by Hitler and its leadership purged or killed, see the Night of the Long Knives.
The SA was never a government entity with any significant functions or budget.
It's actually about white supremacy and turning the US into a Christofascist ethnostate but y'all aren't ready to take that conversation seriously. The militarization of domestic policing and surveillance is just a means to an end.
Most of these people will keep showing up to their cushy jobs at Google and FB while the data they spent decades harvesting is used to oppress their neighbors.
I see the Christofascism as more a flavor of the month than a serious unifying ideology.
Religion has always been a tool used by those in power to gain favorability with people at scale. But history tells us it is easily manipulated and twisted to serve the needs of the powerful. (Crusades, Colonialism, Slavery, Conservatism)
Whatever Christofascism is today, will be boiled down to its fundamental components the moment it no longer serves the powerful so that it can be remade into whatever they need it to be. Think of it more as the rotting of one religion giving way to the fertile ground of new relgion.
> I see the Christofascism as more a flavor of the month than a serious unifying ideology.
I’ve joked occasionally we should just hand the zealots power as they’d quickly go back to just killing each other over theology.
Wouldn’t you know it all the smug religious revival accounts from unemployed zoomers that have recently flooded my social media seem
more interested in attacking different Christian sects. My Facebook has been looking like the 30 years war recently.
It has roots going all the way back to the founding of the country. The core of American culture and of many of its issues has always been the tension between the conflicting desires for a Puritan theocracy with a strict racial hierarchy and a secular progressive Republic.
Slavery was justified by Christian principles, and manifest destiny. Hitler was inspired by America's genocide of native Americans, racial segregation and eugenics (all of which were justified by Christianity.) And after the war, the US carried the torch of Nazism's racist ideas after the rest of the world tried to move beyond it.
Many conservative ideals are backed by Christian belief. They hate feminism because it undermines the tradition Christian ideal of gender hierarchy. They hate homosexuality because they believe the Bible says it's a sin. They hate communists because communism is atheist. And most of all they believe the US was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and should be governed only by Christian principles.
9/11 happens and Bush declares a new "Crusade" against the evildoers. That language wasn't accidental. The connections between the American military industrial complex and Evangelical Christianity run deep.
And now we have Trump, whom a significant number of Americans believe to have literally been sent by God to wage spiritual warfare against demonic forces within the government, citing Christianity explicitly as justification for his militarism.
And it's absolutely not a coincidence that we reached this inflection point and acceleration after electing a Black president. That broke America in ways that I don't think that it can ever recover from. It certainly isn't a flavor of the month. If anything it's the only truly unifying ideology America has ever had.
I think you're correct that religion can be used as a tool by the powerful, but the typical cynical assumption that no one in power actually believes any of it is I think a mistake. Maybe not Trump, I suspect he's too much of a narcissist to believe in anything but himself and is an example of what you're referring to, but I think the people around him whispering in his ear and many of his supporters are true believers.
> They hate communists because communism is atheist.
A few years ago before the election, a friend and I often joked that you could probably sell a sizable portion of American right on something of a “five year plan”
The MAGA communism meme was going around at the time too. Traditional Cold War era “better dead than red” conservatives I knew were suddenly posting about nationalizing companies that weren’t playing ball with Trump.
The other day, I saw an account rambling about “Anglo-Saxon victory over Judeo-Bolshevik Materialism”. I found that a bit odd. I’ve heard the “Judeo-Bolshevik” schtick, and there’s certainly endless negative aspects of communism, but materialism certainly is not one of them.
But your connection with Atheism ties things together in a way that makes sense.
Incredible power, weld somehow by basement dwelling otaku NEETs. Are their claims to possess mystic wizard powers real, or perhaps are you falling for their own aggrandizing propaganda?
For every of those, there are a thousand more Trump voters who don't have anything to do with them. (Also, AFAIK the Proud Boys were started by an ex founder of Vice, and had little if anything to do with 4chan.)
4chan likes to take credit for everything that happens but they don't have any real power.
Trump is just a miserable narcissistic racist (and rapist) consumed with a bitter desire for vengeance against the left, and thus an easily manipulated tool for the people actually setting this up. Anyone with half a brain has been watching the normalization of white nationalism and right-wing extremism escalate and accelerate since 2016 and can see that it isn't entirely about Trump.
