The Rip Current

Duke Professor of Law Nita Farahany has documented the growing industry of companies and devices that try to read your intentions, analyze your mind state, and generally get inside your brain. No, really: in her 2023 book The Battle for Your Brain she documents hundreds of instances in which everyone from employers to authoritarian regimes are hoping to use this stuff on us. And now she's looking ahead in a new book to how technology is changing our ability to think at all. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

In Estonia, on the day you’re born, you’re issued a digital ID that will follow you for the rest of your days. It identifies you at the hospital, at the police station, on your taxes, in court, at the morgue. On a recent episode of The Rip Current podcast, former Estonian president Toomas Ilves explained to me that this all-in-one system helped to root out what had been longstanding corruption under Soviet rule. Not only is cash no longer the preferred form of money, transactions with the government are digital, so individuals like police officers and doctors have no way of greasing the wheels of their system for you, and thus bribing them doesn’t do anyone any good. “ All of that disappears,” he told me. “We've gotten to the point for at least 10 years where basically … there is nothing in your interaction with the state or the government that you cannot do online.”The Rip Current is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.So when you hear that the Trump administration is paying the military contractor Palantir to stitch together a growing nationwide database that could soon connect the information held on you by a variety of federal agencies, from taxes to healthcare to student debt, you might think this will help, as a Trump executive order about collecting data has claimed, in “stopping waste, fraud, and abuse by eliminating information silos.”But as President Ilves explained to me in the clip below, there’s a crucial ingredient that makes the difference between an efficient civil service like Estonia’s and a chilling nationwide surveillance network. It is, in fact, the silos.  ILVES: It’s a huge Christmas tree. My health records are a little Christmas tree ball here. Your health records a Christmas tree ball over there….over here are my bank accounts, my traffic tickets.…that means that you cannot get a database where you get everything… So I can access my health records. I can access my bank records…[but] only my doctor is authorized to see my medical records. No one else can see my medical records unless they're authorized by me. So that  means that the police can't see it…that was the hard part. The technical stuff is easy… [the hard part is] actually figuring out…what are all the firewalls?Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik, writing in the New York Times, explained that after giving more than $113 million to Palantir to gather information from DHS and Pentagon databases, the Trump administration has bigger plans for the company.Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.And in case it’s not obvious to you, this is not Estonian transparency. It’s potentially something darker. Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said. Privacy advocates, student unions and labor rights organizations have filed lawsuits to block data access, questioning whether the government could weaponize people’s personal information.Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel (the Facebook angel investor, conservative libertarian, and patron to J.D. Vance) with CIA seed money in 2004, and made a name for itself helping the American intelligence and military community sift through an unthinkable amount of surveillance data from inside Iraq. Its software allowed an operator to find patterns—and people—in mountains of raw video. Since then, it’s contracts with the Defense Department have grown and grown. (A new DoD contract this year, separate from what the Trump administration has authorized so far, will pay it nearly $800 million.)By the time the American military withdrew from Afghanistan, Palantir’s technologies had evolved to the point of facilitating a detailed biometrics database in that country, one that collected identifying information, but also made predictions about future behavior based on patterns of life. In her 2021 book First Platoon, Annie Jacobsen recounts a conversation with a military operator who had used Palantir in Afghanistan. “The fact that there’s other moves afoot to actually use Palantir in the United States, I think that’s very, very bad, because of the type of 360 [degree] metrics that are collected,” Kevin warns. “I’m not kind of saying, ‘Hey, I’m scared of Big Brother.’ That’s not my view. But that is exactly what Palantir is capable of.” The company has, like many technology companies, sought to distance itself from any controversy around how its products are used by essentially blaming its customers. On its blog, to which it refers reporters seeking comment, it writesOur software and services are used under direction from the organisations that license our products: these organisations define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts in which analysis is conducted.But a group of former Palantir employees have written to protest that how the technology is used is a deepening problem, and should be the company’s responsibility, at least in part. They warn against “the increasingly violent rhetoric which the company is employing today and the actions to which it might become complicit in the future.”The company wrote in its IPO filings that it wants to be the “default operating system for data across the U.S. government,” and once a government agency becomes dependent on the company’s Foundry system, the subscription model can serve to lock that agency into a relationship that’s far easier to continue than to end. And its leader, CEO Alex Karp, publicly evangelizes a need to empower a new military-industrial complex to strengthen the West, and actively celebrates the power of his products. He boasted on an earnings call this year that “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them.”“Big Tech, including Palantir, is increasingly complicit, normalizing authoritarianism under the guise of a ‘revolution’ led by oligarchs,” the Palantir ex-employees wrote. “We must resist this trend.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

Paris Martineau, an investigative tech reporter known for her impactful work leading to CEO resignations, dives into the shifting dynamics between the tech industry and journalism. She discusses the growing tensions and adversarial views toward the media from Silicon Valley. Martineau highlights the challenges of sourcing information, navigating trust, and the disillusionment within tech culture. She reflects on the ethical tensions in venture capital and how technological influence shapes political engagement, underscoring the crucial role of journalism in holding powerful tech companies accountable.

