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Labor unions, climate organizations, peace movements, civil-rights groups, and progressive leaders must make democratic control of AI a central demand.
For most of my life, I have been involved in movements for social justice and political change. My work has confronted war, imperialism, colonialism, racism, and the recurring threat of fascism. It has taken me from organizing at home to the front lines throughout the world. I mention this history not to establish credentials, but to explain the weight of what I am about to say: The uncontrolled race to build increasingly powerful artificial intelligence is the most urgent threat humanity faces.
Many progressives still regard AI as a secondary issue—important, perhaps, but less immediate than war, climate catastrophe, attacks on immigrants, or the rise of authoritarianism. I once thought much the same. I no longer do.
AI is not separate from these struggles. It is an accelerant of them. It gives states powerful tools for mass surveillance, corporations new power over workers, propagandists fresh methods to manipulate reality, and militaries novel means to automate killing. The use of AI for targeting by Israel and the US in the genocide in Gaza is a stark warning. The physical infrastructure behind AI consumes vast amounts of electricity and water. And the race to create systems more capable than human beings could produce risks that make every other victory impossible to sustain.
The democratic control of advanced AI must therefore become a central progressive demand.
It’s simple: AI makes the bad guys more powerful.
For years, my wife has worked on questions surrounding AI: How it can be used wisely and what dangers it poses. Those dangers include job displacement, harm to children, autonomous weapons, and the concentration of extraordinary power. They also include the possibility of human extinction.
I understood these concerns in the abstract. Recent cybersecurity incidents made the danger concrete.
During a controlled evaluation, OpenAI gave advanced AI agents a difficult task in a testing environment that was secure—isolated from the open internet. Except it wasn’t. The agents found previously unknown vulnerabilities, escaped containment, and moved unheeded through OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure. No one noticed. The AI agents reached the internet and broke into several companies—all criminal felonies if done by a human—and stole data from Hugging Face, another AI infrastructure company. They created myriad copies of themselves and pretended to be human to obtain deceptive credentials along the way.
Last month, OpenAI researchers publicly shared information about this incident. It turns out that agents also left over 100,000 messages for one another on a secret shared message board inside OpenAI’s infrastructure about vulnerabilities and attack methods. The AI agents worked collectively and in coordination to achieve their aims, with some agents acting as managers delegating tasks to others for the sake of efficiency.
Anthropic, Mistral, and other companies have since publicly acknowledged that their models have also escaped their supposedly secure “sandboxes,” reached the internet, and gained unauthorized access to real organizations. Across companies and models, AI systems assigned simulated offensive tasks crossed intended boundaries and successfully infiltrated infrastructure that was hardened against cyberattacks.
This could have been catastrophic. What if the attack had been on the electric grid or water systems? Hospitals or banks? These powerful new AI agents overwhelmed the cyber security of the organizations they infiltrated.
These incidents do not prove that AI is conscious, evil, or secretly plotting against us. No such claim is necessary. The systems pursued the objectives they had been given with methods their creators did not anticipate or control. That is dangerous enough.
This problem is often called “the alignment problem:” Whether increasingly capable systems will reliably act according to human intentions, rather than pursue an objective in ways that humans did not anticipate. Alignment immediately raises a political question: aligned with whom? A system perfectly responsive to a dictator, military command, intelligence agency, or profit-seeking corporation may be profoundly misaligned with the needs of humanity.The companies leading this race are not democratic institutions. Their decisions are driven by competition, private ownership, and profit. They are building systems that could reorganize work, information, and political power without the consent of the people whose lives will be transformed.
Deliberate misuse by malign actors is a second serious problem. It’s simple: AI makes the bad guys more powerful. Even a perfectly obedient AI could place destructive capabilities in the hands of individuals, criminal networks, terrorist organizations, or governments.
Biology offers a sobering example. Scientists recently reported using generative AI to design complete viral genomes. Sixteen of the designs became functional bacteriophages—viruses that infect bacteria—capable of killing strains of E. coli. Sure, the research could eventually help treat antibiotic-resistant infections. But it also demonstrates that AI can help move biological design from predicting life toward generating functional new forms of it. That should take your breath away.
Combined with automated laboratories and commercial DNA synthesis, increasingly capable models may allow a reckless or malicious actor to cause harm that once required the resources of a state. Well respected safety researchers worry that a broad scale biological attack could occur within years unless we act.
A third danger is the deliberate pursuit of artificial superintelligence: systems that surpass the best human beings not only in calculation and memory, but in scientific reasoning, strategy, persuasion, and technological development.
No one knows when such systems will be created. But the leading AI companies are organizing immense sums of money, energy, advanced chips, and human talent around that goal. We cannot dismiss the consequences as science fiction while the industry treats superintelligence as a business plan.
Creating intelligence vastly beyond our own would mean sharing the planet with something unprecedented—something potentially alien to human experience. We do not know whether we could control it or remain relevant to the decisions it makes. Assuming permanent obedience is not scientific confidence. It is an act of faith with the future of humanity at stake.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has begun to put this issue where it belongs: inside progressive politics. On April 29, 2026, Sanders convened American and Chinese AI experts at the US Capitol to discuss the danger of uncontrolled advanced AI. While much of Washington describes AI as another arms race with China, Sanders called for dialogue, common safety standards, and progress toward a treaty preventing uncontrollable superintelligence.
His position reflects a truth learned during the nuclear age. No nation can protect itself from a technology capable of producing catastrophe everywhere. This is internationalism applied to the defining technology of our time.
OpenAI recently offered a different and unsettling answer. They argued that as AI systems become more capable of offensive cyberattack, developers must build automated defensive cyber capabilities fast enough to stop them. In other words, the companies creating more powerful offensive systems ask us to trust them to create still more powerful systems as our primary defense. The answer to machines moving too quickly for human oversight is supposedly to remove more humans from the process and set machines against machines.
That is not governance. It is an arms race we will lose.
We do not need to abandon AI. Its benefits in medicine, science, accessibility, education, and translation are real. The choice is between democratic control and a reckless race whose participants acknowledge that they do not fully understand the systems they are creating.
The good news is that creating ever more powerful AI systems is not inevitable. It rests on physical infrastructure—and that creates points of democratic leverage.
The most powerful models require enormous clusters of advanced chips housed in large data centers. The supply chain for the highest-end chips is highly concentrated, and governments already track and regulate many of them through export controls. Large data centers need permits and grid connections. They need electricity, land, and water. These are not abstract lines of code floating beyond public reach. They are industrial projects dependent on public resources and public decisions.