This is really the only answer. ICE is a Trojan Horse. It's like "protect the children." It's just a justifiable means to get what they really want which is more control. America is desperately trying to turn into China in more ways than one.
I cannot comment on whether America is becoming a police state or not because i am a greencard holder subject to cancellation of the greencard at any time at the whims of the current administration.
Unfortunately even if you naturalize, they're now floating the concept of denaturalization for people opposed to the regime. It is wise if you are or were a legal immigrant (or have family members who are), to keep your head down.
Everyone is making the comparison to China but when I see comments like this, I think of countries like Russia where street interviews of the average citizen invariably result in answers like "I'm not political" and "I have no opinion"
Suggesting that the most legally vulnerable group be careful isn't wrong, it is the reality for which they find themselves.
66%~ of the US either voted for this, or were indifferent about it, and are a group which cannot be deported/denaturalized. Perhaps that group should step up instead of the <1% who are most at risk from legal administrative threats.
I think it quite telling hearing born-Americans asking green card and naturalized citizens to be their "resistance" for decisions they themselves made. Reads like looking for cannon fodder, who can just be trivially deported/denaturalized while the immune citizenship sits back and points at how bad things are.
The group of people who voted for this needs to stand up against it and I don't see that happening because it requires admitting you were wrong and got conned and people would rather die than do that.
FWIW, I am not American and I don't live in the US. But yes, you are right of course. For some part of this group. But there are also many immigrants who can afford to speak up, because they are not necessarily refugees who would get deported back to a warzone or similar.
In the end though, the targeted and vulnerable group need to stand up for themselves, others won't do it. I know it sucks, but it's the reality unfortunately. And yes, others from more comfortable groups should also make a stand (and some people are), but history shows that not many will.
Oh? Really? Has this madness been happening in the other 23 of the 24 years since its passage? At this scale? Were there a lot of masked men disappearing people in broad daylight?
I'd have figured that if you were looking at historic examples of the US being a police state, the Jim Crow South would have been a better one, or if you were a homosexual, really, any time prior to the 90s.
yes, since uniformed people have gained legal rights to touch my junk in order for me to be allowed to board the plane (not to mention that they took my toothpaste twice) - every year since then. we have lost every ounce of freedom after 9/11 and this “madness” today is nothing new, we just take for granted now what our own “freedoms” have been reduced to
What is with this tendency to downplay the current drastic escalations? It feels like a kind of hipster denialism - "I was complaining about the US being a police state before it was cool" but also if it's this is "nothing new" then there's nothing to really earnest worry about, right?
How hard is it to acknowledge that we have been gradually losing our rights AND that the Trumpist bonfire is a marked departure into something much more rapid?
Surely you can see the difference between a society where occasional flagrant abuses happen but the majority can still speak out about them, versus a society where abuses are routine and anybody who speaks out becomes a target at scale?
Well, I think the point it is even beyond "how many grains of sand is a pile," which seems like a legitimate point to me. If we don't understand how we got here, it's really hard to figure out hat to do, so pretending as if someone flipped a switch in January of 2025 is not helpful.
I say this as a person who has been pepper sprayed by DHS while resisting ICE:
the conditions to led to the current bonfire have a lot to do with centrist folks piling up wood as if could never be lit.
If you ignore how we got here you will be unable to understand where really are.
> If you ignore how we got here you will be unable to understand where really are.
Exactly this is core issue with a lot of people here on HN. The argument goes “oh shit, look what the current 2025 looks like, OMG so bad, we were this amazing bastion of freedom before this and now this administration is doing _____” so shortsighted and un-educated
I'd say someone did flip a switch in 2025 - the rejection of the standard norms of good faith execution of all three branches of government. The government has always been authoritarian. But it had been predominately bureaucratic authoritarianism, while now it's driven by autocratic authoritarianism.
I say this as a libertarian who's right there with you on the "piling up wood".
