While food assistance, healthcare and other forms of social reproduction become more conditional, the American state is expanding military, technological and administrative capacities tied to strategic accumulation and imperial command. Private technology monopolies, defense contractors and venture capital increasingly meet the state inside AI, cloud computing, commercial space and data infrastructure, leaving ownership private while public power builds the market and carries the strategic burden. As survival, citizenship and political participation become more dependent on classification, the same historical movement produces new forms of population legibility, ideological discipline, security management and selective material incorporation. Weaponized Information argues that these developments are best understood not as one finished authoritarian machine, but as an uneven and contested process of technofascist consolidation emerging from the contradiction between concentrated capitalist power and the declining foundations of secure mass incorporation.
Prince Kapone | Weaponized Information | September 15, 2026
Four Headlines Before Breakfast
Before breakfast on September 15, four stories were sitting beside one another on my morning newsfeed like pieces from four different puzzles. The first came from the sky. The United States had acknowledged active weapons in orbit for the first time. Air Force secretary Troy Meink didn’t identify the systems, but the admission crossed a line. What governments had discussed for decades as doctrine, capability and strategic possibility was now being acknowledged as deployed military hardware circling above the planet. The arsenal had climbed another rung off the earth.
Another headline came from somewhere much closer to the ground. Millions had disappeared from SNAP, the federal food-assistance program through which working-class and poor families buy groceries. Roughly five million people had fallen from the rolls between July 2025 and May 2026, including more than a million children, while new work requirements, administrative burdens and federal cost shifts threatened further losses. Whatever else America couldn’t afford, apparently the problem requiring stricter accounting was dinner.
A third story came from the stadium. After Macklemore used an appearance on Ed Sheeran’s tour to say “Free Palestine” and speak about Gaza and the occupied West Bank, Messina Touring Group said venues scheduled for later dates wouldn’t permit concerts with him on the lineup. The promoter removed him from the remaining support dates rather than lose the shows. No law had prohibited Macklemore from speaking. No censor had torn the microphone from his hand. The punishment operated through access to the privately and publicly entangled infrastructure through which speech reaches hundreds of thousands of people.
Then came the fourth headline. New data from International IDEA showed that U.S. democracy indicators had fallen to levels at or near the bottom of the organization’s fifty-year dataset. Judicial independence, freedom of expression, access to justice, effective legislative constraint and other measures were deteriorating. The report didn’t describe a country that had simply stopped holding elections. Its warning was more uncomfortable than that: institutions can remain standing while their ability to restrain concentrated power is steadily weakened.
Four headlines. Four departments of the news cycle. Space warfare belongs under science or national security. SNAP belongs under domestic policy. Macklemore belongs under music. Democracy belongs under politics. File the stories correctly and nothing strange has happened. The Pentagon has its business. The welfare office has its business. Stadium operators have theirs. The White House, Congress and courts have theirs. The filing cabinet does a remarkable amount of ideological work simply by keeping every drawer closed.
Put the stories on the same table and the compartments begin to look less convincing. One of the richest states in human history is expanding its ability to wage war beyond the atmosphere while millions of people lose food assistance. Political expression remains formally protected while access to the infrastructure needed to reach a mass audience can be withdrawn. New capacities of military command are appearing while institutions built to constrain political power register sustained deterioration. These aren’t identical events. But they expose different pressures moving through the same society.
There is no need to invent a command room where somebody ordered all four. The evidence shows no such thing. History usually works through something messier and more material: agencies with different mandates, corporations fighting for profit, political institutions pursuing their own authority and ruling-class interests being organized unevenly across them. Under common pressures, institutions that began with different purposes can still be transformed in directions that make their functions increasingly compatible.
That developing relation is what Weaponized Information means by technofascist consolidation. The term names a process already underway, not a completed system waiting to be unveiled like some secret machine behind a curtain. Its parts retain different histories, legal powers and institutional boundaries. The question is whether those parts are being reorganized in ways that increasingly serve the same larger requirements of capitalist rule.
Before asking what the technology is doing, then, there is a simpler material question. The American state plainly hasn’t run out of money, machinery or administrative power. The issue is where that power is being built, where it is being withdrawn, and whose security it is being organized to defend.
The State Has Money. The Question Is What It Is Building.