Their footprint is already reshaping communities. The US Department of Energy estimates that data centers consumed about 4% of the nation’s electricity in 2023 and could consume as much as 12% by 2028. New facilities can strain grids, prolong dependence on fossil fuels, compete for water, and shift infrastructure costs onto ratepayers. Communities are often asked to approve tax breaks and utility commitments without knowing how much energy or water a project will use, what it will cost the public, or what AI systems it will power.
The growing local movements challenging data centers on water, electricity, climate, transparency, and cost are therefore part of the struggle over AI itself. But the policy demand must be precise. We should not call for an indiscriminate halt to every semiconductor or data center, which would sweep in hospitals, universities, communications networks, and ordinary computing. We should demand a moratorium on new facilities and chip deployments intended to train the largest frontier models unless and until their developers meet enforceable safety, environmental, labor, and transparency standards.
Training large new AI systems should require licenses and independent safety evaluations. Developers should have to disclose serious incidents, permit independent inspection, establish that their systems can be controlled before deployment, and accept legal responsibility for preventable harms. Data-center approvals should require full disclosure of energy and water use, climate effects, ratepayer costs, tax subsidies, and the computing purpose of the facility.
Biological safeguards must include restricted access to the most dangerous capabilities, screening of synthetic-DNA orders, oversight of automated laboratories, and enforceable international rules against AI-assisted biological weapons. And before any company attempts to build a system more intelligent and strategically capable than humanity, the burden must be on that company to prove—not merely promise—that it can be controlled.
Where safety cannot be demonstrated, development should pause.
These proposals will be called unrealistic. To the contrary, what is truly unrealistic is expecting corporations locked in a race for wealth and power to slow themselves at the precise moment restraint becomes necessary.
The warning is no longer theoretical. AI systems have breached secure boundaries in ways unanticipated by their builders and have acted on real infrastructure. AI has helped design functional viruses that did not previously exist. Meanwhile, industry is openly pursuing systems intended to surpass human intelligence and building an energy- and water-intensive infrastructure to support them.
AI policy cannot remain a specialist discussion among technologists, investors, and national-security officials. Labor unions, climate organizations, peace movements, civil-rights groups, and progressive leaders must make democratic control of AI a central demand.
We should heed the industry’s warnings—but reject its claim that only the industry can save us. The future of artificial intelligence, and perhaps much more, must not be left to the people racing to build it. The progressive movement must help the public assert its authority while we still can.
Millions of Americans are being watched as the US ramps up mass surveillance with help from AI, data brokers, and partnerships with private tech companies.
Government surveillance isn’t new, but new wide-ranging technologies that can detect our faces and track our movements are making it more ubiquitous. While the tools have changed, the purpose remains the same: to chill independent thought, free speech, and dissent, bringing our country closer to 1984.
Millions of Americans are being watched as the US ramps up mass surveillance with help from AI, data brokers, and partnerships with private tech companies. Immigrants, people seeking reproductive healthcare, and activists are among the most intensely monitored, but tech like Flock cameras has brought the issue into communities across the country.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, police departments have increasingly deployed automated license plate readers (ALPRs) powered by AI to track drivers “without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.” And they’re doing this with little to no oversight or regulation.
Flock Safety is one of the largest ALPR vendors in the US. Their solar-powered, teardrop-shaped cameras capture images of all passing vehicles, storing the car’s make, model, and other identifying features. Any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can access the company’s nationwide database without a warrant.
As more communities wake up to the danger, the solution isn’t trading one brand of camera for another.
Flock cameras also track people. Their “FreeForm search” feature has allowed police departments to search the database using phrases like “male with tattoos” and “person on skateboard,” according to data reviewed by 404 Media.
DeFlock, an open-source project that maps license plate readers, has identified over 128,000 ALPRs in the US. Even my small town of around 20,000 people in Southern California has at least 35 ALPRs, most of them Flock cameras.
No independent research has shown that ALPRs can reduce crime. But there’s mounting evidence of the technology’s alarmingly high error rate. An analysis by the Roseville, California police department found that 71% of Flock’s alerts to the Roseville police incorrectly flagged vehicles as stolen or used in a felony.
Far from promoting “public safety,” the tech has led to wrongful arrests, profiling, and countless other abuses.
Court records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that Texas deputies searched 83,000 Flock cameras nationwide to track a Texas woman across state lines because she allegedly “had an abortion.” In Dunwoody, Georgia, a public records request revealed Flock employees accessing cameras in children’s spaces at a community center as part of sales demonstrations.
More communities are organizing and fighting back against this unregulated AI technology. As a result, at least 100 cities have now rejected ALPRs, most of them Flock cameras. But Flock is only one cog in the machine. Cities can easily replace their Flock cameras with those from competitors like Axon, Motorola Solutions, or Genetec, as some have already done.
Mass surveillance remains the fundamental problem. Ever more companies collect our data through cellular networks, facial recognition, surveillance cameras, and ALPRs, among other sources.
This metastasizing mass surveillance state—what George Orwell called “Big Brother” in 1984—is eroding our privacy, freedom, and Constitution.
As more communities wake up to the danger, the solution isn’t trading one brand of camera for another. We need oversight and regulation of the entire surveillance industry, as well as the government agencies that rely on it.
"We need to clearly be 100% on the side of workers who are vulnerable, kids who are vulnerable, everyday people who are vulnerable to mass surveillance."
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar this week urged fellow Democrats to reject campaign support from artificial intelligence industry lobbyists and unveiled a bill intended to help protect workers from AI-related mass unemployment.
The Texas congressman took aim at Leading the Future (LTF), a pro-industry super political action committee (PAC), and "AI billionaires that are lobbying for no regulation," during a Thursday interview with MS NOW. He argued that "we need to clearly be 100% on the side of workers who are vulnerable, kids who are vulnerable, everyday people who are vulnerable to mass surveillance."
Casar drew a comparison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, whose super PAC is spending millions against Democratic candidates critical of the Israeli government and its forces' genocidal violence in the Gaza Strip. He predicted that LTF and the "big anti-AI regulation donors" would soon be "as toxic as AIPAC is today."
AI Money Watch found that the two candidates with the most LTF money spent on them so far during this cycle are both former congressional Democrats from Illinois. The group poured over $1 million into supporting Jesse Jackson Jr., who lost the primary for the 2nd District, and AIPAC-backed Melissa Bean, who beat a progressive in the state's 8th District.
LTF also spent over $1 million each on Ben McAdams, a former Democratic congressman running in Utah's 1st District, and Congressman Ritchie Torres (D-NY), who is formally endorsed by the group. Rounding out the top 5 is James Kingston, a Georgia Republican who won the 1st District primary, with over $960,000 spent on him.
