Time to Tune Out Spyworld

A note on FBI research and the downstream effects of life in a surveillance state

Ryan Lovelace published a piece today, “Exposing the FBI’s Human Experimentation Studies,” that details how an ostensible national police force has invested in bizarre programs like taking saliva samples from twins, or developing “interrogation science” and better facial recognition technology.

As a younger reporter in the early 2000s I was surprised to learn many municipalities still funded political intelligence units descended from the infamous “red squads,” and later was stunned to find ex-con friends of Eric Garner who’d witnessed gruesome dermatological experiments at places like Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania. Wasn’t the era of widespread domestic spying and treating citizens like guinea pigs for goofball dreams of scientific control supposed to be over?

We’ve since learned the worst Hoover-era practices didn’t just come back, they were lapped many times over in the years since 9/11 by a vast new array of legal and illegal security state programs. One obnoxious characteristic of the era has been the way both Republicans and Democrats gobble surveillance contracting concepts, bringing us everything from Marco Rubio’s AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” program to loony truth-squadding ideas like Joe Biden’s ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board. Programs that read like paranoid science fiction when they came out, like the “Total Information Awareness” program developed by DARPA (motto scientia est potentia, or “Knowledge is Power”) seem tame next to current capabilities.

We frogs have been boiling so long, few notice the heat. A major unreported consequence of our acceptance of the fact that both private and public actors analyze our every digital move has been a steady devaluing of privacy. All surveillance states assume the person attempting to retain private thoughts or beliefs must be guilty of something, and since 9/11 both major parties have come to embrace that underlying premise with a vengeance. Donald Trump’s ICE raids devolved into South African or Russian-style pass sweeps, Democrats responded to Covid by hunting the Bill of Rights with a flamethrower, neither party has done a thing to eliminate mass abuse of FISA or National Security Letters, and the private sector increasingly forces public political displays on its employees.

Americans don’t have a ton of experience with “totally aware” society, but I’ve seen where it leads. In the Soviet Union everyone was conscious of being watched all the time, by the old lady sitting on the bench outside your apartment to taxi drivers and phone operators. It was dangerous to be quiet, spurring the organic appearance of a citizen type referred to as a Sovok. The Sovok never stopped talking. If you sat next to one on a plane, your silence would trigger an anxiety attack, and he’d begin scheming ways to penetrate your serenity. As in: “Is that a Coke? Very bad for you. Now kvas is a real beverage, I brought some, you have to try…”

Here a pun came into play: “Soviet” means both “council” and “advice,” so a “nation of Soviets” was a “nation of advice.” The Sovok could not shut up and could not stop giving you advice. At first it annoyed, then you realized constant displays of orthodox stupidity were a rational defense against political surveillance. A nation full of people saying dumb things round the clock is a natural consequence of mass monitoring.

Which brings us to modern America. Every click, post, or right turn now is recorded by surveillance institutions, and we’re drowning in political media that never, ever shuts the fuck up. What we call virtue-signaling, on either the left or the right, is just the same protective yammering I saw as a student. I had a major Soviet flashback during the Super Bowl, when Amazon ran an ad for its “Ring” security cams that featured clip-art humans gushing with happiness to be surrounded by a commercial mass surveillance program:

The more we learn about programs like the ones Ryan outlined today — and we need to learn them — the more we tend to feel overwhelmed, and accept the inevitability of more surveillance. I mention this to make sure Racket readers know we don’t mean to depress you, but rather to add to the list of things you might want to consider not putting up with. We’re becoming a babble-ocracy, as a result of being on phones all day that heighten Sovok-like anxiety while draining our ability to concentrate, read, take walks, and live like normal people.

We’re grownups, we don’t need to be watched like toddlers, and babbling nonstop while worshipping at the safetyism altar isn’t a solution, either. We deserve private lives, and weren’t we better off when we had them?