I hate hate hate the guillotines outside of Jeff Bezos’s home in DC. That is unambiguously evil, and must be condemned without qualification.

But that’s not to say that what Jeff Bezos stands for is unproblematic. Look at this:

Amazon is hiring ‘intelligence analysts’, who should work
on ‘sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company’ and spy on ‘organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders’.

Via @jfslowik / https://t.co/bE2Hf4BV2m pic.twitter.com/rsSop6EzoH

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 1, 2020

Amazon’s list of enemies, to be targeted by their corporate intelligence agency:

‘hate groups, policy initiatives, geopolitical issues, terrorism, law enforcement, and organized labor’

…plus ‘activist groups’ and ‘hostile political leaders’. pic.twitter.com/cCyfCGV6UF

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 1, 2020

Here’s another Amazon job listing with a similar description:https://t.co/CyguNTUIRW

In both cases, ‘preferred qualifications’ include:

‘Previous experience in Intelligence analysis and or watch officer skill set in the intelligence community, the military, law enforcement…’ pic.twitter.com/EpvcCH4ZIk

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 1, 2020

So, Amazon’s internal intelligence agency will be monitoring “hate groups” and “hostile political leaders.” If I were Sen. Josh Hawley, I would be careful what I ordered on Amazon Prime. I would be careful, period.

And who, by the way, is a “hate group,” for Amazon’s purposes? Why does a retailer need to keep track of “hate groups”? Which “hate groups”?

Like you, I bet, I do a lot of business with Amazon, which makes my life better in many way. But this chilling bit of information about America’s most beloved corporate behemoth ought to be a reminder of the power of these entities. Whistleblowers like Google’s James Damore have discussed the internal culture of contempt at Google for anything not rigidly progressive. In my post yesterday about the bourgeois totalitarian Design Mom, I quoted the popular influencer saying that she wishes Trump supporters would be cut off from being able to shop in certain stores, and banned from using the Internet. That’s a hysterical wine mom tipsy on Sancerre and rage, but don’t simply dismiss her.

Why not? Consider how your life would change if you woke up tomorrow morning and found that Amazon would no longer sell you things, because its corporate intelligence office discovered your name on a list of contributors to an SPLC-designated “hate group” (like, for example, the completely mainstream and above-board Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law non-profit that does pro bono work defending religious liberty). As a “hater,” Amazon doesn’t want your money. It doesn’t want you to have access to its streaming video, its Kindle shop, or any of its services, because it has determined that you are part of a “hate group.” So it cuts you off.

Would that be legal? I don’t know. Remember the Virginia restaurant that refused to serve Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, because its owner hate Trump? That was obnoxious, but within the legal rights of the restaurant. I don’t know how that would work for a national online retailer. Are you going to file a lawsuit against the world’s biggest retailer to fight for your right to do business with it? Most people wouldn’t.

It may not be legal now, but is it really so hard to imagine that under a Biden administration, or some other future administration, there might arise an initiative to “fight hate” by allowing retailers to deny access to goods and services to those who are affiliated with officially designated “hate groups”? And they don’t have to cut you off. Back in 2014, Amazon got into a dispute with the publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing, and used its power to twist Hachette’s arm in negotiations. 

It didn’t stop selling Hachette books, but it told customers that their order of a Hachette title would take four to six weeks to deliver. I know this because not only was it widely reported, but it also affected me: my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is a Hachette book. Writers like Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, and others were furious with Amazon for holding us and our careers hostage to its fight with Hachette. But Amazon didn’t care. It really is that powerful.

So, Mrs. Hatey McHaterface, you might still be able to buy from Amazon, but unfortunately your shipments may take a month to get there. Sorry! Should have thought about that before donating to the Family Research Council, or, as your online activity indicates, reading the Catholic trad website Church Militant (both of whom are officially designated SPLC hate groups).

Amazon already uses SPLC’s designation to prevent its customers from donating through its Amazon Smile program to any group that the SPLC calls a hate group. This strategy is not alien to Amazon.

One of the big messages I want to get through to readers in my upcoming book Live Not By Lies is that the soft totalitarianism I see coming is not exclusively, or even at this point primarily, coming down through the State. It’s going to come through institutions of civil society, and through big business — Woke Capitalism. The idea that totalitarianism is purely a state phenomenon is an outdated relic of the Cold War. It would be if this totalitarianism were to become hard. But the soft version will be able to engineer compliance without having to employ the crude methods of a police state. From Live Not By Lies (which will be published at the end of this month):

Why should corporations and institutions not use the information they harvest to manufacture consent to some beliefs and ideologies and to manipulate the public into rejecting others?

