Review by Bill Doughty
The invention and deployment of the steam engine accelerated the antislavery movement two centuries ago; the wide use of the telegraph brought about the women’s movement and women’s right to vote 120 years ago; and the intercontinental railroad and telephone helped fire up the Progressive Era while television stoked the civil rights movement.
How technology fuels social movements is one of the insights revealed in “The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance” by Ray Brescia (New York University Press, 2025).
“As each net technology emerged on the scene, a new social movement embraced it.” And the country moved forward.
“But the history of all of these technologies and their incorporation into social movement advocacy also had another component to them,” Brescia writes. “Each advance in the ability to communicate brought with it a new threat of surveillance and manipulation.”
So what happens to an easily manipulated society when the tsunami of all technology –– AI –– washes over us?
“Today, new technologies like generative artificial intelligence and quantum computing stand poised to supercharge all aspects of communications technologies in ways that are beneficial to humankind but, in others, that will likely prove destructive, completely shredding all semblance of digital privacy along the way and undermining the freedom to advance change,” Brescia observes.
“As we enter a world dominated by generative artificial intelligence, the institutional order is likely to change, and not necessarily for the better. In such a future, the ability to seek out, leverage, manipulate, and inundate individuals with information that will try to sway their actions, chill their speech, incite them to engage in harmful ways, or cause them to disengage such that their inaction is actually against their interests is nearly limitless.”
“Democracy requires a high degree of protection for individual identity and political privacy, regardless of the the source of the threat to that privacy,” he writes.
“Early in the digital age, before smartphones became personal appendages, techno-futurist Ray Kurzweil envisioned a new type of consciousness ––“the singularity” — that would emerge as a product of the fusion of computers and human intellect.' While this prediction has not yet come to pass, in many ways the melding of the personal and the digital is well underway. Since the early 1990s, an array of new technologies has transformed the ways we live and the power of individuals to influence society and change the world. With the rise of the internet, mobile technologies, social media, and artificial intelligence, the ability of individuals, groups, movements, and political parties to effectuate change has never been greater…
“What is more, soon we are likely to see the widespread adoption of driverless cars; the proliferation of the Internet of Things, a global network of products connected to the internet and to each other; and the encroachment of generative artificial intelligence across all aspects of life. Records of our bodily functions will be digitized and medical treatment revolutionized. Computer servers throughout the world will contain a vast amount of biometric data about us. Our movements will be monitored, just as our steps are being tracked today. Strangers will know and artificial intelligence will track our heart rate, breathing, glucose levels, body temperature, and other biometric data in real time. Our state of being itself-our opinions, our moods, our fears—will fall within this digital system, a shadow, parallel world, like the "Upside Down" from the Netflix retro sci-fi thriller Stranger Things. It is in this world where blurry, spectral versions of us will take shape; yet the characteristics of our avatars may be a more accurate reflection of us than the image we project of ourselves in the real world.”
Algorithms control what people see and hear, allowing foreign trolls and home-grown miscreants to chip away at unity to create chasms of division. This happens despite how we humans evolved toward altruism, cooperation, and reliance on community. Brescia quotes historian Yuval Noah Harari: “Change through cooperation with others is what may truly make us human and differentiates us from other species.”
In George Orwell’s 1984, a disembodied Big Brother spews, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In an upside-down world of fiction as fact, an unsuspecting public can be manipulated by big lies, repetition, celebrity, and surveillance by a would-be autocrat.
“George Orwell’s Big Brother had nothing on the surveillance state that now exists,” according to Brescia, who studies institutional theory, perspective, and convergence in order to protect integrity of individual and collective privacy.
“Given the critical role that the integrity of identity plays in the achievement of personal self-realization, as well as individual and collective self-determination, our institutions, laws, and norms must offer robust protections for our private actions and engagements, even our thoughts, as they are manifest in the digital and analog worlds. A recognition of the severe threats to political privacy that lurk in the digital Upside Down is necessary to understand that preserving the integrity of identity is an essential feature of a functioning democracy. This work is an attempt to explore the ways that our laws, institutions, and norms can catch up to new technologies, with all of their capacities as well as the threats that lurk within them, to ensure that we can preserve the integrity of identity in the digital age and advance and enrich the pursuit of democracy, meaningful social change, and, ultimately, human flourishing.”
