Dec 19, 2024

How Do We Escape the Panopticon?

By Recognizing the Internet as the New Post Road

VN Alexander

Now that tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel (who backed J. D. Vance) have bought the free and fair election of President Donald Trump for us in the United States, we are in danger of becoming a more “efficient” AI-surveilled and -run country.

The experiment in democracy that is the United States has not been conducted properly ever since the commitment to privacy was abandoned with the rollout of the new communications system known as the Internet. Tech companies collect information on all our Internet activity. Allegedly, they use our data to better serve us—with targeted ads—assuming we are keen to trade our rights to privacy for the right to be advertised at more efficiently.

In truth, most citizens cherish the inalienable rights that are acknowledged in the U.S. Constitution. But those rights have been eroded away slowly and subtly over time. We need to backtrack a number of decades, find where we veered off the path, and get back on it.

The United State Postal Service (USPS) appears early and prominently in the Constitution as a means of secure communication necessary for a functioning democracy. Thus, the institution has been able withstand calls for its end in recent decades—much to the chagrin of real estate developers who would love to buy-up cheap some lovely old stone buildings. My beloved former post office in SoHo, Manhattan is now a fancy Apple store. In D.C., the Old Post Office and Clock Tower Building, owned by Trump at one point, is now the Waldorf Astoria. In this essay, I will argue that the trend of phasing out the USPS needs to be reversed.

When I ran for Congress in New York on the Libertarian line in 2020, I made decentralized government and expanding the role of the USPS central to my campaign. I realized that we can protect online privacy and free speech by recognizing the Internet as the new post road.

I think the responsibilities of federal government could be significantly reduced to upholding the Constitution, providing a sovereign (debt-free) currency, minding the borders, and supplying local governments with funding for public infrastructure, such as public transportation and communication lines. I do not see a role for the federal government in saying how the infrastructure is run. Ideally, that should be left to local stakeholders.

Let me say that again; otherwise, readers may miss it. I am not calling for a USPS Internet run by government bureaucrats. That’s too much power. Civil servants would have to maintain equipment and manage day-to-day operations, but crucial audits and policy decisions should be made by local stakeholders—perhaps with a mechanism similar to Mark Gorton’s idea for Citizen Oversight Juries for health agencies. In the U.S., after all, government is supposed to be by the people.

Why the Post Office is in the Constitution

Democracy in the U.S. has undergone an existential crisis, in large part due to the fact that no one has any privacy on the Internet and all of our scraped data is centrally controlled by a few actors. We are both censored and afraid to speak.

In the First Article, Section 8, Clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution, the new government is charged with the duty “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.” Clearly, the framers foresaw problems with a purely privately-owned and -run communication system and they created the USPS to protect our rights. It is a simple straight-forward argument that Clause 7 should be interpreted to keep up with technological advances.

Today, even in tiny out-of-the-way zip codes, there stands a handsome building, ready to serve the needs of a free people to communicate freely and privately. It is a federal offense to tamper with the U.S. mail.

If the Internet is reframed as the new post road, then our online communications would be protected by the Mail Theft Statute, according to which it is illegal to intercept any mail that is addressed to someone else. The law also prohibits the willful obstruction of mail delivery and tampering with or destroying someone else’s mail. These laws might be applied to packets of digital information that would travel along the lines of a USPS Internet cable line as easily as to packets of hard mail traveling along roads.

In the 1800s, when the means of communication began to change drastically with new technologies, Samuel Morse argued that, because telegraphs are “another mode of accomplishing the principal object for which the mail is established, to wit: the rapid and regular transmission of intelligence,” it was “most natural to connect a telegraphic system with the Post Office Department.” Telegraph technology was first deployed with U.S. government funding. Morse’s government allies tried to install telegraph wires underground and that was expensive. It took too long. Private industry swooped in, hung wires on trees and slapped up poles, and got the job done swiftly and cheaply.

Now, just about every street in America-the-beautiful is marred by ugly telephone and electrical poles.

And the way for the construction of the panopticon was paved.

How the Panopticon Was Built

The Constitution says the federal government is not allowed to spy on us, which is why third-party private entities have slipped into this role on behalf of the government, according to a number of lawsuits that are making their ways through the courts, notably Kennedy v. Biden.

Since their inceptions, companies like Facebook and Google have received funding from the government to build and deploy the technology that sucks up our data. Allowing the awful chimera of public-private partnerships to control our communications has been our undoing. To note an important example, Palantir Technologies, founded by Peter Thiel, is a creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Palantir works on top of the infrastructure created by Alphabet and Meta and gathers online activity in order to profile every U.S. citizen. Palantir, which appears to have replaced DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, is justified as part of an unconstitutional precrime effort, as Whitney Webb has reported. Clearly, there needs to be a separation of business and state akin to the separation of church and state to stop the crony capitalism that is morphing into fascism. Although Peter Thiel has claimed to be a Libertarian, his Palantir is providing the tools for a totalitarian corporatist government.