There are many angles from which to analyze how we got here. Yes, the "centrists" supporting lazy authoritarian laws and agencies because they couldn't bother thinking one step ahead to how they'd be abused. The sprawling surveillance industry pointed out by a sibling comment. Narrower issues of destruction of the fairness doctrine and campaign finance limits. Even many of the refrains of the Trumpists point to problems that were slowly allowed to fester until they reached a breaking point (although as usual for Republicans, the answer they've been stage-managed into is completely self-defeating).
For all of these things it's understandable to want to say "I told you so" - for catharsis, and trying to establish some authority of having a larger context of what direction we need to head in.
But none of that justifies downplaying the situation we're currently staring down, which is what I take issue with.
(also re being pepper sprayed: what's left of your country thanks you for your service)
"But none of that justifies downplaying the situation we're currently staring down, which is what I take issue with."
Maybe we read things differently- I don't see folks who say "this is nothing new, the US has always been ethically questionable" as "downplaying" anything.
As I've written here before, there is a difference between "hey, welcome to the party" (radicalization) and "hey shut up, this is a thing we've always done" (normalization).
I take issue with (and find very frustrating) the idea that somehow things have just now reached a breaking point.
I find that incorrect-to-me idea worrisome on two levels.
First of all, if Clinton or Harris had been elected we'd still be walking down this same road but liberals would be at brunch and telling us that nothing is wrong. But Ferguson and Standing Rock both happened while Obama was in office. And we don't need to run another experiment to see how it would have run under Harris, as she explicitly was moving to the right from Biden.
The flip side of your suspicion that folks in my position are just perversely enjoying some kind of schadenfreude might be that folks who believe this situation to be new and unique is to note that while this violent empire has been violent-empire-ing for far longer than any of us have been alive, the violence hasn't been overtly staged within the spectacle confronting the "middle class" folks until very recently.
The distinction between "bureaucratic authoritarianism" and "autocratic authoritarianism" only matters if you show up the bureaucracy in a legible way, and the fact that this is a distinction you draw places you in a very specific relationship to the power which "it's always been violent" seeks to critique.
Or to say the same thing in a different way, for the same reasons you might point to some perverse enjoyment by hipsters, you might look at your own psyche here:
to admit that the US has always been violent is to admit that you didn't care because it wasn't happening to people about whom you care.
However, that possible reading of your position is -wholly immaterial- to the folks who are pointing out "it's been bad for a long time".
The catharsis you seem to be projecting isn't really there for the people who could see there was a problem before it became visible even to middle class liberals. So an aside, nobody cares that folks ignored the problem until we are where we are, so feel your feelings about your blindness and then get to work, and stop projecting.
Do, however, consider that the lines of thought which lead people to directly and painfully confront power in a physical way can only come from the idea that the power being confronted is not and has not been legitimate.
I only dive into the phrenology of your position because it seems funny to me, but I do think that position is an active and harmful impediment to actually doing anything- if we could just vote our way home, why bother walking?
That is, if it really was okay a while ago, why not just do the blue version of making America great again?
And that leads to a second level at why I find the idea that "things have just gotten worse this year" to be almost dangerous:
the situation can and likely will get more authoritarian.
The reality to me is that these systems have been violent in the past- I live on land next to the Southern Ute folks' reservation, and I have had Navajo roommates, and I can see a former residential school every time I drive to town.
There is no amount of being white or tall or "well-educated" that would save me if the ancestors of the folks who built those things decide I am no longer a "citizen" because "reasons" and burn my corpse so it ascends to some gulag in the sky.
But if these systems haven't been incredibly harmful, abandoning them seems foolish and dumb. Any action to undermine their authority takes on the same character of a "rejection of the standard norms of good faith execution of [the] government".
I wholly understand why anarchists and communists seem stupid and dangerous to the folks who have historically been able to ignore the harms of these systems.
For that reason, though, folks are going to have to give up some of their ideological attachments to those systems if they are going to work against them.
So from my position, actively being unwilling to admit the past harms cause by those systems is a very easy way to prevent oneself from coming to a position where you actually have to do anything material.
Sorry for writing a novel (as an aside I dislike AI because writing things like this is how I think through things and I think the adoption of AI writing says a lot about the willingness of folks to think). But as a person incredibly worried about the very real shift in character of the current political spectacle, I think that "it's new and improved" is a harmful idea that you should reconsider.