The first mistake is to call this a shrinking state. A government capable of financing weapons, detention centers, border infrastructure, military AI, commercial space systems and a sprawling national-security apparatus hasn’t somehow forgotten how to spend money. It is spending plenty. The material question is what kinds of capacity are being expanded, what kinds are being allowed to decay, and which social relations those choices reproduce.
The contradiction sits inside the same federal legislation. The 2025 reconciliation act changed SNAP eligibility, financing and administration in ways the Congressional Budget Office projects will reduce federal SNAP spending by $211 billion through 2035. The same law altered Medicaid enough for CBO to project roughly $1.2 trillion less in Medicaid outlays and 13.1 million fewer enrollees by 2035. Yet Congress didn’t suddenly discover the virtue of an empty Treasury. The law simultaneously provided an estimated $350 billion for defense, homeland security and immigration enforcement.
That money includes ships, munitions, air and missile defense, border barriers, more immigration agents, expanded detention capacity and more immigration judges. The Pentagon alone received $156 billion in mandatory defense funding through 2029. Washington isn’t losing the capacity to act. Congress is deciding which capacities deserve expansion and which social obligations can be cut, pushed onto states or made harder to claim.
SNAP makes that choice visible at the grocery counter. Between July 2025 and May 2026, participation fell by roughly five million, about 12 percent nationwide. The decline began before every provision of the new law took full effect, so no single statute explains every lost case. The policy direction is still clear. Work requirements expanded. More costs shifted toward states. Payment-error rules increased fiscal pressure on administrators. Federal food assistance became more conditional at the same time Washington reduced its own projected responsibility for financing it.
Arizona shows why this process can’t be reduced to some futuristic algorithm quietly deleting the poor. More than 400,000 Arizonans lost SNAP after July 2025, nearly half the state’s participants. But the immediate machinery was painfully ordinary. The Department of Economic Security had laid off about 500 workers, including roughly 160 eligibility specialists, while applications were slowed by what the agency itself described as “1980s technology.” People were being governed through understaffed offices, jammed phone lines, missed interviews and administrative choke points.
That tells us something important about the state taking shape. Technofascist consolidation doesn’t require every agency to become a gleaming digital command center. Advanced capacity can be concentrated where ruling-class strategy demands speed, surveillance, military power and control while the institutions poor and working people depend on are left with staff shortages, paperwork queues and obsolete systems.
Call it differentiated modernization. One wing of the state gets satellites, machine learning, classified cloud infrastructure, autonomous systems and billion-dollar procurement pipelines. Another gets broken phones and a backlog. The contradiction isn’t between a modern state and an old one. Both exist in the same building. What differs is the social function being served.
The history behind that divergence matters. Postwar U.S. capitalism developed a particular form of class compromise in which powerful labor struggles, enormous industrial expansion and unrivaled U.S. productive power helped force and finance real material concessions. Stable industrial jobs, union contracts, rising wages, employer benefits, public investment, mass higher education and federally supported homeownership incorporated large sections of the imperial-core working class into the system. The GI Bill alone opened education and housing assistance to millions of veterans while helping stabilize the postwar economy.
But there was never one universal American bargain. Federal housing policy itself helped draw the racial boundary around incorporation. Historical FHA rules embedded racial discrimination into mortgage underwriting, while Black veterans and families encountered barriers to the suburban property system the state was helping build. The settlement remained capitalist: bosses still owned the factories and workers still produced profit. It was also racialized, patriarchal and imperial. Large sections of the white working class received forms of wage, property and public investment that Black workers, Indigenous nations, migrants and others encountered on sharply different terms. The bargain softened class antagonism for some without abolishing exploitation for anybody.
From the 1970s forward, capital began dismantling many of the institutions through which workers had forced themselves into that settlement. Union power weakened. Public functions were privatized or contracted out. Finance expanded its reach into everyday life. Welfare was pushed toward workfare, means testing and administrative discipline. Jamie Peck’s research on workfare restructuring showed how the shift tied subsistence more tightly to labor-market participation while transferring costs and risks downward toward local governments and poor households. At the same time, prisons expanded, policing intensified, military expenditure remained politically protected and the state repeatedly stepped in when financial capital threatened to wreck itself.