Paid subscribers to The Rip Current get an early look at this, the ninth episode of the podcast. Thank you for being part of what we do!The Rip Current is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Under its fourth president, Toomas Ilves, Estonia went from a struggling newly liberated democracy to one of the most technologically sophisticated nations in the world. In this hourlong conversation, Ilves describes what Estonia can teach us about how to fight corruption through technology, truly root out waste and fraud, and empower everyday citizens — and what it looks like when things go the wrong way. Ilves and I were fellows together at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where he taught me how Soviet rule — and the kleptocracy and favoritism it made possible — stalled the cultural and economic development of his nation, like fruit in a deep freeze. He’s uniquely qualified to speak to what it’s like when only the powerful and their friends have the good things, and the rest of the population is relegated to a lower status, and he knows better than anyone what’s at stake in the long term when that happens. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

I struggled with my own drinking habit for years, and I’m the kind of guy that has to be told to put the goddamn phone down — sometimes by the phone itself. So I think about addiction a great deal, and I find that everyone around me talks about their own habits in terms of addiction. And I decided to bring in an expert on addiction to define what it is, and where it’s headed in this country.America pioneered the advertising, product design, and behavioral science that has made addiction one of our nation’s biggest industries, after all. From gambling to opioids, America has always been great at getting customers hooked. And yet as a culture, we blame addiction not on the industries that invent these products and push these habits — but on the customers who fall into the trap.Now technology is inventing entirely new forms of addiction, from phone-based sports gambling to our dependence on sycophantic chatbots for company. Dr. Keith Humphreys is a psychiatrist at Stanford, a researcher at the Veterans’ Administration, and has worked for decades to understand drug and alcohol addiction, testifying before congress and working with state and federal officials to navigate the drug-infested waters we all find ourselves in at the moment. But he’s also deeply humane on the subject, and I find him both enlightening and very reassuring. Here’s hoping he helps you understand the difference between habit and addiction the way he’s helped me — have a look at his book Addiction: A Very Short Introduction, which I found fascinating — and whatever you’re grappling with, I hope you take some comfort from this episode. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

When I was writing The Loop: How A.I. is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back, I asked everyone around me what I should be reading. My thesis was that we needed to immediately begin resisting the companies trying to sell us A.I., because they were likely to amplify the worst parts of being human, rather than the best parts. (And that’… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

Before she was an associate professor at Georgetown and a cofounder of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, which measured the disinformation campaigns at work in multiple presidential elections, Renee DiResta was a new mom at home getting bombarded with anti-vaccine ads on Facebook. “Why are they hitting me with this stuff?” she wondered, and her efforts t… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

When I was at a particularly despairing place about how quickly the world seemed to be doing exactly what I tried to warn against in my book The Loop: How AI is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back, I got an email out of the blue from Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, an icon of my early life thinking about the Internet. We’d never met. Here’s what he wrote me:Thank you for an incredibly valuable book — which complements and completes one I'm working on just now about AI and democracy. I was lost without it, but now I'm found! Endless gratitudeMan did that turn my week around. His encouragement helped me get up the courage to launch The Rip Current, and when I started putting a podcast together here I invited him on, and this episode is the result.Thanks for listening to The Rip Current podcast! This episode is available immediately to paid subscribers, and free subscribers get it a week later. Send it to someone in your life who thinks about technology, democracy, or corruption.At the end of my time with NBC News I talked a lot about the notion of “future crimes.” I thought of these as the kinds of misdeeds, made possible by technology, that are clearly intolerable in a civilized society, but fall outside the current bounds of the law. So when people talk about being “originalist” when it comes to the law and legal precedent, it makes me nuts. The idea that the founding fathers should be expected to have known exactly what was coming in the grand American Experiment, much less what new technology would be doing to it today — well, to someone who has covered the unexpected consequences of innovation for all this time, that’s crazy.Lessig agrees, and his life exemplifies this idea. He’s the author of 13 books, which run the gamut from his early belief in the need to rewrite copyright to make culture as open as possible to his latest book, still in the works, that he told me will argue technology has put democracy, not to mention human society, into a terrible dilemma. I found him open and thoughtful, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

The public duels between celebrities like Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni aren’t just gossip fuel. They’re a vast business, one that’s also a thriving laboratory for experimenting with influence and public perception. Kat Tenbarge reports on these propaganda wars at Spitfire News, where she brings the dogged investigative techniques she honed at NBC New… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe

A special reading from the latest issue of The Rip Current, about the Trump tariffs, the the idiocy of the math, the effects he won’t see coming, and the reaction from CEOs, world leaders, and the markets. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theripcurrent.substack.com/subscribe