Today’s commentary starts with some brief discussion about the WV Legislative session, and a reminder to check out: Improving West Virginia’s Competitiveness: How the Mountain State Matches Up With Our Region Where It Matters Most.
Find more about the “school choice” discussion in West Virginia here, from Amelia Ferrell Knisely at West Virginia Watch: Morrisey pushes school choice; lawmakers face ‘balancing act’ as counties lose public schools.
More on the push to bring AI data centers to West Virginia, from WV Delegate Tristan Leavitt: https://x.com/leavittforwv/status/1889308231492641204
As I’ve written before about how automation destroyed labor in the coal fields: Why Don’t Coal Barons Support Immigration Like They Used To?
I also discuss at some length the issues with fighting for the myth of the “free market” — it’s a bit like inventing a better car by assuming a world without friction or gravity.
And finally, I talked about this book I helped
write: The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy.(And relatedly, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power)
My main point today is that when we wrote that book just four years ago, we were looking at both a ‘public sector Big Brother” and a ‘private sector Big Brother’.
Importantly the Public Sector Big Brother can theoretically be kept in check by virtue of the structure of our democratic republic; but, Private Sector Big Brother is unaccountable to anyone except investors, and can only be kept in check through government guard rails and regulations that protect citizens from unscrupulous would-be Private Sector Big Brother.
And now we are seeing now is what happens when those guard rails aren’t strong enough: Elon Musk has become “Big Bro”, and he is merging government surveillance and information sets with his corporate surveillance and information sets, with the sole motivation of creating more profit for Elon Musk and capturing the market for Elon Musk’s corporations.
Democracy isn’t dying in darkness — it is drowning in profit.
Thank you all as always!
Troy
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