The state didn’t withdraw from capitalism. It changed where and how it intervened. It became less willing to guarantee broad material security while remaining perfectly capable of defending property, organizing markets, subsidizing strategic industry, disciplining labor, managing borders, enforcing contracts and projecting military power. The old sermon about “big government” and “small government” hides that class relation. Capital has never needed a uniformly small state. It needs a state strong where ownership and accumulation require strength and conveniently stingy where workers demand a larger claim on the wealth they produce.
The present conjuncture drives that older transformation further. SNAP recipients face tighter conditions and fiscal pressure on the agencies administering their benefits. Medicaid recipients face new eligibility and enrollment requirements. Border enforcement, military production and strategic technology receive new money and institutional capacity. Social provision survives because capitalism still needs people fed, children raised, labor reproduced and enough stability to keep warehouses, hospitals, ports, factories and server farms running. But reproduction is becoming more conditional while command is becoming more strategic.
The weapon in orbit and the empty SNAP card aren’t connected because Congress moved one identical dollar from a grocery account into a satellite. Their connection lies deeper, in the class direction of state capacity itself. Once that becomes visible, “the state” can no longer remain an ownerless abstraction. Somebody builds the systems receiving the investment. Somebody holds the patents, stocks and contracts. Somebody takes the profit. Follow the capacity upward and the trail runs directly into capital.
Follow the Money Upward, Follow the Machine Into the State
If the state is becoming technologically formidable in some places while social provision deteriorates in others, ownership moves to the center of the argument. Somebody builds the satellites, models, cloud networks and weapons platforms receiving all this public money. Somebody owns the patents. Somebody holds the stock. Somebody collects the contract and carries the asset forward after the government has helped create the market for it. Follow that trail upward and selective state modernization reveals its class content: strategic power is being built through one of the most profitable circuits of monopoly accumulation.
The old military-industrial complex never stopped being a business. Brown University’s Costs of War project calculates that private corporations received about $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts between 2020 and 2024, roughly 54 percent of the department’s discretionary spending during those five years. Five old-line weapons giants alone took $771 billion: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. Whatever poetry Washington wraps around national defense, there is a very large invoice attached to the flag.
But the class composition of that war economy is changing. The old primes still manufacture missiles, aircraft, submarines and the hulking steel skeleton of American military power. Alongside them, a newer fraction of capital is fighting for a larger cut: venture-backed firms selling autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, data integration, commercial satellites and software-defined warfare. A Quincy Institute study traces billions in private finance flowing toward military technology through firms such as Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz, financing companies including Palantir, Anduril and SpaceX. Their pitch to Washington is simple: the traditional contractors build too slowly; Silicon Valley can build the next war faster.
That fight is taking place inside capital, not against the war economy. Startups complain that Lockheed and RTX monopolize procurement. Legacy contractors defend programs already producing billions in revenue. Venture capital wants acquisition rules loosened so portfolio companies can reach Pentagon money before their investors lose patience. Quincy also documents the revolving door carrying former military officials into defense startups and investment firms. The dispute is over which owners will command the next layer of military accumulation, not whether war should remain a market.
The Pentagon is actively organizing that market. Decades of military support for computing and aerospace have now developed into direct dependence on commercial technological infrastructure. In May 2026, the Defense Department announced agreements involving eight technology companies—Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, SpaceX, Oracle and Reflection—to deploy advanced AI capabilities on highly classified military networks. The stated purpose included synthesizing large volumes of information, improving situational understanding and speeding decisions for warfighters. Commercial AI was no longer sitting outside the classified fence selling software over it. The Pentagon was wiring privately owned models into the information systems through which military command operates.
Commercial space capital has moved in the same direction. In June, the director of the Space Systems Command Commercial Space Office wrote that without commercial dual-use technologies, the United States couldn’t maintain space superiority or win a future conflict in space. That is a remarkable admission from the military itself. Private firms are becoming operational dependencies inside strategic command.
Yet the property title stays private. Washington creates demand, carries strategic risk, opens classified networks, finances procurement and organizes whole markets around military requirements. Corporations retain equity, patents, software, valuations and future commercial opportunities. Public power constructs the field. Private capital keeps the property title.
The polite phrase “public-private partnership” hides how concrete this relation is. The state controls taxation, procurement, law, secrecy and military force. The firms control productive capacities the state increasingly needs but can’t quickly reproduce on its own. The Pentagon gets commercial innovation without having to own the companies. Technology capital gets one of the largest guaranteed customers on earth, backed by a Treasury that doesn’t cancel the order because households decide they already own enough missiles.
