Summer 2013, surveillance and guillotines. What connects Snowden and Piketty?

In the summer of 2013, within just a few weeks, two extremely important, esoteric, technical texts appeared: Snowden's leaks revealing the system of ubiquitous global surveillance, and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, dedicated to the economic inevitability and political instability of the oligarchy.

Back then, in 2013, the connections between these works were not so obvious, but over the years I have become increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can actually only be understood by treating their works as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.

Piketty's groundbreaking work was based on a detailed analysis of capital flows worldwide over a span of 300 years, resulting from the benedictine work of a sizable team of doctoral students who sifted through a gigantic collection of diverse data. The conclusion drawn from his book is: “in the long run, the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth” (in short, “r > g”).

Although at first glance this sounds harmless, in reality it is a true bomb. If r > g, then most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of those who already have the greatest assets at the start, and whether they do anything productive with the money they possess is of no importance. This, in turn, means that the so-called heroes of the market system, those entrepreneurs who establish and run companies contributing to public prosperity, are doomed to play second fiddle to those whose contribution to development involves gathering goods, that is, ordinary plumbers unclogging the flow of money.

Capital wins over labor

The most brutal example of this in Capital in the 21st Century is Piketty’s comparison of the heiress of L’Oreal, Liliane Bettencourt (then the richest woman in the world), with Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft (at that time the most prosperous corporation in the world). Piketty compares the growth of their fortunes in two periods: from the founding of Microsoft until Gates stepped down as CEO, and from his resignation from the executive role, when he ceased to be an entrepreneur and focused solely on investing.

In the first period, when Gates was establishing and running a highly successful corporation, he accumulated less wealth than Liliane Bettencourt, who at that time was doing exactly nothing of value. Bettencourt did not even manage her own investments, leaving that to a few very clever finance experts, lawyers, and accountants. In other words: sitting with folded arms Bettencourt generated more wealth than Gates, founding the most vigorous corporation in the world. Bettencourt, who owned something, was doing better than Gates, who was doing something.

But then Gates left the position. He stopped doing, and started having. He became an investor, surpassing in profits both Bettencourt and Gates the entrepreneur. And again, it turned out that the market system rewarded the person who was best at doing something less than the person who gave up work and shifted to a business of owning something.

Piketty shows that this phenomenon occurs across different markets, in various nations and eras: with all other conditions equal, the market system creates a class of hereditary aristocrats, ruling the global capital and directing its allocation, even though they themselves have never done anything. The market predicts the most generous bonuses not for the most productive participants, but for those who, thanks to Fortune’s favor, emerged from a lucrative womb.

How great fortunes turn into power

Worse, winning this lottery of the luckiest hat you could be born into is not at all equivalent to gaining the qualifications to manage the inherited capital along with the umbilical cord. Liliane Bettencourt had no revolutionary business ideas, did not invent any miraculous materials or processes, and did not create any genius artworks. She merely accumulated goods through services provided by technically skilled professionals, whose duties include, among others, hiring their successors to ensure the continuity of this accumulation for the next generation of lucky ones, who won their hats at birth and will manage even greater capital and wield even more power in society.

Perhaps if these chosen ones were satisfied with the fact that the unfeeling Renfields would handle the allocation of their capital, while they themselves could indulge in chocolates and parties on yachts, it might provide some political stability. Unfortunately, they quickly realize that they come from a long line of wealthy ancestors, whose continuation will be their descendants, and they conclude that they possess some exceptional, hereditary virtue, a magical blood, which the system, as a token of recognition, rewarded with enormous wealth and the power that comes with it.

It starts to get dangerous when aristocrats, bored with accumulating wealth, begin mobilizing inherited capital to change how the rest of us live. Billionaire dilettantes are weapons of mass destruction – their special projects have a very wide radius of influence, causing, among other things, many unintended damages.

Take, for example, Bill Gates: his ideological projects are a disaster. As a patent maximalist, he funded lobbyists who managed to block South Africa’s plans to produce its own AIDS medicines under a waiver of intellectual property rights, and then used them again to prevent the Global South from producing its own COVID vaccines.

Closer to home, driven by his hatred of public institutions, Gates spent millions to dismantle public schools and replace them with so-called charter schools (funded like public schools but managed as private), specifically targeting poor and marginalized children based on race, which turned out to be catastrophic in consequences.

Gates also supported and reinforced Jeffrey Epstein’s position with his island of abuse.

From inequality to mass surveillance

That capital tends to accumulate in the hands of the already wealthy (r > g) means that these aristocrats begin to decide increasingly on issues concerning the entire society, despite their obvious incapacity to manage and lack of any democratic legitimacy.