There is a lot to chew on here and while I generally appreciate that, you completely missed where I am coming from. I had tried to acknowledge enough in my previous comment that you'd see I wasn't fresh to the larger topic, but I guess that didn't work.
I had never voted for either major party in a national election until 2020, when I consider myself having voted for the conservative option of Biden. In 2016, I completely understood why people voted for Trump - I was the one telling my aghast blue tribe friends that he was speaking to people's longstanding frustrations and had a good chance of winning.
I do constantly examine whether I've reverted to my latent tribe or have become caught in a filter bubble, but I still do not think so. I've always been allergic to groupthink, and the Trumpist groupthink is still overwhelming at this point, whereas the opposition groupthink is much more narrowly-scoped. (and I hate it as well, as it makes for poor opposition)
So back to the main argument -
I don't see folks who say "this is nothing new, the US has always been ethically questionable" as "downplaying" anything.
To me, it often does comes across this way. Note how the comment I initially responded to put "madness" in square quotes, as if we're supposed to believe the concerns are just all in our heads.
It's adjacent to the Trumpist talking point that everything being done isn't any worse than what "the left" already did, which is clearly coming from a place of wanting to downplay. And there is a long pattern of Trumpists abusing appeals to lofty ideals and liberty in general to get people to support the openly fascist agenda [0]. It's not a matter of being "unwilling to admit the past harms", rather it's about bringing them up in the appropriate context - Trumpism revolves around a long litany of real grievances and hypocrisies, but then channels that anger into highly destructive "solutions".
And as far as the caricature of "middle-class liberals" that you were addressing? If people are just now waking up, I do not see this as something to condemn! To me the actual concern is preventing them from falling back asleep (eg that "just vote Democrat" fallacy)
> The distinction between "bureaucratic authoritarianism" and "autocratic authoritarianism" only matters if you show up the bureaucracy in a legible way, and the fact that this is a distinction you draw places you in a very specific relationship to the power which "it's always been violent" seeks to critique.
Care to elaborate on this? My initial reaction is that we should take such legibility as a universal goal, in the sense that we should aim for everyone to have this legibility. We often shit on the idea of bureaucracy, but if it's the best way we've found to neuter autocratic power, then maybe we need to stop taking it for granted? (FWIW me of 15 years ago is screaming at current me for having written that)
[0] actually I just glanced at the poster's comment history and this is exactly what they're doing.
DEA? ATF? The fact that the "Patriot" Act was basically written and ready long before it was put up for a vote?
But of course now I'm on the other side of the argument. The point is that even though it's a long arc, this doesn't invalidate the current urgency. "Slow at first, then all at once"
If you set your metric at targeting and marginalizing racial groups, you undermine your point even harder re "Patriot" Act being the start.
But also, am I supposed to come away with the conclusion that this is all in line with business as usual and there is nothing to worry about as long as I am white?
You are conflating America being racist as hell with the establishment of the surveillance state post-9/11, which was largely focused on Arabs.
America has been a racist cesspool for hundreds of years, but since 2001 it has also become a highly advanced surveillance state that has militarized its own police force.
You may not like it, but this has been developing for 25 years and has just now started to (barely) affect white people.
You've skipped over my two counterexamples of the DEA and the ATF, and their supporting laws criminalizing substances and tools. Those have been around much longer than merely 2001, and had already created some pretty totalitarian spectacles of government attacking the People.
Also driving this conversation towards race reeks of race-to-the-bottom "privilege" politics. Which is why I facetiously asked if your intention is to encourage white people to become less concerned.
Cause what you are doing is sensationalism and exaggeration. “Abuses are routine” - back this up with actual numbers vs. making a crazy blanket statement like that cause you saw 13 clickbait articles in December.
You are 100% right, we have been (not so) gradually losing our rights and Trump et al isn’t really lighting any bonfires, the country has been burning for decades… it is just that the current fires are broadcasted to a wider audience with minute-by-minute play-by-play. and while most people are falling for this shit again (see 2016-2020) the current admin is lining their pockets (which is the one and only goal they have…)
Have the TSA disappeared a lot of people? Flown them out to foreign torture prisons, and thrown away the key? Ignored judicial orders to return them?