The money follows the relationship into politics. Public Citizen found that more than 3,500 federal lobbyists worked on artificial-intelligence issues in 2025, more than one quarter of all federal lobbyists. Within the defense sector alone, it identified 259 AI lobbyists representing 57 clients. Anduril employed 35; Palantir employed 16. Venture funds, weapons producers, software firms and trade groups aren’t waiting politely outside Congress while lawmakers design the technological future. They pay people to work the halls while procurement rules, subsidies and regulations are being written.
The tax system shows the same class direction from another angle. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that more than 70 percent of the net 2026 tax cuts from the 2025 law go to the richest fifth of Americans, while less than 1 percent goes to the poorest fifth. In a separate analysis, ITEP found that six giant corporations received $83 billion in federal corporate tax breaks during 2025. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta sat among them—the same class of technology monopolies positioned around cloud infrastructure, AI and the wider technological systems increasingly useful to the state.
That property relation is racialized as well as class concentrated. ITEP’s analysis of corporate ownership and race, using Federal Reserve wealth data, finds that white households hold a vastly disproportionate share of corporate equity and therefore receive a disproportionate share of the benefits attached to corporate tax reductions. That doesn’t turn white workers into capitalists. It shows how a property system built through generations of racial exclusion still concentrates ownership upward and disproportionately into white hands. Class rule and racial hierarchy meet in the asset itself.
None of this requires a ruling class that thinks with one brain. Legacy contractors fight startups. Technology companies quarrel with government agencies over military uses, pricing and control. Investors compete viciously because the contracts are real and the profits enormous. A ruling class is not a church congregation reciting one creed. It is a field of competing owners whose conflicts unfold inside a property system they all depend on.
The capitalist state organizes that field. It decides which industries are strategic. It funds research, guarantees demand, sets procurement rules, builds classified environments and uses contracts to impose the conditions under which firms enter military systems. Individual corporations retain their property and pursue their own interests, but public power increasingly structures the conditions under which military and technological capital accumulate.
That is the emerging national-security technology fraction: legacy weapons capital, Big Tech, frontier AI firms, commercial space companies, venture-backed defense startups and finance being pulled together by state-created markets and strategic demand. Their conflicts remain real. So does the direction of development. Private monopoly ownership survives while the state increasingly organizes its strategic accumulation.
And that contradiction comes back down from the classified network to everyday life. Capital can build satellites, models, autonomous systems and data centers without rebuilding the older institutions that once tied large sections of the working class more securely to industrial growth. Public money can expand technological capital without guaranteeing food, housing or stable work below it. People still have to eat, labor, move, raise children and survive. Once those necessities are distributed on increasingly conditional terms, somebody has to decide who qualifies.
Once Life Becomes Conditional, the Population Must Become Legible
Once access to the means of life depends on conditions, somebody has to check the conditions. A work requirement needs proof of work. An exemption needs proof of disability, age, caregiving or homelessness. A means-tested benefit needs income records. Immigration law needs a status determination. A boss measuring productivity wants timestamps, locations, output and pace. The more survival is broken into conditional claims, the more people must expose themselves to the institutions deciding whether they qualify.
This logic is older than the computer. Virginia Eubanks shows in Automating Inequality how the poorhouse didn’t disappear when the ledger became a database. Indiana’s automated welfare experiment centralized call centers, documents and electronic verification inside a system already organized around suspicion and diversion. The machine didn’t invent the political decision to make poor people prove their deservingness. It increased the administrative capacity of an institution already built to separate the deserving from the undeserving. Eubanks describes the automated system becoming a gatekeeper rather than a facilitator while poverty rose and access to assistance continued falling (Automating Inequality, pp. 64–98).
Oscar Gandy gives that machinery its political-economic form in The Panoptic Sort: identification, classification, evaluation. Institutions gather information because they intend to act on the category they assign. A credit score changes the price of money. A parole classification changes freedom of movement. An eligibility ruling determines whether groceries can be bought. The important question isn’t simply how much the state or corporation knows. It is what the classification authorizes (The Panoptic Sort, pp. 14–18).
