“Big Brother is watching you”
— George Orwell, 1984
2025 is definitely the Orwellian Big Brother home game edition. I had started warning that bad things were coming last year when I realized that OpenAI’s only financially move might be head into surveillance, and started noticing some of the steps they were taking in that direction, like putting Paul Nakasone (former head the NSA) on their board last June, and taking a share in a webcam company last August. Here’s one podcast last fall where I made the case:
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Things have taken a severe turn for the worse, and it’s not just that it was reported last month that OpenAI now trying to launch a social media network, presumably in part towards the end of collecting further private data. Or that Perplexity’s CEO recently just said the quiet part out loud:
Nope, it’s worse.
This morning I woke up to not one but two reports that make clear that the era of Big Brother is about to enter the United States in a massive new ways, and not just via OpenAI but through multiple vectors:
The first was an ominous essay from The Information’s Halley Huang and Catherine Perloff:
and the second from the Washington Post
Chilled by all this, I just reached out to Carissa Veliz, author of the outstanding Privacy is Power for thoughts. She was in haste rushing off to a meeting, but texted me this:
For too long we thought privacy was individual in nature, that it had to do mostly with personal preferences around concealment and exposure. And we let surveillance tech creep in. But we were wrong. Privacy is about the power of the citizenry; it’s a vital pillar of liberal democracy. And moves If towards surveillance are power grabs not coincidentally associated with authoritarian tendencies. To watch surveillance further unfold, with its political implications more obvious by the day, is extremely concerning. Surveillance is not a neutral tool — it’s an instrument of social control.
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But we do have more of a choice than it might first appear. And the right time to make better choices for democracy is now.
I couldn’t agree more. If you are not worried, you are not paying attention. The time to speak up is now. Or forever hold your peace.
Subscribers (both paid and free) only: Tomorrow (Thursday May 8) at noon ET/9am PT I will join Nina Jankowicz, author of How to Lose the Information War, on Substack Live, for a discussion about power, money, misinformation, and AI, with questions both from her and the audience – meaning you, if you care to ask. (If you download the Substack app and enable notifications you will automatically be notified and given something you can click so you can join.)