Next Comes What

Companies and agencies are spying on everyone they can.
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 Our episode this week gathers a series of recent surveillance scandals, in which everything from public cameras to your AI agent and even your television may be monitoring you. To put the current snooping in context, Andrea Pitzer looks at the history of mass political surveillance. In the Nazi era, Heinrich Himmler dreamed of having five men to track every individual suspect. East Germany hired or co-opted more than one in seven citizens to spy. And the U.S. has its own history on this front, with a massive surveillance operation put into place during the civil rights era, with the goal of targeting Black Activists, Native Americans, and feminists. 
In the modern era, Andrea notes that governments often have willing partners in tech companies, using tools that far surpass twentieth-century capabilities. Corporations are typically more interested in collecting data to increase their bottom line, while governments want surveillance to secure power and target public opposition. But in the end, companies are prone to collaborating with governments, especially if they can profit from it—even if doing so lets law enforcement take unethical or illegal actions. The problem of tech and AI isn't that they're aware or human (they're not). From China to the US, the real threat is the oligarchs and aspiring dictators who would happily eliminate our freedom for another dollar or an ounce of power.
00:00 Introduction and Recent Tech Surveillance
02:55 The Fallibility of AI and Stolen Discoveries
05:10 Human Contractors and Data Privacy
07:20 Historical Precedents of Authoritarian Surveillance
09:10 The Panopticon and East Germany's Stasi
12:00 COINTELPRO and the Erosion of Privacy Guardrails
14:30 China's High-Tech Xinjiang Surveillance Model
17:30 Historical Parallels of Surveillance
20:00 The Role of Tech Monopolies and AI in Modern Surveillance
22:30 Policy, Resistance, and Actionable Steps Forward

Here's how to take on the global right-wing nostalgia for the glory days of fascism.
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This week's Next Comes What looks at the victory of the authoritarian, reactionary party AfD in last weekend's election in eastern Germany. Andrea Pitzer considers a few of the regional specifics of that election, and considers other universal aspects of the global rise of neo-Nazi and Nazi-adjacent movements. What the twenty-first century models have in common is the open demonization of immigrants. There is no way out of the current political crisis, Andrea suggests, without addressing that demonization head-on.
 
Summarizing a recent Syracuse University study, she explores the ways that various kinds of media function, not only providing misinformation and disinformation, but also setting moral frameworks that make an argument about whether immigrants are seen as fully human. The Syracuse researchers found that fact-checking statements does not automatically adjust the underlying moral narrative the original misinformation was supporting. Andrea argues that defeating the authoritarian threat cannot happen through attempts to moderate a few of the right's most extreme tactics. A long-term solution requires friends of democracy to directly address perverse frameworks and messaging by offering not only substantially different policies but also a narrative that directly counters the one that fascists have been selling.
00:00 Introduction: The Arc of Right-Wing Sabotage and Fascist Ideology
03:15 The Role of Anti-Immigrant Paranoia in Modern Right-Wing Politics
06:40 Case Study: The Rise of the AfD in Germany and MAGA Parallels
10:15 Deliberate Propaganda: How Disinformation is Created and Spread
14:35 Incidental Propaganda: The Media's Role in Amplifying Far-Right Narratives
19:10 Moral Disadvantage and Partisan Media Exposure (The Syracuse Study)
23:55 Economic Anxiety, Tariffs, and Industrial Decline in the US and Europe
28:20 Historical Parallels: Nostalgia for Fascism and the Concentration Camp Tendency
33:10 The Global Wave of Apocalyptic Fever and Tech Oligarchs
37:45 A Long-Term Framework and Strategy to Defend Democracy

The data center revolt and the pushback against detention camps have something in common. The public is realizing it has power.
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This week, "Next Comes What" considers how the oligarchs driving the AI boom and the president of the United States are all driven by a desire not just for wealth but for unlimited power that gives them control over humanity itself. Andrea Pitzer looks at Donald Trump's attempt to use the entire apparatus of the federal government to make reality whatever he says it is, with disastrous consequences for the country and the world. The CEOs pushing the AI boom portray themselves as the saviors of humanity, but in reality are inflicting tremendous damage by steamrolling communities and workers with new tools of technology that cannot deliver on the disingenuous promises being made by the tech titans. Meanwhile, both the president and the CEOs are warping the global economy.
 
Yet what they demand is not inevitable. Just as with the local--and occasionally even bipartisan--pushback on ICE's attempt to convert existing warehouses into concentration camps nationwide, the data center revolution is now facing resistance from unhappy Americans across the political spectrum. Andrea looks at what it means when people wake up to the power that they have, considers the risks of any big social reaction, and explains why it's important for the anti-data center movement to become bigger than simple backlash. Before the current momentum can get diverted to benefit those who seek only more exclusion and control, supporters of self-governance need to harness this revolt and build a coalition that embraces democratic values, linking the health and stability of local communities to a bigger concept of what kind of country we ought to be.