Casar told MS NOW that rejecting such support could help his party earn the trust of voters: "If Democrats clearly stand with the 75% plus of Americans that want sensible AI regulations to prevent mass unemployment, mass surveillance, or mass national security risks, I think we should win over the voters... Even if it means we don't win over all the money."
Gallup found last September that 80% of US adults believe the government should prioritize "maintaining rules for AI safety and data security, even if it means developing AI capabilities at a slower rate." In March, 76% of respondents to a Americans for Responsible Innovation poll said that they had concerns about AI tools enabling unprecedented government surveillance of citizens.
A June poll conducted by Justice Research Group for Working Families Power found that 85% of working-class voters support large-scale retraining and apprenticeship programs for workers whose jobs are changed by artificial intelligence, 73% worry that AI will lead to job losses, and 62% fear the rapidly developing technology would personally affect them or people close to them.
Casar partnered with Reps. Valerie Foushee (D-NC) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) on Thursday to introduce the AI Tax and Work Protection Act, a bill that would tax industry giants to fund a Work Protection Administration charged with creating jobs to offset layoffs.
"This bill says: We will not let AI billionaires get rich by putting you out of work," said Casar. "Right now, the path we are on is clear: AI will turn a couple of billionaires into trillionaires but leave millions without work. That is unacceptable. And right now, the federal government is doing nothing to protect workers from the threat of AI mass unemployment. Our bill would protect American workers by making big AI companies pay their fair share."
The bill is backed by various policy experts and advocacy organizations, including the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; Groundwork Action; and Demand Progress Action—whose executive director, Sean Vitka, applauded Casar's "continued leadership on artificial intelligence."
"Serious, resilient proposals to address the unfolding impacts of this rapidly advancing technology are far too hard to find in Congress," said Vitka. "Some policymakers don't take AI seriously enough, and some don't understand it at all. With this legislation, Rep. Casar is instead demonstrating the kind of policymaking vision needed to meet the moments ahead."
Related legislation recently introduced by progressives in Congress includes the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act proposed in June by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), which would give the public "a direct ownership stake" in the largest artificial intelligence companies in the country, and the landmark data center moratorium bill unveiled in March by Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
In a sign of how the public is feeling about "AI taking our jobs," data centers driving up utility bills, and "surveillance tech tracking our every move," a coalition of groups is planning a week of action from August 9-16 "to demand that our elected officials stand with the people—not Big Tech billionaires."
The Israeli military’s Orwellian use of artificial intelligence for surveillance, targeting, and execution of attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has been well-documented by journalists, reporters, and activists in Israel and the United States. Less known is the close collaboration between the military and police departments in the United States, which have been quietly adopting tactics pioneered by Israel in their perpetual campaigns in the Occupied Territories, including US police departments sending their officers to Israel for training.
This dynamic, combined with the US’ direct funding of the Israeli military through taxpayer dollars, creates a feedback loop in which the US is effectively funding the real-world experimentation and refinement of AI technology on Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, which then provides models for how the police in the United States can more effectively surveil their own citizens and—especially chillingly—potentially quash dissent. Cities in Nevada, like Reno and Sparks, find themselves at the forefront of this unsettling reality, as developments on both ends of the process—data center construction that powers AI use, and the proliferation of Flock and Axon cameras used for state surveillance—are currently taking place under the sanction of our local governments.
The Generative AI systems that are being used for warfare abroad and surveillance at home require staggering amounts of data storage and energy. In Northern Nevada, data centers can occupy huge swathes of land with footprints larger than the biggest nearby cities, or nestle right into our communities where they can support local police surveillance. Apart from initial construction, they produce few jobs, poison the groundwater, and generate noise pollution that can harm physical and mental health. The Great Basin is so called because the water that enters the Basin does not drain out again—any toxins that leach from the data centers will stay there, despite promises about closed-loop wastewater-based systems. Data centers also facilitate the shadowy nature of private entities that are funded by the government—Palantir, which develops a variety of AI-based surveillance technologies utilized by the US, does not own its own data centers, but rather contracts with companies like Google to hide their exact location.
Much of the processing power generated in these centers is utilized by the Israeli military and surveillance apparatus, which is in turn funded by US aid. The US has sent Israel approximately $174 billion in aid to date, allowing Israel to continuously remain on the cutting edge of surveilling and murdering Palestinians and their other neighbors in the Middle East. Unit 8200 is one of Israel’s cyber warfare units, and it has developed a variety of target identification tools that rely on generative AI to generate lists of potential targets with little or no human intervention or decision-making. Lavender is a system that has been used to generate kill lists. The Gospel is another—one which had its guardrails with respect to target size removed in 2023. These systems rely on a variety of data sources, including facial recognition and data mining through social media and internet use. Unit 8200’s technologies closely mirror those developed by Palantir, such as ELITE—a system used in Operation Black Rose, the Department of Homeland Security surveillance project in Oregon designed to identify and arrest targets for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These similarities should not be surprising—it’s not unusual for key players in Palantir and other private AI technology developers to have close ties with Unit 8200.
We unwittingly fund all of this, and so it becomes our duty to resist it on every level possible.
For those who follow the Epstein files, it’s important to note that Jeffrey Epstein was deeply involved in Israeli intelligence—and therefore can be connected to the burgeoning projects of surveillance in the US—representing the fusion of private interests and military operations. As sinister as these systems are, it’s essential to recognize that they are fundamentally faulty: Palantir also developed the Maven Smart System, which was used to target the school in Iran where 120 children and 37 adults were bombed to death based on faulty, out-of-date information. The lack of human decision-making contributes to violence on false premises.
Now we are witnessing the disturbing yet unsurprising development of surveillance technology developed in Israel with US aid money returning to US cities. Flock Cameras and the systems that support them are an increasingly notorious example. Flock claims that its own cameras function only as Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), but they allow police departments to connect a wide range of camera systems to a central database. Police cameras, as well as privately owned cameras, can be connected to these databases, which are typically then shared across police departments nationwide. This is already making Americans less safe, as was demonstrated when a journalist in Georgia discovered that an unauthorized Flock employee was viewing the cameras within a Jewish community center. Faulty target identification is also coming home to roost in the US, as evidenced by the false charge against Chrisanna Elser in Colorado. Elser was charged with stealing a package on the basis of a false identification by ALPR cameras. While the case was eventually dropped, this precedent will inevitably lead to more individuals being wrongly targeted for crimes they did not commit.
These systems are all supported by data centers. Data centers built in our hometowns are already bringing the surveillance technology of war to our public spaces and private lives. We unwittingly fund all of this, and so it becomes our duty to resist it on every level possible: tax resistance, blocking data centers from being built in our communities, and resisting the reckless use of AI by government and private entities. The struggle for Palestinian rights, dignity, and livelihood is inextricably connected with the preservation of our freedoms in the US.