The contemporary SNAP system makes that relation brutally concrete. Research using administrative records finds that work requirements increase denials, including procedural denials. Earlier research found that imposing SNAP work requirements increased exits by 23 percentage points after eighteen months and cut participation among subjected adults by 53 percent while producing no detectable employment increase. Homeless adults were especially likely to disappear from the rolls. The administrative condition didn’t magically summon a job into existence. It created another checkpoint between hunger and food.
Washington is simultaneously building the informational infrastructure through which those checkpoints can be administered. USDA has created a National SNAP Information Database in a FedRAMP High cloud environment. Its authorized uses include program administration, Treasury’s Do Not Pay system, Food and Nutrition Act investigations, fraud and abuse inquiries, approved contractors and limited law-enforcement purposes defined by statute. Recipient records therefore become more centralized, searchable and administratively interoperable, even while legal boundaries continue to restrict who may use them and for what.
Technology itself doesn’t decide which side of that relation wins. USDA’s own study of robotic process automation found that Georgia used automation to lower payment-error rates and New Mexico used it to save recipients time when reporting address changes. A computer can automate harassment. It can also remove paperwork. Lawmakers define eligibility. Administrators build incentives. Agencies hire or fire workers. Institutions decide what counts as compliance. Technology gives those decisions speed and scale.
The same struggle over legibility reaches into the workplace. The National Employment Law Project has documented digital worker surveillance used to track location, pace, scheduling, performance and discipline. The boss once needed a foreman walking the floor. Now the warehouse scanner, delivery app or productivity dashboard can register the worker continuously. The capitalist demand is familiar: squeeze more labor from the hour. What changes is the density of measurement. The worker’s activity becomes a stream of machine-readable events management can compare, rank and punish.
Palantir shows how the same technical form can travel across institutions. Sarah Brayne traces the company from the CIA-linked In-Q-Tel ecosystem into federal intelligence, immigration and local policing (Predict and Surveil, p. 17). ICE now uses Palantir infrastructure inside its enforcement apparatus, with systems built to turn scattered records into searchable profiles and operational leads. The ACLU documents Palantir’s expanding role in the deportation apparatus, where information stops being an archive and becomes a way to locate people for removal. USDA doesn’t have to become the Pentagon for classificatory technologies developed in one field to migrate into another.
Commercial surveillance widens the field again. The ACLU’s records litigation has shown DHS purchasing commercial location data harvested through ordinary digital life. The state doesn’t have to build every sensor itself. Phones generate location trails, apps collect identifiers, brokers aggregate the records and government agencies buy access. Commercial extraction becomes raw material for state legibility.
This is where Simone Browne’s Dark Matters is indispensable. The American state didn’t discover identification with smartphones. Browne traces a much longer history through slave passes, runaway notices, branding, lantern laws and the Book of Negroes, showing how surveillance helped produce and police racial boundaries rather than merely observing them (Dark Matters, pp. 19–22). Who had to carry proof? Who could move without explanation? Whose presence after dark became an administrative problem? The devices change. The politics of differentiated visibility has a much longer life.
That racial history is still active inside supposedly neutral administration. A peer-reviewed study of SNAP work-requirement waivers from 2005 to 2018 found that counties in Republican-controlled states and counties with larger Black populations were less likely to receive waivers, even after accounting for unemployment; the racial difference was especially pronounced in Republican-controlled states. A rule written in universal language can still be administered through institutions shaped by racial power.
But classification also produces resistance. Tribal governments challenged the new SNAP and Medicaid work requirements and won exemptions. The Navajo Nation reported that Native people were exempted after Tribal governments pressed federal treaty and trust obligations. Indigenous sovereignty changed the rule itself. The population being classified is never simply raw material waiting for administration.
The emerging data state is therefore less interesting as an all-seeing eye than as a system for making selected people actionable. Public records, commercial traces, eligibility files, workplace metrics and specialized databases matter because institutions can attach consequences to the categories they produce. Eligible or ineligible. Employed or noncompliant. Exempt or sanctionable. Authorized or removable. Information acquires political force when it can change food access, wages, mobility, scrutiny or freedom. WI’s further inference is that repeated exclusion from those systems can help produce populations treated as increasingly disposable; “disposable” is the social relation produced through those decisions, not a box checked inside a database.