Piketty suggests that inequality is inherently a factor that fosters political destabilization. A society ruled by fools and monsters, unchosen by voting and impossible to remove from power through elections, is doomed to extinction. Such societies eventually become so unstable that they collapse—see: the French Revolution, the world wars.

This is where Piketty joins hands with Snowden. When Snowden’s leaks erupted, much was said about mechanisms and legality of global digital surveillance by the NSA, but glaringly little attention was paid to the reasons behind all this surveillance. In 2013, the view that such spying was related to “security” was almost unquestioned. The question was rather whether spying could translate into increased security. No one asked why the situation was so uncertain and dangerous.

Looking back with the benefit of years, the answer was found in Piketty. In Capital in the 21st Century, he issues a long, fiery appeal to lawmakers and aristocrats to consider redistributive socio-political solutions (e.g., a wealth tax), which are the cheapest ways to ensure political stability. Piketty claims that the cheapest way to prevent anyone from putting a guillotine on their lawn is to build hospitals and schools. It is cheaper than paying guards and prisons for those who might otherwise build guillotines.

Today’s discussions around AI revolve around whether it really increases our productivity and whether one person will be able to do the work of two, three, four, or even a hundred others thanks to chatbots. But when it comes to surveillance, the digital revolution has definitely brought a gigantic increase in productivity.

Take, for example, the East German Stasi (GDR) spy apparatus, widely regarded as the most surveilled society in human history. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany had about 16 million people, of whom around 90,000 East Germans worked directly for the Stasi, in cooperation with another 100-200 thousand paid informants.

Approximately 200,000 people spied on 16 million residents of the GDR. That’s roughly one spy per 80 people. In comparison, the NSA was able to gather detailed data on about 6 billion internet users. In 2013, about 5 million Americans held security clearances or met the criteria to obtain them. Even if we hypothesize that every one of these people worked on NSA surveillance programs, that would still mean over 1,200 monitored persons per spy. Computers have thus allowed to multiply the scale of surveillance many times over compared to the methods used by the Stasi.

This is an increase by several orders of magnitude within just one generation! Economists dream of such leaps in productivity, fantasizing about dividends from automation.

Why spy? From Stasi and NSA to Trump and DOGE

East Germany spied on its own society because the system was so unjust and cruel that its beneficiaries understood that their neighbors were on the verge of rebellion at all times, ready to rise against them. The East German leaders were right here, and their possible mistake was not involving enough people in espionage. Why? Because in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell!

Of course, the GDR already paid more than 1.2% of its population to spy on the rest. It’s possible that East German leaders thought there was simply no more fiscal potential in their society to hire more spies, despite personnel shortages in the Stasi that could threaten social collapse. If Piketty is not mistaken, the leaders of the GDR could have solved this problem by reducing the reasons for people to want to overthrow the government. They could have distanced themselves a bit from the trough, undertaken democratic reforms, sought democratic legitimacy, and improved the material comfort of society. But that would have to come at the expense of the leaders’ power and wealth, and since they lacked the courage for such sacrifices, they lost everything.

Now the NSA enters the scene: digitalization of human civilization drastically lowered the costs of surveillance and thus (again referring to Piketty) significantly increases the scale of inequality that the world can bear before neo-aristocratic winners, lacking legitimacy, competence, and ruling with cruelty, bring everything to ruin.

The years of Trump’s rule prove this. We have reached the peak of illegal governance by billionaire dilettantes. Trump’s second term was inaugurated by DOGE’s foolishness, when followers of the Musk cult dismantled the American public administration on a gargantuan scale. Musk attacked not only foreign aid programs (though the fact that the world’s richest man indirectly murdered hundreds of thousands of the poorest children for fun is not just a sign of cruelty – it’s an act of incredible destabilization that will shake world politics for generations), but also national institutions. One member of the DOGE sect decided to destroy the part of the NIH responsible for monitoring cyclospora outbreaks.

Today, tens of thousands of Americans experience the shambles of the state. It’s no longer just a human tragedy (which we undoubtedly face), nor an economic disaster with a huge domino effect for companies relying on these barely functioning Americans, or for the agricultural sector whose products are now boycotted by millions. The fact that Bill Gates is allowed to decide how schools operate, and Elon Musk how the public healthcare system functions, leads to political chaos and diverts society from the rule of law, pushing it toward the guillotine.

Digital infrastructure of Trump’s authoritarianism

And so we return to Snowden. His revelations indeed sparked a global discussion about digital surveillance, making most digital activity worldwide now encrypted. That’s something.

However, the US government has found new ways to conduct global surveillance, often through direct cooperation with tech giants. Billionaires like Peter Thiel exploited the rift within big tech regarding open participation in surveillance and founded Palantir, whose overarching mission is to kill political opponents of the oligarchy.