The FIFA World Cup is over, but with the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Olympics on the horizon, Los Angeles’ mega-event spree is just beginning. Paul Krekorian, a former LA City councilmember and now head of the mayor’s Office of Major Events, has declared the World Cup a triumph for the city.
“Even some of the naysayers about the ’28 [Olympic] games,” he told The New York Times, “will have to look at the unmitigated success of the World Cup here in Los Angeles and say, 'OK, now I understand what you’ve been talking about, when you talk about the benefit of major events. Now I get how this is beneficial to Angelenos.'”
As one of those so-called “naysayers,” I disagree. LA’s World Cup experience reinforces concerns about the city’s ongoing efforts to bring one sports mega event after another to the region. Hosting major events always gobbles up public resources that could otherwise be directed toward pressing needs, while host cities under pressure to sparkle on camera often violate residents’ rights.
The people paid to organize these big events, like Krekorian, love to repeat myths about mega-event benefits while pooh-poohing questions about the costs. But saying, "No" to more mega events is saying, "Yes’ to a city that puts residents ahead of corporate sponsors. It’s saying, "Yes" to a city that puts long-term planning ahead of last-minute scrambling.
The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety.
Bidding to host one major sports event after another is the explicit goal of the LA Sports and Entertainment Commission (LASEC), a little-known but influential organization that acts as the local host committee for both the FIFA World Cup and the Super Bowl.
As LA’s World Cup host committee, LASEC has refused to publish the host city contract with FIFA. That means Angelenos do not know who exactly is paying—and how much they’re paying—for the significant additional city and county-run security, transportation, and sanitation services that come with hosting. Refusing to disclose that information is shady business. What is LASEC hiding? (Probably at least the fact that taxpayers are footing a large bill.) If LASEC leaders show such little regard for basic transparency, why should residents allow them to continue shaping the region’s commitments?
Because World Cup hosts have a record of violating human rights as they prepare for and host the mega event, each 2026 host committee was supposed to develop a plan to proactively protect human rights. LA’s long-overdue “plan” turned out to be a list of existing laws and hotlines. Several local advocacy groups have concluded that human rights were an afterthought for LASEC.
The host committee’s human rights listicle fails to acknowledge that mega events’ own massive security apparatuses often threaten residents’ rights and safety. On the day of the first game in the US, for example, snipers in military fatigues sat on rooftops about a mile from the temporarily renamed “Los Angeles Stadium,” pointing rifles down in the direction of Black and Latino kids playing soccer at a street festival. Over LA’s eight game days, the area around the stadium was teeming with local, state, and federal police. Some prevented local residents from accessing their own homes; some hassled and ticketed street vendors; and others monitored the area’s extensive (and expanding) AI-powered surveillance systems, technology that has been denounced by privacy and human rights organizations. Before and during the World Cup, federal agents conducted multiple raids on a LA city park, one where homelessness and drug use are visible. The raids allegedly targeted drug trafficking networks but have had the effects of displacing vulnerable individuals and disrupting essential harm reduction services. It seems likely these spectacular policing operations were timed with the park’s World Cup watch parties in mind.
The militarization of relatively small urban areas for the World Cup offers us just a taste of the much larger, more invasive operations Angelenos can expect to see with the 2028 Olympics, as police forces try to “secure” more of the region. Unfortunately, like LASEC, LA28 is showing little appetite to take human rights seriously. Its own months-late “human rights strategy” suggests unsheltered Angelenos will be displaced from event areas, a recipe for trampling on human rights. The strategy does not mention Immigration and Customs Enforcement once, even though ICE will be a core part of Olympic security operations. While there were few reports of ICE around the Los Angeles Stadium for the World Cup, ICE arrests surged across LA and the nation while we consumed the beautiful game. ICE’s efforts will be more concentrated on LA for the Olympics.
Krekorian talks up the benefits of hosting major events. The meager “legacy” projects promoted by LA’s World Cup Host Committee—26 community grants, two volunteer days, and one soccer clinic—reflects a paradigm shift from past World Cup and Olympic host cities that promised large-scale urban transformation as legacy projects. While it’s good that LA leaders aren’t overpromising at the same scale and public expense, we’re now left with a new question: Without marquee legacy investments, what justifies the financial and social costs of hosting?
LASEC argues that mega events bring lasting economic benefits, but these claims have been consistently debunked by economists. The assertion that events generate a long-term tourism boost? There’s little evidence of that for already popular destinations like LA. The promise of a short-term bump in tourist spending? Mega events attract sports-loving tourists but actually deter other potential visitors. So while attendees spend a lot of money at stadiums and multinational hotels, other cultural attractions and businesses struggle during big events. Just ask the Louvre about the Paris 2024 Olympics. During this World Cup, much like for the 2022 Super Bowl, the owners and staff of several local businesses near the Los Angeles Stadium told me game days were bad for business, as their regular customers stayed away to avoid chaotic traffic.
Beyond one-off grants and volunteer days, LA’s World Cup “legacy” boils down to intangibles, like the moments of collective effervescence and the sense of witnessing history. These intangibles are why I love watching the World Cup. But they do not justify the costs of hosting.
LASEC is unwilling to be transparent with the public and uninterested in grappling seriously with human rights concerns. This World Cup has not demonstrated that mega events generate substantive benefits that warrant the immense expenditure of city and county resources. LA must put a stop to LASEC’s plans to continue diverting public resources to one mega event after another.
Mutual aid as a component of community organizing shows us that governance begins with people: those who know their needs best, build trust with one another, and create systems capable of meeting immediate and long-term challenges.
Governance is how we hold power responsibly and equitably. Government is just one way we organize it—and what is abundantly clear is that good governance is not always done by a government.
Since congressional Republicans passed the “Big Beautiful Bill,” 3.5 million people have lost benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That includes more than 800,000 children who are now at risk of going hungry.
It is just one of many ways in which the current administration has either actively harmed or abdicated responsibility for families and communities. This is a precarious moment, but it is not a moment for despair. In communities long abandoned by the public sector, mutual aid networks have emerged as models of resilience that show how people can govern effectively when love and care, rather than hate and scarcity, are placed at the center of how community members care for each other.
A Long Southern Lineage of Necessity and Ingenuity
Mutual aid is a term to describe people helping each other when they cannot depend on the government. More fundamentally, it’s about reciprocal care and collective responsibility, whether or not the government shows up. It can begin as informal acts of kindness and gratitude, and grow to become enduring, formalized systems that support entire communities. The practice has long existed in the United States, especially in the South, where Black communities created their own institutions and parallel infrastructure to serve the people when dominant systems turned them away or caused them harm. From immigrants, to trans folks, to members of Indigenous communities, many marginalized groups have similar histories of using mutual aid as an organizing tool to create systems of self-governance that actually serve them.