Once the worker, welfare recipient and migrant have been made legible in this way, the political citizen doesn’t remain outside the process. Voting also depends on records, classifications and institutional decisions about who belongs. The electorate itself can become a population to be verified, cross-checked and acted upon.
The Citizen Becomes a Dataset Too
Once the worker, welfare recipient and migrant have been made administratively legible, the political citizen doesn’t remain outside the process. Voting itself depends on classification. A person must be identified, registered, assigned to a jurisdiction, recognized as eligible, attached to an address, placed on a roll and counted inside a district. The ballot may be secret, but the machinery deciding who receives one is built from records. The political people don’t simply appear on Election Day. Institutions produce the electorate before the electorate can act.
That gives the current struggle over voter data a significance larger than another partisan fight over election procedure. Since May 2025, the Justice Department has demanded election records from nearly every state and Washington, D.C., including statewide voter-registration files containing information such as driver’s-license numbers and partial Social Security numbers. By August 2026, DOJ had sued 30 states and the District of Columbia after they refused to turn over the requested data; 23 of those suits had already been dismissed. Washington is trying to assemble voter information on a national scale while states and courts fight over whether it possesses the authority to compel it.
The conflict widened in March 2026, when Executive Order 14399 directed the Department of Homeland Security to construct state-by-state citizenship lists using information from USCIS, the Social Security Administration and other federal databases. It also sought to push federal authority deeper into mail-ballot administration. In June, a federal court voided key provisions and barred federal agencies from using them to interfere with voter-roll maintenance or mail voting in the plaintiff states. The attempt at centralization was real. So was the institutional resistance.
The struggle became even more revealing when election administration crossed directly into the national-security budget. In June, DHS attached five election-related conditions to FEMA’s roughly $1 billion Homeland Security Grant Program, money intended to help state and local governments prevent and respond to terrorism. Governments that failed to satisfy the conditions could lose 20 percent of their grants. Among the requirements was use of the federal SAVE system to check citizenship across an entire state’s voter-registration database, along with citizenship checks for election workers, administrators and vendors. Cities and counties sued.
Look at the mediation. Antiterrorism money becomes leverage over election administration. A department built around border control, emergency management and national security acquires a fiscal tool for pressing local governments to alter how they verify the electorate. The point isn’t that maintaining accurate voter rolls is inherently sinister. Every election depends on administrative records. The struggle is over who commands those records, which databases can be joined, and what power follows from the match.
WI calls this electoral legibility. Citizenship files sit in one federal system, voter records in another, immigration information somewhere else, Social Security data somewhere else again. As those boundaries become politically contested, the fight shifts from keeping a list to controlling the infrastructure through which political membership is verified. A name becomes politically consequential when an institution can challenge a registration, demand additional proof, accept a ballot or strike someone from the roll. Here population classification reaches the process through which people help decide who governs.
The same fight over command appears inside the state after the election is over. In June, Trump issued Executive Order 14410, transferring roughly 8,000 policy-influencing career positions into Schedule Policy/Career. The administration presents the change as a way to make senior policy personnel more accountable to an elected president. Those workers also lose ordinary adverse-action protections, and the White House says they may be removed for poor performance, misconduct, corruption or “subversion of Presidential directives.” Greater accountability upward to the executive can therefore mean weaker institutional capacity to resist the executive from within.
That concentration reaches labor power directly. Executive Order 14251 excluded broad agencies and subdivisions from the federal labor-management relations program on national-security grounds, reaching far beyond the conventional military sphere into civilian departments and offices including the Department of Veterans Affairs, Treasury, the EPA, the FCC, the General Services Administration and specified components of other departments. Here “national security” becomes a legal instrument for weakening collective bargaining inside the civilian state. The category that justifies war and intelligence work is also being used to reorganize the relation between the federal government and its own workers.
That gives the September democracy story a material footing. International IDEA reported that nearly half of 30 U.S. indicators had fallen to their lowest levels since its dataset began in 1975, with deterioration touching areas including judicial independence, freedom of expression, effective parliament and access to justice. An index can’t explain why power is moving. The struggles over voter files, bureaucratic independence and federal labor rights show where to look: who gains the capacity to define the electorate, command the administrative apparatus and reduce organized resistance inside the state.
