Kristi, this one's so good! Alarming to see what the government has been doing so haphazardly in the name of cuts and efficiency. Your essay is screaming a slippery slope toward predictive systems at me. A state that can merge its records and act on them is basically running the same upstream move I talk about with predictive capitalism in my stuff, except instead of pointing prediction at a consumer to sell something, a state can point it at a citizen through the one institution that can arrest, tax, or deport, based on perceived actions and beliefs, and it turns into pre-emption. Same machinery, wildly different stakes depending on who's holding it and where it's aimed, with dangerous implications. Pointed at whom is the whole ballgame. Sobering read.
Yeah. This one was sobering to write and scary to publish too. I’ve seen the power of these tactics wielded in the private for too long to stay silent though so I pushed through. The stakes are too high when I imagine the tricks of predictive capitalism used inside public institutions. I want my government small and blind, I’m old school like that.
The truth: Kristi, this is fantastic. It made me upgrade my subscription to paid immediately. Your voice matters, and I am so glad you are out there writing exactly what you are, when you are.
The duality you highlight here, how 'efficiency' is the vocabulary for both what is funded to be seen and what is buried, is the exact corporate reflex we have to break. Maybe we should be auditing these models to see exactly whom they are pointed at and why >) This is exactly the kind of structural auditability, telemetry, and data provenance we are building at Bast AI. Thank you for putting words to this tension.
Kristi, this one's so good! Alarming to see what the government has been doing so haphazardly in the name of cuts and efficiency. Your essay is screaming a slippery slope toward predictive systems at me. A state that can merge its records and act on them is basically running the same upstream move I talk about with predictive capitalism in my stuff, except instead of pointing prediction at a consumer to sell something, a state can point it at a citizen through the one institution that can arrest, tax, or deport, based on perceived actions and beliefs, and it turns into pre-emption. Same machinery, wildly different stakes depending on who's holding it and where it's aimed, with dangerous implications. Pointed at whom is the whole ballgame. Sobering read.
Yeah. This one was sobering to write and scary to publish too. I’ve seen the power of these tactics wielded in the private for too long to stay silent though so I pushed through. The stakes are too high when I imagine the tricks of predictive capitalism used inside public institutions. I want my government small and blind, I’m old school like that.
What a powerful and beautifully clarifying essay. Thank you.
The truth: Kristi, this is fantastic. It made me upgrade my subscription to paid immediately. Your voice matters, and I am so glad you are out there writing exactly what you are, when you are.
The duality you highlight here, how 'efficiency' is the vocabulary for both what is funded to be seen and what is buried, is the exact corporate reflex we have to break. Maybe we should be auditing these models to see exactly whom they are pointed at and why >) This is exactly the kind of structural auditability, telemetry, and data provenance we are building at Bast AI. Thank you for putting words to this tension.
🥹🙏