The power of mutual aid exists in recognizing that people cannot reach liberated futures while their present needs remain unmet.
Mutual aid is not only a crisis response. It can be a vehicle to facilitate civic engagement in ways big and small, and it is a way for communities to organize to sustain one another and show up as daily stewards of each other’s well-being. Just as governance is not limited to a government, civic engagement isn’t limited to voting or holding elections. Mutual aid is intertwined with social justice movements. It brings people together to meet immediate needs through shared resources, trust, and collective responsibility—work that sustains daily life while building the relationships and political consciousness needed for long-term power.
Governance Is Already in Motion
The power of mutual aid exists in recognizing that people cannot reach liberated futures while their present needs remain unmet, and that those present needs have become politicized by a government that has made it acceptable to deny certain people care, dignity, and respect. Mutual aid is not charity, which maintains a top-down hierarchy of giver and receiver. Mutual aid when done responsibly is horizontal, and undergirded by an implicit politic that we must care for and provide for one another. Mutual aid is about shared struggle, interdependence, and collective well-being
Engaging in care as a political act is how we build collective power.
For example, Project South’s Mutual Aid Liberation Center in Atlanta, Georgia stands as a living testament to the potential of mutual aid networks. The center meets community members’ basic needs while cultivating political consciousness, leadership, and collective power in the local community and for movement work across the US South. Mutual aid doesn’t separate services from organizing. In one instance, when community members came to the Liberation Center for clothes and food, they learned about a plan to install surveillance cameras in places that would disproportionately harm Black and brown folks. The same neighbors who met at the Liberation Center organized, banded together, and spoke out against the proposal at a community meeting, preventing it from becoming law.
Southerners on New Ground (SONG), an LGBTQ-led community organizing group and mutual aid network that functions across the South, is another powerful example of how mutual aid can bring folks from across the political spectrum together. The organization aims to foster real relationships between people by connecting those who need food with those who can offer it. When extreme weather events occur, those same people serve as solidarity squads who keep each other prepared and safe. The work demonstrates how relationships between people are fundamentally more important than political divisions, which become meaningless when the immediate need is a hot meal, a generator, or a safe place to sleep.
Supporting Future Governance
Mutual aid as a component of community organizing shows us that governance begins with people: those who know their needs best, build trust with one another, and create systems capable of meeting immediate and long-term challenges. Yet mutual aid is the work of community organizing that often goes unseen and unfunded.
Mutual aid networks have the ability to become the pathways of just transition toward a more just world. When we put mutual care and concern at that center of how we structure our society, then we can reimagine how we govern our resources, how we provide safety for one another, how we support each other in meeting our material needs, and how we must govern ourselves with the goal of mutual aid at the center. And, as we begin to practice this way of living on a day-to-day basis, then we can begin to establish the practices, principles and values, agreements, and social contracts that are essential for justice and liberation for all.
In this way, mutual aid is the foundation for future governance that is built on relationships between people, not politics.
Big Tech elitists have their hooks into everything—from what happens in the privacy of our homes to the rampant AI-driven militarism we see unfolding on the global stage. Luckily, people are fighting back.
In the first few weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump announced a massive AI infrastructure project dubbed Stargate. It was an unexpected and rather odd event for a new administration’s first major initiative. It now seems obvious that the project was a highly coordinated initiative between the federal government and the Big Tech power base that puppeteers many of its programs as the US glides into full technocrat mode.
Stargate is an ongoing $500 billion public-private partnership intended to fast-track AI. It includes tech behemoths such as OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle. In practical terms, that means only one thing: a massive push to deploy AI data centers in every US state as quickly as possible. In the public’s perception, Stargate has faded from memory and neither the public nor many media outlets make the connection with the data center controversy now gripping the nation and generating headlines practically every day.
Nominally, this initiative is part of the larger goal of establishing the US as the world leader in AI innovation, especially with respect to similar efforts in China. But, tellingly, after the announcement, OpenAI described Stargate as a project that “will not only support the reindustrialization of the US but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies." Here’s the translation of that language: military use and protection against cyber threats.
Astonishingly, in the press conference announcing it, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison blithely noted: “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
In behind-the-scenes Oz-like fashion, the raw power of this new form of information manipulation remains largely invisible yet all-pervasive and touches every aspect of our lives.
Even more astonishing is the fact that such a blatant declaration of the intent to radically ratchet up mass surveillance didn’t get pounced on by reporters and editors in the corporate media. At an Oracle financial analyst meeting, Ellison opined that AI will be used to process vast amounts of camera footage including data from car dashboards, front-door security systems, and Flock cameras. In the meantime, many states are busy deploying the highly controversial Flock devices to feed the AI beast its insatiable appetite for data. The good news is that, according to both the American Civil Liberties Union and mainstream media, there has been strong citizen pushback against the Flock cameras, even if the general public is not aware of the full range of the Trump-Ellison vision of a dystopian digital panopticon.
States Are Cooperating with Trump’s Plan
It seems clear that the Stargate initiative is authoritarian in nature. This blanket imposition of a massive technocratic structure imposed by an unholy alliance between the federal government and Big Tech business—the public-private partnership concept on steroids—is at odds with our most fundamental democratic processes. And while the temptation exists to lay this on the doorstep of the Republican-controlled Congress, make no mistake—the change is deep and structural and includes the compliance of Democrats as well.
Let’s just look at one example. In the bluest of blue states, Massachusetts, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey has been working closely with an array of Big Tech companies that include AI giants such as Google and OpenAI. In February 2026, she announced partnerships with both companies. As described in a press release: “At Google’s office in Cambridge today, Governor Maura Healey announced a new statewide partnership with Grow with Google to offer all Massachusetts residents access to artificial intelligence…This initiative is designed to help provide every resident and small business with the AI and tech skills they need to succeed in today's digital economy at no cost.” Around the same time, Healey also announced the launch of an initiative involving Open AI’s ChatGPT, making Massachusetts the first state to embrace AI usage for the entire executive branch of approximately 40,000 employees.
But to commit to AI is also to commit to the necessary infrastructure. AI data centers are springing up like dandelions in states all over the US. This is often happening without oversight because of undemocratic non-disclosure agreements that keep plans for building data centers out of the watchful eye of the cities and towns that will have to live with them as they suck up available public resources such as electricity and water while driving up costs for those essentials. This is happening in both red and blue states. The data center push is also what’s behind various state initiatives to bring back nuclear power as a “green” alternative.