Courts, states and public workers continue to fight those moves. Their resistance matters because it changes what federal power can actually do. But the direction of the struggle is already visible. The state is reaching beyond the classification of work, benefits and immigration status toward the institutional production of political membership itself, while the executive simultaneously seeks tighter command over the people who administer government. Once citizenship, voting and administrative loyalty become objects of intensified classification, the boundary between ordinary political conflict and security management starts getting thinner.
When Opposition Becomes a Security Problem
Once the state is sorting people by eligibility, citizenship, work status and political membership, another boundary comes into view. A strike can remain a labor dispute or be treated as disruption. A protest can remain protected speech or enter an intelligence report. A dissident can remain an opponent or become a security subject. The decisive movement begins when political antagonism is no longer handled only as politics and starts passing through institutions built to identify threats.
The Macklemore episode sits at the softer edge of that process. After he told a MetLife Stadium crowd “Free Palestine,” tour promoter Messina Touring Group said venue owners refused to host Ed Sheeran concerts with Macklemore on the bill. The Israeli-American Council had already organized a petition calling for his removal. Robert Kraft acknowledged opposing Macklemore’s appearance at Gillette Stadium while arguing that his objection concerned what he regarded as antisemitic rhetoric and imagery rather than solidarity with Palestinians. Macklemore alleged that Kraft rallied other venue owners against him; that wider coordination hasn’t been established.
The material result required no government censor. Macklemore could still speak, release music and post online. What he lost was access to infrastructure capable of carrying his speech to stadium-sized audiences. And the property relation isn’t even cleanly “private.” Tour stops included venues embedded in public institutions: Indianapolis’s Capital Improvement Board, a municipal corporation, owns Lucas Oil Stadium; Mercedes-Benz Stadium sits within the portfolio of the Georgia World Congress Center Authority, a state agency; and Raymond James Stadium is managed by the Tampa Sports Authority, an independent public agency. Public ownership, private operation, promoters, franchise capital and billionaire owners can all meet inside the same cultural infrastructure.
That is what WI means here by infrastructural ideological administration. Political speech doesn’t have to be outlawed before concentrated institutions can make it harder to circulate, more expensive to carry or incompatible with access to a mass audience. The power operates through contracts, venues, distribution and property. At this level, the sanction is economic and infrastructural rather than criminal.
Move one step deeper and commercial infrastructure becomes a bridge into state identification. In 2025 and 2026, DHS immigration agencies used administrative subpoenas to demand identifying information about online users who documented immigration raids or criticized federal enforcement. A February 2026 EFF coalition letter describes a DHS subpoena to Meta seeking information that could unmask users documenting raids in California, alongside other demands directed at technology companies. Legal resistance forced some of those demands back. But the mechanism was already visible: a person speaks through a privately owned platform, the company holds the identifying records, and the state demands them.
For noncitizens, identification can carry a much heavier consequence. In American Association of University Professors v. Rubio, a federal district court found that administration officials pursued a policy of arresting, detaining and seeking to deport noncitizen students and faculty engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. The court concluded that the policy was intended to chill protected speech and violated the First Amendment. In January 2026, the court set the policy aside, while appeals continued.
The records exposed in that litigation show how political classification can become administrative action. DHS personnel prepared intelligence reports concerning Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Bader Khan Suri, Mohsen Mahdawi and Yunseo Chung that focused heavily on speech, associations and allegations circulated by outside political organizations. The trial evidence traces the movement clearly. Speech becomes data; data becomes an administrative file; the file becomes potentially actionable power.
The same logic moves onto a wider field in National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. Issued in September 2025, NSPM-7 directs Joint Terrorism Task Forces and other federal institutions to investigate and disrupt networks connected to political violence, including funding, recruitment, nonprofit relationships and organizational infrastructure. Its list of recurring ideological “indicia” includes “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” along with positions involving migration, race and gender.
The memorandum officially targets violence and intimidation; holding an anti-capitalist belief isn’t itself made a federal crime. The political development lies elsewhere. Anti-capitalism has entered a national-security directive as an ideological marker federal counterterrorism institutions are told to consider while mapping violent political networks. A category once fought openly as politics can now sit inside the classificatory vocabulary of the security state.