Meanwhile also Thiel’s PayPal Mafia confederate, Elon Musk has been made rich with cheap Federal Reserve fiat money to back his various 4IR-adjacent ventures. With his Department of Defense contracts to built satellite surveillance infrastructure (Palantir is also a Starlink client), he is poised to some day put regional Internet Service Providers out of business, leaving the entire communications system under the control (ostensibly) of one billionaire.

But what can we do? Private companies aren’t mandated by law to respect our privacy or our right to free speech. So we put up with it and check off the “agree to terms” box. Then we feebly call on Congress to “regulate” the tech companies, which Congress will be pleased to do, asking the tech companies themselves to write the regulations, which will only end up codifying how often and in what way companies can “legally” steal our information and continue to censor us.

The real solution is already in the Constitution: we just have to enforce it.

Certain Products/Services Are Vulnerable to Monopolization

Anti-trust regulation is not the solution.

In August 2023, a U.S. District Court ruled that Google is in violation of anti-trust laws. Similarly, we can say Meta, the parent company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsAp, monopolizes a huge portion of private communications. If Google or its parent company Alphabet is broken up, spawning numerous baby googles, they will likely end up colluding with each other, regaining centralized control over our communications, while maintaining the illusion of competition. When Bell Atlantic, the northeast’s main telephone company, was trust-busted it wound up spawning Verizon, which simply gobbled up the smaller competitors. When anti-trust laws were used to break up Standard Oil, this resulted in enormous profits for the stockholders of the various new companies and did not reduce the power of the oil industry leaders.

As Henry George observed in the late 19th century, owning and controlling finite natural resources and public infrastructure is distinct from other kinds of business activities that can be well regulated by the free market. People have as much of a choice of Internet service, electricity service, and cell phone service providers as they have choice which roads, train tracks, bridges, and ports to use. Communication and transportation systems tend to be centralized by nature.

Communication systems require putting infrastructure (e.g., telephone poles, cable lines, cell towers) on private property or near densely-populated areas. Public vote and public oversight seems required for such ventures—likewise the construction and maintenance of roads, railways, and international ports of entry. Local stakeholders need to have a say in how infrastructure is built in their communities and how it is run, since they will be the ones using it, paying for it, and living with it.

Funding and Control of Public Infrastructure

I like the US Postal System. It does not run on tax dollars. People who choose to use the Post Office pay for the service. If only all government services, like Social Security insurance, medicine, and primary education, operated on a voluntary pay-per-use basis.

As Stephen Zarlenga, founder of the American Monetary Institute, cogently argued, it is not necessary to collect taxes to fund public infrastructure. If US Treasury notes were created for the purpose of buying the cable Internet lines and maintenance equipment from the providers that currently hold the contracts with the local authorities, the new notes would be backed by the value of the infrastructure purchased. As citizens pay the USPS to use the Internet, the asset would be more economically advantageous than gold locked in a vault.

Yes, I’m aware of the accusations that the USPS unfairly “monopolizes” the federally-protected mail delivery boxes. (Nothing’s stopping anyone from adding boxes.) I’m aware of claims that the USPS is hemorrhaging funds, providing terrible service, and is hopelessly in debt. I think those claims can be debunked. Most of the USPS’s financial woes stem from the fact that it had been, until 2022, saddled with higher retirement liabilities than other agency, according to the USPS. I also question the propriety of giving Amazon a bulk discount, which has caused further financial strain and favors one big corporation over private citizens and small corporations. But let me just say that even if the Post Office is horribly mismanaged, we should be motivated to fix it and expand it.

A government Internet service could be run as effectively as any private Internet service, if the employees were rewarded and punished based on the quality of their performances, as in any business. The Pendleton Act and the Civil Service Act of 1883 were passed to protect federal employees from being fired for partisan reasons. This has resulted in making it difficult to fire federal employees for any reason, allowing poor performers to stay on the job.

This is not an insurmountable problem. The problem the Civil Service Act sought to remedy is partisanship. Therefore, we would be better off doing away with political parties (which are private corporations with a stranglehold on democracy) and instead, the states should require all candidates to get ballot access as independents. So many government solutions address the symptom of a problem and ignore the root cause. Thus, our country may be compared to a chronically-ill person, who is on multiple medications (various Acts), the majority of which are prescribed to counteract the side-effects of the others. But that is another essay.