But what happens when leaders no longer respect or defend the Constitution?
Free and independent thinkers ask questions such as these: How and why can the military be used to confront protesters in cities of political opponents? How can the government use Orwellian tactics to skew the truth about issues such as immigration arrests, assaults on elected officials, attacks on education institutions, realities of an insurrection attempt on the U.S. Capitol, attempts at foreign intervention without congressional approval, and overall disrespect for the judiciary and rule of law?
What if an administration is so corrupt if chooses personal profit and power over the welfare of people and personal privacy?
“Whether democracies can continue to function in the age of Surveillance Capitalism, artificial intelligence, misinformation, and manipulation remains to be seen. The threats to democracy across the world are significant. In the United States, the world's oldest democracy, authoritarianism and threats to the rule of law are real and increasing in force. Today's technology-fueled media environment, because of disintermediation, social media, and artificial intelligence, poses significant threats to the preservation of the American form of democracy, one in which a delicate balance of institutions –– public, private, civic, communicative ––operates to help citizens achieve individual and collective self-determination. In turn, these institutions are reflections of the popular will. I have shown in previous chapters and in past work the symbiotic relationship between institutional change, the ability to communicate, and social movements. What is more, that relationship is constantly changing, as the technology that enables and shapes communication, as well as society and the citizen, is also changing. When that technology is placed within democratic societies, the connections run even deeper, but so does the possibility that such technologies can be used not just to advance democracy but also to undermine it. For these reasons, the need has never been greater to ensure that the communications tools of today and tomorrow are not weapons that can strike at the heart of democracy but rather tools to help realize it.”
Among Brescia’s suggested remedies: using those tools to set up and enforce simple and mandatory disclosures (not obtuse fine-print agreements), instituting “search” protections, ensuring transparency by tech companies of what data is gathered and stored, disclosing the sale of personal data, disclosing uses of algorithms, enforcing clear remedies for breaches of cyber privacy, and embracing an overall shift to an information fiduciary relationship by corporations.
Political scientist Erica Chenoweth studies antiauthoritarianism. In her findings about quantitative outcomes, she concludes that 3.5 percent of a population is “required to mount a successful campaign of civil resistance.”
Carrying out civil resistance requires influencing five key pillars: military, business elites, civil servants, state media, and police. The key strategy: nonviolence even in the face of violence. The key proof of success: when public backing of the regime goes away.
Change can be made with “institutional convergence.” For example, Brown vs. Board of Education came about when the interests of civil rights advocates converged with white elites and public pressure at a time when Cold War Soviets criticized the hypocrisy of Jim Crow South’s treatment of African Americans. A coalition of opposition does not have to be homogenous.
A final question: In this century, can the power of AI be harnessed to create a positive social movement to preserve democracy or will everything be turned upside down in an American autocracy or theocracy?
After publication of Brescia’s book, which calls for a framework and methodology to “preserve political privacy in private law contexts,” Americans witnessed an unprecedented invasion of privacy by the Trump Administration in coordination with a technology giant who reportedly paid $350M to help elect a president. Brescia penned an op-ed condemning the Trump administration’s invasion of privacy after Elon Musk and his band of privateers raided the Social Security Administration –– via DOGE.
Brescia wrote, in part:
“…unvetted individuals working for a 'department' that doesn’t officially exist have gained access to the private financial information of hundreds of millions of American taxpayers and businesses. Veterans, retirees, taxpayers, you name it, had such rights swept away by DOGE mercenaries in an instant, with no court review, with no justification, without any consideration for due process rights. And we don’t know the full extent of the release of this information, who has access to it, what their designs on it are and whether they intend to sell it to other companies or even foreign countries, even when it appears some of this information may have been fed into a computer program, driven by artificial intelligence, to help DOGE identify potential cuts.”
The op-ed was written last February, and Brescia urged immediate action by Congress to curtail DOGE’s invasion of privacy. “This is necessary to protect the American people and businesses from this seemingly lawless abuse of privacy and due process and to understand the damage already done.” Sadly, so far his warnings have gone unheeded.
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