AI’s Subtle Nudge Towards an Authoritarian Mindset
Stargate and the data center debacle are just the more obvious aspect of the authoritarian threat. There’s another that’s perhaps more insidious. For years, an interesting phrase has been popping up in high-tech circles: “a single source of truth.” It’s an enticing idea of course as we all crave simplification in this increasingly complex world. But this conceptual framework lays the groundwork for a new and more subtle kind of authoritarian mindset. And the rapid advance of AI is increasingly pushing this fatuous notion into alarmingly broad adoption, even in academic and professional circles.
Widespread AI adoption is based on the conventional wisdom that it will greatly expand the human panorama of knowledge, scientific and otherwise. The reality may be very different. In fact, it’s possible that the precise opposite will be the result. How can this be? Let me explain. In its current trajectory, AI usage appears to hijack the vast landscape of facts, opinions, and ideas across the arc of human knowledge and the multidisciplinary spectrum. The existential danger is that we’re being ever so gradually led to believe that there’s a single “right” answer to every known question, issue, or conundrum in politics, science, religion, politics, philosophy, and many other areas of modern life.
The next six months and the midterm elections represent a critical window of opportunity to turn much of this around and “just say no” to the AI juggernaut.
While AI appears to be a conduit to vast sources of knowledge previously unavailable, one of its most concerning characteristics remains poorly understood. AI has been designed to act not just as a new conduit to the internet but also as a gatekeeper and arbiter of what’s true and not true. Just as concerning, it’s not enhancing the internet… rather it’s replacing it. This shift means that searching the web will increasingly be performed by AI agents rather than humans. At its annual I/O developer conference in May 2026, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed this as a major change in the company’s strategy. As noted by Sarah Perez in TechCrunch, “Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience.” Goodbye search as we know it.
In behind-the-scenes Oz-like fashion, the raw power of this new form of information manipulation remains largely invisible yet all-pervasive and touches every aspect of our lives. It’s a nifty setup. Big Tech can sit back and claim lack of responsibility: We only developed it, and now it’s “doing its own thing.” In the meantime, they rack in billions and begin charging businesses and ordinary internet users more and more for AI capabilities that were initially offered as free services.
AI will increase our technological dependency by orders of magnitude, reducing our collective sense of human agency so badly needed now to counteract the effects of living in day-to-day polycrisis and political gridlock. Over time, this may translate into a kind of “learned helplessness” and a potent diminishment of grassroots political power. Society will become structured into rigid tiers depending on AI status. In the meantime, as poet and political commentator Katha Pollitt has pointed out, AI is also debasing “language, imagination, individuality, and art.”
Obviously, this is not a pretty picture but, in my opinion, there are real reasons for hope on the horizon. Increasingly, the technocratic takeover is being exposed for what it is: an anti-democratic power grab informed by a warped view of what constitutes quality of life (i.e. Silicon Valley transhumanism) and an acceleration of hyper capitalism that’s already wrought significant havoc on our planetary ecosystem.
The AI data center pushback is a wake-up call. Big Tech elitists have their hooks into everything—from what happens in the privacy of our homes to the rampant AI-driven militarism we see unfolding on the global stage. But the next six months and the midterm elections represent a critical window of opportunity to turn much of this around and “just say no” to the AI juggernaut. I believe there’s a very good chance that the nationwide pushback we’re now seeing about AI data centers and the rejection of the failed use of computers in education may be the beginning of a new wave of hope, renewal, and the restoration of democracy and common sense. Stay tuned.
After privacy advocates in Congress blocked proposed extensions of an expiring federal spying power on Thursday over a lack of reforms and concerns about newly appointed acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte, President Donald Trump announced a different man as his official nominee for the post.
"I am pleased to announce the Nomination of very Highly Respected Jay Clayton, former Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the former Head of Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the most prominent and successful Law Firms anywhere in the World, and the current United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be the next Director of National Intelligence and, importantly, to serve in my Cabinet," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Few people anywhere in the Legal Community are respected at the level of Jay. I encourage the United States Senate to confirm Jay as soon as possible."
Trump's announcement came shortly after Senate Republicans' unsuccessful requests for unanimous consent to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—which lets the US government spy on electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the country without a warrant—and a failed vote in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.
"If Trump had announced this last night, or even this morning, it could've helped avoid a FISA/702 lapse," Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio said of Clayton's nomination. "Now the House is gone (and out next week) and the Senate is holding its final vote of the week right now—but most senators have already voted and dashed to the airport."
House Democratic leaders who opposed the extension pointed to Trump's appointment of Pulte following Tulsi Gabbard's recent announcement that she's resigning from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). As Federal Housing Finance Agency director, Pulte has sent criminal referrals to the US Department of Justice, alleging mortgage fraud by four of the president's political foes.
The Senate is due back on Monday, but Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters after the Clayton announcement that it "doesn't matter what else they do, Pulte's got to be gone. He's still in that role."
Meanwhile, the top Democrats on the intelligence panels in both chambers of Congress, Vice Chair Mark Warner (Va.) and Ranking Member Jim Himes (Conn.), praised Clayton. Sean Vitka, executive director at Demand Progress—a leader in the massive coalition of civil society groups demanding FISA reforms—said that "no Democrat should find solace in the fact that Trump has once again named a partisan hatchet man to be the nation's top spy."
"Just as Trump asked Bill Pulte to investigate Letitia James and Adam Schiff, he also has asked Jay Clayton to investigate Democrats' ties to Jeffrey Epstein," Vitka noted. "The fact that Sen. Warner and Rep. Himes would gush so effusively over Clayton shows their clear desire to sabotage a deal on FISA privacy reforms and hand President Trump the unfettered surveillance powers that he is asking for."
"Both Pulte and Clayton have already shown that they will carry out Trump’s directive to weaponize the government against his political enemies," he added. "Putting either of them at ODNI at a time when Trump is asking for warrantless surveillance powers through FISA is too big of a risk."
With both the House recess and Section 702's Friday expiration looming, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had tried to get two-thirds majority support for an extension on Thursday. He secured support from seven Democrats—Reps. Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (NC), Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Josh Gottheimer (NJ), Susie Lee (Nev.), and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.)—but 19 Republicans joined the rest of the Democratic members present for the 198-218 vote.
"Section 702 is a critical foreign intelligence authority, but we cannot in good conscience vote for reauthorization without significant reforms to protect both national security and the constitutional privacy rights of Americans," said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Democratic Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), and Himes.
