In a digestible, highly-reccomended Feb 21 opinion column in the New York Times, Zeynep Tufekci writes about the technological motivations and implications of Elon Musk’s DOGE, placing their exploitation of data in a historical context:
“It didn’t have to be this way. Over the years, expert after expert and organization after organization warned about the dangers of consolidating so much data in the hands of governments (and corporations). As far back as 1975, Jerome Wiesner, then the president of M.I.T., warned that information technology puts “vastly more power into the hands of government and private interests” and that “the widespread collection of personal information would pose a threat to the Constitution itself,” risking the rise of an “information tyranny in the innocent pursuit of a more efficient society.”