If the Internet cable lines could be maintained by the USPS, this would also solve the very serious problem of rural residents not having access to high-speed Internet because it is not profitable for private providers. The main point of having the USPS is making sure all citizens have equal access to a communication system.

The other point of the Post Office originally was to bring in revenue for the federal government. It’s rather quaint that the founders imagined the government would have to earn its keep rather steal money through taxation. Currently, U.S. cable companies enjoy a whopping 25% return on their investments, according to McKinsey Co. This includes delivery of TV, regulated by the Federal Communications Commission, which is also derelict in its duty to prevent centralization of powers. The free market hasn’t been able to work its magic on this monopolized industry, which has some of the highest rates and poorest cable/Internet service in the developed world.

Today, delivery companies like UPS and FedEx are quite free to compete against the Post Office to deliver mail. Any delivery vehicle can use the roads, which are built and maintained by governments, but they have to obey the road rules. On a USPS Internet, different private companies could provide search engines, email readers, platforms, apps, and websites, like the cars that drive on the roads. But the information that is carried by those companies would be protected by the Constitution.

No embedded social media buttons. No third-party cookies. The provider you use would not be allowed to scan your email, listen in on your private conversations, record any of your activity across various websites or profile you. Your anonymity could be preserved. Platforms couldn’t sell your data or use it to train AI (which isn’t the marvel it’s purported to be). They would not be able to keep people who are subscribed to your feed from seeing your posts. They wouldn’t be able to rig your search results. Search engines wouldn’t be able to scan comments you’ve made on social media or in comments sections where the “intended recipients” are specifically limited to that forum. You would be able to delete your content at any time, and a copy of it could not be saved in their permanent file on you.

While a USPS Internet would help safeguard our rights, it would have its own unique management and cyber security problems. Libre Solutions has made suggestions about how local stakeholders might utilize open-source software and hardware to address cybercrime, hacks and other security risks without having to ask daddy NSA to step in. Maintaining a functioning democracy requires a lot of work from the demos. People will have to show up occasionally at local USPS meetings, fire those who are doing a bad job, chit chat with neighbors about it, and keep an eye on how things are being run.

That’s better than the CIA keeping a watchful eye on us all the time.

The New Public Square

YouTube is the new public square, according to comedian Jimmy Dore, who is not alone in making this argument. Discussing Candace Owen’s removal from the platform for speaking out against Zionism, Dore went further, saying that YouTube should be nationalized. I disagree with the idea of nationalizing web platforms (not just the lines), even as I sympathize with the motivation.

I liken YouTube to a private car driving on a public road and think it should be treated as such. But it is true that tax-payers have subsidized some of those Big Tech vehicles to such an extent that the public might have some claim to partial ownership. According to Kit Klarenberg, Google wouldn’t exist without funding from the CIA and the NSA. Facebook had similar support, reports Whitney Webb.

I believe the remedy might be to let the public cannibalize the subsidized behemoths and then move on. Google’s search engine is so far advanced that no start-up competitor could ever beat it, but, granted access to Google’s proprietary code, the USPS (not Elon Musk) could help develop its own open-source search engine, but with a user-controlled algorithm, rather an algorithm-controlled user. Additionally, software exists already that would allow people to transfer all of their content from legacy social media over to new open-source USPS versions of video sharing and status update platforms. On any USPS platform, users should be able to create and adjust their own filters according to their own preferences.

To protect children online, as I have argued elsewhere, parents need access to equipment (like dumbphones) and open-source parental controls software, provided by the free market, that allows them to determine what their children can view online and with whom their children can communicate. That is the solution to protecting children, not government regulation or Internet IDs.

Some people have opined that the country’s founders could not have anticipated the power of the Internet. But they quite clearly saw the dangers of concentrated powers and the need for privacy and free speech. President Donald Trump recently outlined how he intends to stop censorship online, but he does not get at the root of the problem, the lack of constitutional protections for our communications system. Alphabet, Meta and other tech companies will have to develop new business models that don’t involve violating users’ rights. Likewise, when the US federal government belatedly recognized that everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, slave-plantation owners had to develop new business models. It’s time for a people-powered radical readjustment.

VN Alexander PhD is a philosopher of science and novelist, who has just completed a new satirical novel, C0VlD-1984, The Musical. You can read and follow her SubStack here. She served as the Assistant Managing Editor of The Kennedy Beacon funded by American Values 2024 (AV24) super PAC and has submitted a draft for a bill to “Recognize the Internet as Part of the Post Road” to AV24’s new platform, Policies for the People (P4P). Please visit P4P to upvote the proposal.