(I'm also not entirely sure why they are touching your junk, I've not had that happen in any of my security checkpoint experiences.)
Look, while I'm as happy as the next person to bitch about how awful the TSA is, if they are your best example of the US being a police state... It's not particularly persuasive. Most police states don't limit their capacity for repression to throwing you out of an airport without a refund for your ticket.
Yes. Arresting people for civil infractions (such as overstaying a visa, or even citizens caught in drag nets or protests) and taking them to 3rd party nations for detention is definitely a tactic a totalitarian police state would employ.
Public health is equivocally one of the few places the constitution is defined for (general welfare of the people). This is something they used to teach in civics classes, I wonder when that stopped?
ICE has more funding now as a domestic law-enforcement agency than almost every military on the planet.
If we need to fund the "arrest of illigal immigrants" to such an amount as this, can you please explain to me how other countries, as you mention in your comment, can successfully do this with nowhere near that amount of funding?
It's not just illegal immigrants. They've been arresting and deporting legal ones and even citizens. Deporting to countries they never been to and foreign prisons where they cannot get out.
I would love to hear how is this similar to COVID at all.
Well you see before Covid, Aunt Karen could waltz into the Olive Garden for "wine night" whenever she wanted, and could even threaten to leave a bad review and get half the bill comped (she didn't need the money but it was a nice power trip). During Covid, she had to make a reservation because half the tables were lOcKeD dOwN and when the hostess had the gall to tell her that she needed to wear something to cover her schnauze, the manager took the hostess's side. So you see in many ways it was much more oppressive than being made to tan outside all day at some sunny vacation resort.
So you're totally fine with the police state when it's turned against people you don't like, but you consider it a bad thing when you disagree with its aims. That's a pretty bare display of hypocrisy.
Asking as a foreigner who wants to travel to Cali to visit the Computer History Museum sometimes in the future: What is the plan for ICE? Is it going to get more manpower and $$$ to expand its responsibility?
Half the country violently doesn't want you here, and you should oblige them by taking your money and attention elsewhere. There are plenty of more deserving locations.
Depends on the color of your skin, I guess. Also, border agents have the right to search your phone and have been known to refuse entry to people speaking ill of Trump on socials.
On the face of it, it looks similar to israeli border guards and cops in the West Bank.
Paramilitary, high tech equipment, close to zero accountability. It's not far off that the people they're snatching don't have any legal means to fight it either, similar to how palestinians are held in 'administrative detention' and only have access to extremely corrupt military courts.
I suspect that negotiation is not going to get either states or popular movements very far against this threat.
Technology is a fundamental political right; asymmetry of power in a polity through a monopoly on technology is the goal of any State, which people have a responsibility to deny.
I don't think so. Anarchy is defined as the absence or non-recognition of authority, whereas I do not reject authority, but reason about controls a free market can meaningfully apply on it, namely through decentralization of technology - the means of its power.
I do believe a productive hierarchy of power could naturally emerge if everyone were equally equipped with technology. For example, if all State financial transactions were auditable by anyone (say, via immutable ledger) - would this not lead to favorable outcomes without the necessitating the chaos of anarchy?
They should focus on immigrant CEOs and politicians from South Africa and India who currently enrich themselves and deregulate and enshittify the tech industry.
Every single story this user submits is political hate. Every comment they make is political hate. And yet they're a multi-year power account with over 10,000 karma. What is the justification for allowing such accounts to exist, other than the mods being complicit with it?
Political hate? But this article seems to be coming from the perspective of someone who loves their country and doesn't want it to be taken over by America-hating fascists?
I do like how Illinois has setup a commission to track accountability. https://ilac.illinois.gov/
I feel like those of us in the technology sector have a obligation to assist in the counter balance to the police state that is rapidly building up. After all the executives of our companies have clearly chosen their side (Musk, Thiel, Ellison, Cook, Zuckerberg).
One idea is creating a site to track incidents, collect testimony, video evidence of events as they happen. If we can't be physically there to confront them at least we can share evidence and put it in front of as many eyeballs as we can. It wouldn't be a pleasant project, being a sin eater has its own costs. It would at least be something though.
Does anyone else have projects or ideas that can be contributed to?
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