Over the past decade, the steady offensive of digital technology, dominated by a cartel of gigantic global firms colluding with the US political repression system in exchange for tax breaks, turning a blind eye in antitrust proceedings, and lucrative government contracts, has led to a greater increase in the efficiency of mass surveillance than in the previous 25 years.

For over a hundred years, there has been no administration more unpopular than Trump’s. No other president in history has stolen so much on this position. Trump governs amid rampant greed and a collapse in purchasing power. Under the current US administration, there has been a gigantic increase in privatized surveillance linked to the state apparatus. Trump’s years are the years of Flock Safety.

Trump’s years are the years of Palantir.

Trump’s years are the years of facial recognition technology.

Trump’s authoritarianism is a consequence of his bad governance, and his bad governance is driven by his authoritarianism. The more he steals, destroys, wages wars by choice, and chaotic customs policies, the more he needs cameras for spying, internet surveillance, vehicle tracking, facial recognition. Every time Trump mentions a third term, abolishing elections, or restricting voting rights, he generates demand for mass surveillance to catch and imprison those who protest his words. The more mass surveillance, the safer he feels, committing unpopular, corrupt acts.

Of course, Trump is not the end. He belongs to the elite of winners in the lottery of the golden womb, whose fondness for theft, deception, destruction, and plunder results in political destabilization and forces them to allocate part of their “yacht fund” to hired security.

Take AI, for example. Trump’s years include a time when this incredibly unpopular technology is pushed into every corner of every app we need.

This is a time when corporate bosses boast recklessly about how many jobs they plan to destroy, how much they plan to cut wages for those who survive layoffs.

AI, although it cannot perform our work, a dealer of AI will surely be able to convince our boss to fire us and replace us with this invention.

And most strikingly, we are in an era where cities and towns increasingly are plundered by data centers unwanted by residents, looted by secretive local governments, silenced, and even arresting citizens demanding decisions on giving up electricity, water, land, and peace through democratic processes.

An economist would say that in this situation, we are seeking a balance between the costs of bribing city councils to approve data centers, the costs of building a smaller, more digestible data center, and the costs of silencing critics from the public. Bribing local authorities to push data centers onto city residents is cheap because many municipalities are perfectly suited for this, so data center barons can choose as if from a box of chocolates.

However, alongside the growing protests against data centers (oligarchy leads to destabilization), the costs of dealing with public opposition are also increasing. That’s why the Trump administration is teaming up with favored tech and military contractors to ramp up detailed surveillance of critics of data centers and AI.

The more surveillance, the greater the rebellion

These corporate spies do not only spy on critics of data centers. They have a whole portfolio of surveillance services to stabilize the oligarchy, targeting “antifa,” immigrant rights, and anti-ICE groups.

They are joined by equipment vendors offering corporations, the wealthy, and enclaves inhabited by both, the cheapest labor force in the security industry (see: robots are crap).

Trump and his army of gold-clad thugs have fallen into the same trap as East German leaders. Every step toward greater guard efficiency increases access to the trough, from which even more suckers can be fed. Whenever this happens, destabilization in American society increases, requiring even more guards for protection.

As the example of Minneapolis shows, policing – whether through mass surveillance, robot cops, or ICE thugs – is destabilizing in itself. Police states make their residents want to overthrow the government, which leads to increased police forces and the growth of partisan militias capable of turning everything into rubble.

Theoretically, the privileged class by birth could decide to end theft, fraud, and mutilation. The problem is that for every plutocrat who realizes that playing fair is the cheapest way to prevent a guillotine from growing in their yard someday, there are three others who cannot resist cheating. So, since destabilization is inevitable and the bills for protection will still come, it’s easier to keep scheming quietly.

In history, known as the “tragedy of the commons,” the common pasture is depleted to the last blade by shepherds, each knowing that if they do not graze their flock, someone else will. The original “tragedy of the commons” was a racist hoax committed by an academic fraud, who tried to justify the expulsion and mass extermination of Black and Brown people from America.

In reality, resource communities do not have to mean tragedy; many of our most important resources have been managed as commons for centuries.

But when the common resource is “a stable society,” the wealthy birth class cannot escape the tragic deadlock, convinced that either they will cheat us or another American aristocrat will. That’s why the demand for those who will guard, oversee, and protect continues to grow… and for guillotines as well.

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Article published on the author’s blog Pluralistic.net under a Creative Commons license. Translated from English by Dorota Blabolil-Obrębska.

The post Summer 2013, surveillance, and guillotines. What connects Snowden and Piketty? first appeared on Krytyka Polityczna.