00:00 - The Illusion of Power and Real-World Harm
03:45 - Manufactured Reality: Renaming Lake Ontario to Erasing Public Health Data
07:12 - Billionaire Philanthropy, Tech Oligarchs, and the Drive for Absolute Control
11:05 - The Reactionary Playbook: How CEOs and Politicians Conflated Cultural Grievances
14:50 - Gil Duran on The Nerd Reich, The Sovereign Individual, and Tech Governance
18:30 - The Grassroots Anti-Data Center Movement: A Cross-Partisan Populist Revolt
22:15 - Risks of Unchecked Resistance: Avoiding Scapegoating and Isolationism
26:00 - Corporate Encroachment, Public Resistance, and the Fight for Democratic Accountability

As elections loom, resist the calls to throw away your moral compass.
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With so many pundits calling for meeting Republicans and independent voters where they're at before the midterms, this week's "Next Comes What" considers what that means. Andrea Pitzer discusses how the days in which fringe candidates could be dismissed as irrelevant are long gone. The fringe extremists are running the country now. Andrea looks at the ways that Trump and his advisers are vile actors committing heinous acts, and notes that it's impossible to compromise on the very issue of every person's right to exist without being terrorized by the government and their neighbors. There's no way to compromise on these issues without doing harm to vulnerable people and our political system itself.
 
Walking listeners through a different approach, she suggests finding a political stance based on values, and then trying to bring other people toward that by addressing needs that they themselves can understand—and emphasizing the policies they, too, will benefit from. The good news, Andrea suggests, is that Trump's agenda is deeply unpopular, and becoming more so. The challenge before us is to offer a better vision of what government, and we ourselves, can be.
 
00:00 - Midterm Elections and the Threats to Democracy
02:15 - Natalie Harp and Donald Trump's Inner Circle
05:40 - The Rise of Extremist Rhetoric in US Politics
08:20 - Misinformation, Bad Advisors, and Political Control
12:10 - Anti-DEI Backlash and Structural Discrimination
15:35 - Global Impacts: USAID Cuts and Foreign Military Actions
19:50 - The Evolution of the War on Terror and Extrajudicial Power
24:15 - Historical Compromises and the Erosion of Democratic Values
27:30 - The Risks of Unchecked AI and Corporate Influence
30:10 - Why Moral Politics Matter: Staying Grounded Against Extremism

To help keep concentration camps from becoming a permanent feature, figure out who's in the torturers' club and who sells the barbed wire.
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This week's episode looks at what it means to be in the middle stages of a concentration camp regime—which is where the United States is at now. Andrea Pitzer discusses how the shift from performative incidents of violence and terror at the beginning gives way to a more institutionalized and methodical approach, one in which the bureaucracy of the police state becomes more entrenched and self-sustaining. This explains the transition from theatrical street actions, like those of Gregory Bovino, former face of the Border Patrol, to the lower-profile, more methodical approach of (relatively) new DHS head Markwayne Mullin.
 
To consider how this quieter entrenchment and creation of a self-sustaining concentration camp machine unfolds, Andrea looks at who makes the physical means of detention and harm, and how the ideas on how to harm are spread. She focuses on two historical examples--that of Oliver Brothers of Pittsburgh, the company that made barbed wire for the first concentration camps in Cuba, and the evolution of the tactic of la parrilla—"the grill"—a form of electrical torture used under dictatorship in Chile a half-century ago. She then turns to modern appliances that aid in atrocities: electroshock gloves, ankle monitors, and omnipresent surveillance cameras. She notes a new airline contract supporting ICE deportations—possibly involving running detention facilities as well. The episode ends with a look at ways to stall, block, and shut down the torturers' club and the businesses that profit from the deliberate infliction of human misery.
 
00:00 - How Concentration Camp Regimes Actually Form
02:18 - The 1890s U.S. Tech Supply Line Behind Reconcentración
05:14 - The Evolution of Extrajudicial Torture Tactics
07:15 - How Police State Systems Move from Malice to Institutionalization
10:13 - Inside the Modern Private Detention & ICE Expansion
12:12 - High-Tech Surveillance: Flock Cameras & Electric Shock Gear
14:55 - How Local Resistance is Shutting Down Detention Sites
17:42 - Grassroots Tactics: Organizing, Protests, & Documenting Abuse
21:30 - Ending Human Rights Violations at the Local Level