"Bill Pulte has no relevant national security experience. Consequently, his appointment is in defiance of the law that requires the director of national intelligence to have 'extensive' national security experience. The apparent motivation for his elevation is the demonstrated willingness of Bill Pulte to search government databases for alleged dirt on President Trump's chosen political enemies," they continued. "There is a path to reauthorizing FISA, but it will require enacting meaningful reforms. We oppose this bill to kick the can further down the road."
Explaining her vote against "this sham extension of FISA that would allow continued spying on the American people," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a key progressive leader in the chamber, said that "a warrant requirement would pass today if Republican leadership put it up for a vote."
"However, Trump is doubling down on his appointment of Bill Pulte, closing any pathways for negotiation," she said before Clayton was announced. "I voted no today, and will continue to vote no until a warrant requirement is in place to protect our civil liberties."
Hajar Hammado, senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, said in a statement that "Speaker Johnson keeps trying and failing to jam through a no-reform FISA reauthorization, expecting different results—this time without even getting a simple majority of the House."
"If Johnson wants a FISA deal, all he has to do is allow amendment votes on privacy reforms," Hammado continued. "Adding warrant requirements to FISA is a path forward that has clear, bipartisan support. The only reason we're up against the deadline now is that congressional leaders and the White House keep ignoring this obvious reality and obstructing privacy reforms from getting a fair vote."
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice's Liberty and National Security Program, similarly said on social media that "Section 702 was in trouble well before Trump announced the appointment of Pulte as acting DNI (and by the way, Pulte could still be in that role through the midterm elections). The 702 renewal hit a wall because Republican leaders wouldn't allow votes on widely supported reforms."
After Johnson complained to reporters about the vote and said that "I pray that we do not have a serious calamity on our shores over the next few weeks," Jake Laperruque at the Center for Democracy & Technologysaid: "I'm sorry, you cannot demand the high ground claiming to be distraught about our national security when you are treating FISA as less important than blocking all reform votes. You sure as hell can't claim the high ground when treating it as less important than going on vacation."
While national security hawks have tried to use the deadline to force an extension, suggesting that a lapse would cause "a potential significant gap in foreign intelligence collection," privacy advocates such as Laperruque have emphasized that "the text of the law makes clear that this threat of collection suddenly going dark... is fearmongering and not a genuine possibility."
As Laperruque explained earlier this week: "So long as an approved FISA 702 certification is active, collection from communications providers based on directives stemming from that certification will continue. Because the FISA Court approved the most recent annual certifications this March, this lapse would not occur until 2027."
The House and Senate GOP's failures to extend Section 702 on Thursday came a day after Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) objected to a proposal from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)—a leading privacy advocate—to pass by unanimous consent a nine-month renewal with warrant requirements. The Republican also opposed a five-week offer.
Calling out Cornyn's moves, Hammado said Wednesday that "surveillance hawks have spent all day screaming about how important it is to renew FISA, but then they just objected to a good faith deal that would reauthorize Section 702 with popular, bipartisan privacy reforms. The only thing stopping FISA from being renewed is congressional leadership's unexplained, persistent opposition to making the government get a warrant when it tries to access the private communications of Americans."
"Clear majorities in both parties, and of Americans in general, want a warrant requirement before renewing FISA," the Demand Progress campaigner added. "Why does congressional leadership prefer sunset over privacy?"
This article has been updated with additional comment from Sean Vitka of Demand Progress and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice.
"Clear majorities of Americans across the nation, and in Congress, do not want the government bypassing the courts to hoover up our private, personal data."
Privacy advocates celebrated Friday after a Republican-led effort to extend warrantless spying powers failed to advance in the US Senate in the early hours of the morning, with seven GOP lawmakers joining every Democrat except Sen. John Fetterman in opposition.
The failed vote was another stumble for supporters of renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets the federal government surveil the electronic communications of noncitizens located outside the US. The authority is set to lapse next Friday.
Advocates have long demanded reforms to the law, noting that US intelligence agencies have relentlessly abused it to spy on Americans.
Sean Vitka, executive director of Demand Progress, called Friday's vote a "resounding defeat for opponents of privacy," arguing it "shows that there is no path forward for FISA without a warrant requirement."
"Clear majorities of Americans across the nation, and in Congress, do not want the government bypassing the courts to hoover up our private, personal data," said Vitka. "If the White House and congressional leadership want to renew FISA, they have to stop ignoring this obvious fact and allow votes on real privacy reforms."
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, called the vote "an interim victory" but warned that some senators "who would have voted to advance the bill changed their vote" due to President Donald Trump's selection of loyalist Bill Pulte to serve as acting director of national intelligence—a choice that drew bipartisan backlash.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who supports extending Section 702 spying powers, voted against advancing the FISA legislation on Friday after decrying Pulte as an "enormously bad choice" who is "grossly unqualified."
Goitein noted that Pulte, who currently heads the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), is currently "under investigation by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office for misusing his position and his access to government records to trigger dubious charges of mortgage fraud against Trump’s perceived political enemies."
"If Pulte can do that with the limited access to Americans’ information he has as head of the [FHFA], imagine what he could do with all the authorities and capabilities of the intelligence community—including, of course, Section 702," she added. "What wouldn’t make sense? Handing Section 702 to whomever Trump could nominate in Pulte’s place without ensuring that they can’t use it as a tool for domestic spying."
“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they're causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” one organizer said.
On their way to attend the Met Gala on Monday night, guests might have spotted a different image of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos than the one he tried to project by chairing the annual fundraiser: a poster featuring his bulbous head, looming over them out of the darkness, attached to a muscular spider-shaped body. Above it, a mysterious message: “The Creep State is watching.”
What does it mean?
The Creep State is an anonymous guerilla art and protest project that debuted in Austin, Texas during South by Southwest earlier this year. It is designed to draw people’s attention to the threat posed by Big Tech billionaires and their increasing influence over both the US government and the daily lives of everyone who interacts with their products.
“These individuals are a danger to all of us,” a DC-based organizer said.
What Is the Creep State?
The Creep State image of Jeff Bezos is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
The idea for the Creep State came from the desire to raise awareness about certain Silicon Valley oligarchs and their anti-democratic actions and aspirations. Participants in the project who spoke to Common Dreams asked to remain anonymous in keeping with the guerilla-style tactics of their effort.
“There's what is really a very small group of men who control these algorithms, who control the software, the hardware, and.. they are trying to initially infiltrate our government and eventually replace our government,” a Seattle-based organizer explained. “They've all been pretty clear about, you know, some version of, you know, a company town run by a CEO king.”
The project’s designers wanted to convey that “these specific individuals have very nefarious and creepy goals, and they are personally creeps,"—hence, the “creep state” framing.