In recent years, the most obvious interventions have come from social media companies deplatforming users for violating terms of service. Twitter and Facebook routinely boot users who violate its standards, such as promoting violence, sharing pornography, and the like. YouTube, which has two billion active users, has demonetized users who made money from their channels but who crossed the line with content YouTube deemed offensive. To be fair to these platform managers, there really are vile people who want to use these networks to advocate for evil things.

But who decides what crosses the line? Facebook bans what it calls “expression that . . . has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others.” To call that a capacious definition is an understatement. Twitter boots users who “misgender” or “deadname” transgendered people. Calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce,” or using masculine pronouns when referring to the transgendered celebrity, is grounds for removal.

To be sure, being kicked off of social media isn’t like being sent to Siberia. But companies like PayPal have used the guidance of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to make it impossible for certain right-of-center individuals and organizations—including the mainstream religious-liberty law advocates Alliance Defending Freedom—to use its services. Though the bank issued a general denial when asked, JPMorgan Chase has been credibly accused of closing the accounts of an activist it associates with the alt-right. In 2018, Citigroup and Bank of America announced plans to stop doing some business with gun manufacturers.

It is not at all difficult to imagine that banks, retailers, and service providers that have access to the kind of consumer data extracted by surveillance capitalists would decide to punish individuals affiliated with political, religious, or cultural groups those firms deem to be antisocial. Silicon Valley is well known to be far to the left on social and cultural issues, a veritable mecca of the cult of social justice. Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty. These are the kinds of people who will be making decisions about access to digital life and to commerce.

The rising generation of corporate leaders take pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

China is already demonstrating how to do it with its social credit system. And because the overwhelming majority of commerce in China is electronic (China is pushing hard to go cashless), the state can cut any dissident off from participating in the economy with relative ease. Flip of a switch.

In Live Not By Lies, I ask the question: can it happen here?

Of course it can. The technological capability to implement such a system of discipline and control in the West already exists. The only barriers preventing it from being imposed are political resistance by unwilling majorities and constitutional resistance by the judiciary.

American culture is far more individualistic than Chinese culture, so that political resistance will almost certainly prevent Chinese-style hard totalitarianism from gaining a foothold here. But activating the broad reach of technology, especially the data-gathering technology that consumers have already accepted into their daily lives, and making it work to serve social justice goals is eminently feasible.

If democratic majorities come to believe that transferring social control to governmental and private institutional elites is necessary to guarantee virtue and safety, then it will happen.

As of this writing, the global online payments transfer system PayPal refuses to let white supremacist groups use its services. It’s hard to object to that, though First Amendment purists will feel some distress. But PayPal also stigmatizes some mainstream conservative groups. And as we have seen, some major banks now have policies that deny service to firearms manufacturers and sellers—this, even though guns are legal to make and to own under the Second Amendment. Note well that the government did not force these giant financial firms to adopt these policies. What is to stop private entities that control access to money and markets from redlining individuals, churches, and other organizations they deem to be bad social actors from denying access to commerce? China
shows that it can be done, and how to do it.

Y’all know that I’m talking about my book a lot because it will be for sale on September 29, and I hope you’ll pre-order it, but I am also genuinely alarmed by how fast things are going. I finished the final version of the manuscript in March, but already the scenarios that I write about are coming to pass, or getting close to it. Take a look at this posted the other day by a reader who has a review copy:

Yes, it’s true. We are living in Big History now. We cannot afford to be caught off guard. I’m worried that a lot of people will assume that if Trump is re-elected, that the threat from soft totalitarianism will have been averted. Not true. Not true at all. It won’t have an advocate in the executive branch, which is something to be grateful for, but I guarantee that all the woke capitalists, the media, academia, and the professions will double down on fighting “fascism” through wokeness. If you are planning to vote for Trump, don’t think that a Trump victory will solve this problem. In some ways it will slow down the drift toward soft totalitarianism, but in many other ways it will speed it up, as those in charge of corporations and institutions freak out and respond by intensifying their radicalism.

This not a reason to vote for Trump, or not to vote for Trump; it’s just saying that the phenomenon of soft totalitarianism is far, far bigger than the presidency. Again: we can’t afford to be caught unprepared.