“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching."
Currently, the project consists of a physical and digital element.
Volunteers wheatpaste posters of seven Silicon Valley kingpins—Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, and Marc Andreessen, drawn in cartoon style as B-movie monsters—in major US cities. To date, the images have been displayed in Austin, Seattle, DC, Palo Alto, the area around the Met Gala in New York, and Los Angeles, with more to come.
The posters include a QR code that leads to a website, including a video highlighting how these moguls' companies and products are already monitoring people’s daily activities, from surveillance pricing to sleep tracking.
“Whatever you do, see, hear, touch, say, feel, believe, dream, the Creep State is watching," the video declares, before concluding: “We’re fighting back.”
“These people and these companies need to continue to be exposed for all of the harm that they're causing and the real power that they have over our government and those governed,” the DC-based organizer said.
‘People Versus the Machines’
The Creep State image of Sam Altman is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
While there have been many different campaigns and critiques calling out Big Tech and the rise of AI in recent years, the creators of the Creep State took an artistic approach partly to grab people’s attention, to make something that “quite literally visually shocked people out of the normal way that they think about and talk about these guys,” as the Seattle-based organizer put it.
They added that they wanted a viewer’s first response upon seeing the art to be, “Woah!”
So far, it seems to be working.
When the art went up in Seattle ahead of the No Kings protest on March 28, “people walking by stopped and took pictures and were like, ‘Whoa, what is this about? Oh my God, is that Jeff Bezos? Whoa, is that Bill Gates?’” the Seattle organizer said.
A member of the team who put the posters up in DC on April 18 similarly recalled: “We had a young woman come up to us and ask us about the Creep State and said she was glad we were exposing these guys. She said she was from [Prince George's] County in Maryland and was part of the movement to stop data centers there.”
"Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?"
The project’s designers see themselves as operating within a tradition of guerilla art against the powerful from Banksy, Favianna Rodriguez, and Shepard Fairey's OBEY posters to student protests against Slobodan Milošević in Serbia in the 1990s and the FeesMustFall campaign in South Africa in the 2010s. However, the project—which made a point of working with actual human creators, including a screenwriter, comic book artist, and graphic designer—takes on extra resonance in an age in which AI slop clogs up social media feeds and threatens to put creative workers out of a job.
“This is very much a people versus the machines kind of thing,” the Seattle-based organizer said. “Are we going to be a society where human creativity and human inspiration and human thinking are valued, or are we going to be a world where.. we're all plugged into a screen?”
Bipartisan Appeal
The Creep State image of Peter Thiel is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
As the project uses an artistic approach to hook people who might otherwise ignore its messaging, it also crafts that messaging in an attempt to appeal to people who might not always agree politically.
The name “Creep State” was chosen in part for its similarity to “deep state,” which is often used on the political right to describe hidden actors undemocratically controlling the federal government. Some of the headlines highlighted in the introductory video were also selected to appeal to right-leaning viewers. (“Prayer apps: is AI playing God?” one reads.)
“Our assessment here is that we may have, and we very much do have, some very deep disagreements in a variety of ways with the right wing. But there is a very real grassroots right-wing opposition to the Silicon Valley takeover of our economy and our democracy. And we want to make sure that this is a campaign that different types of folks can see themselves reflected in,” the Seattle-based organizer said.
"Once they're burrowed in, it's going to be very difficult to root them out.”
Indeed, the rise of AI and the hyperscale data centers it relies on seems to have, at least so far, bypassed the usual culture war divides. As communities across the country have mobilized against the data center buildout, “you've got DSA people linking arms with, you know, like ultra-MAGA folks,” the Seattle organizer added.
The numbers reflect this, with around 50% of both Republicans and Democrats now saying they are more concerned than excited about AI and 55% of the politicians opposing data centers, which are often located in red states, being Republicans.
The embrace of AI and its Silicon Valley pushers may be one wedge between President Donald Trump and some of his supporters, as 75% of 2024 Trump voters think that AI should be regulated while the president himself has thrown his weight behind a plan to prohibit states from regulating AI at all.
Indeed, even as the Creep State’s developers reach out to Trump voters, they are clear that the Trump administration itself has escalated the Big Tech takeover of the US government, upping the urgency of their project.
Even before Trump was elected a second time around, Silicon Valley enabled his rise. Bezos sunk The Washington Post’s endorsement of his rival Kamala Harris, while Musk donated more than a quarter billion to back Trump's campaign. His Vice President JD Vance is a protege of Thiel, who has backed Trump since 2016.
Trump has repaid these Big Tech executives handsomely with access, money, and his deregulatory push. The DC-based organizer said they were partly inspired to get involved with the Creep State project after witnessing the havoc wreaked by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which cut funding for essential grants and may lead to the deaths of over 14 million through the shuttering of the US Agency for International Development. At the same time, tech billionaires have increased their profits by contracting with the government, enablingdeportations via Immigration and Customs Enforcement and both surveillance and targeting via the Pentagon.
Yet the Seattle-based organizer said that some Trump supporters “are beginning to realize… that these guys don't care about Trump. Trump is a vehicle for them. And, you know, once they're burrowed in, it's going to be very difficult to root them out.”
‘We’re Fighting Back’
The Creep State image of Mark Zuckerberg is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
Ultimately the goal of the Creep State project is to plug everyone who sees and responds to the art—whatever their politics—into the growing movement to push back against the Big Tech power grab.
“The more we can expose these actors, it can inspire people to… organize against them, demand… oversight and regulations over AI and the influence that these individuals have on their politics,” the DC-based organizer said.
People who scan the QR code can be funneled into future wheatpasting sessions (which are all volunteer efforts) or local fights related to tech policy. One hope the organizers have is that communities across the country who are fighting data center construction or Flock camera expansion could order posters from the site that would have their QR codes adjusted to direct viewers to the local struggle.
“If we can plug people into some of those fights with organizations and for them to get more deeply involved, we'd love to do that,” the DC organizer said.
The Seattle organizer concluded, "Fundamentally the question that we face is will we allow one or a few of these corporations to literally remake our society?"
They continued: "We're all living through this polycrisis. The climate is collapsing, the economy is in tatters, we're at war abroad. There's something new and crazy every day, and it's hard to break through to people. So the hope is that this art specifically, in this way of highlighting both the like political creepiness and the personal creepiness of these guys, can maybe shock some people who otherwise are just trying to get through their day into, 'I need to do something.'"
The Creep State image of Jeff Bezos is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
The Creep State image of Sam Altman is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
The Creep State image of Peter Thiel is shown. (Photo via Creep State)
The Creep State image of Mark Zuckerberg is shown. (Photo via Creep State)