Those institutions have a much longer history than the present administration. Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, intelligence-sharing systems and federal investigative authorities were built through earlier security struggles and massively expanded after 9/11. The political method reaches further back still. Classical counterinsurgency doctrine treated the population itself as decisive terrain. Army literature describes the struggle as one in which insurgents and counterinsurgents attempt to separate one another from the population, map social organizations and relationships, isolate oppositional networks and secure active or passive support. One Army study states the logic with remarkable directness: population and resource controls can restrict movement, conduct censuses, control resources and coerce populations away from support for insurgency.
WI isn’t claiming that contemporary activists have therefore become insurgents in some formally declared domestic war. The historical point is more concrete. Counterinsurgency developed a portable political grammar for governing contested populations: identify relationships, separate opposition from broader constituencies, disrupt its resources and organization, cultivate allies and prepare force where incorporation fails. That grammar can migrate through intelligence practices, federal-local task forces, databases, vendors and threat classifications without anybody issuing an order announcing that civilian America is now a counterinsurgency theater.
The newest evidence shows that this security logic is beginning to encounter the technological transformation itself. More than 1,000 intelligence pages obtained by WIRED show DHS, the FBI and fusion centers circulating reports around an emerging category of “anti-technology extremism.” The material grew out of real attacks and threats against technology executives and infrastructure. But the intelligence field spread wider, encompassing nonviolent criticism of artificial intelligence, opposition to data centers, protests and online anti-tech discourse. One circulated product even highlighted a nonviolent More Perfect Union video criticizing a Georgia data center.
That development cuts directly into the accumulation process already established. Data centers aren’t weightless clouds. They occupy land, consume electricity and water, require transmission infrastructure and attract public subsidies. Automation threatens some jobs while strengthening managerial control over others. Communities and workers resist because technological accumulation creates material conflicts. When domestic-security institutions begin mapping those grievances alongside actual threats of violence, they start building knowledge about opposition before political conflict has fully matured.
That is preemptive governability: learning the organizations, grievances, relationships and pressure points of a conflict early enough to manage it before it overwhelms ordinary institutions. The venue can deny the stage. The platform can hold the identifying record. Immigration authorities can act on status. Counterterrorism agencies can map networks. Fusion centers can watch an emerging conflict. These powers aren’t interchangeable, but they increasingly inhabit the same political terrain.
And there lies the limit of security power itself. A ruling order can identify opponents, restrict circulation and prepare repression. It still has to secure enough material allegiance from the much larger population that keeps the factories, offices, bases, ports, stores and polling places running. Surveillance can police consent’s outer boundary. It can’t substitute for consent.
The Machine Must Also Manufacture Consent
The security state can identify opponents, restrict circulation and prepare repression. It still can’t reproduce a social order by force alone. Millions of people have to keep working, buying groceries, raising children, paying rent, serving in the military, voting and accepting enough of the existing order for the whole arrangement to hold together. Capitalist rule survives not only because it can punish people who resist, but because it continually finds ways to bind large sections of the population materially and politically to the system.
That is what makes Trump’s proposed “Trump Dividend” so revealing. Speaking at the Republican midterm convention, Trump promised that if Republicans retained both chambers of Congress, every adult U.S. citizen would receive $5,000. “If the Republicans win,” he told the crowd, “you win with us and you get $5,000.” The White House packaged the proposal in the language of business, comparing the country to a successful company returning money to its shareholders and presenting the payment as the fruit of Trump’s leadership.
No such payment has been enacted. Congress would have to appropriate the money, something Mike Johnson acknowledged after the announcement, and a $5,000 payment to every adult citizen would cost well above $1 trillion. The promise may never survive contact with Congress. Its political form is already worth studying.
Trump didn’t describe the money as a permanent social right that citizens could claim regardless of who controlled Washington. He tied it openly to a partisan result: Republicans keep Congress, adult citizens get the money. Even the name personalizes the transaction. The “Trump Dividend” arrives in political imagination not as an impersonal claim on collectively produced wealth, but as a reward associated with the victory of a leader and his party.
That form differs sharply from a durable social right. SNAP, Social Security or a public pension creates an institutional claim against the state. A union contract creates a collective claim workers can enforce against an employer. Different legal relations, same political significance: both put something durable between ordinary people and the whim of whoever happens to occupy executive office. A benefit written into law or a contract won through collective struggle doesn’t require the recipient to personally thank the politician or boss every time the obligation is honored.
A promised one-time payment tied to partisan victory works differently. One form embeds a claim in institutions. The other can be narrated as a gift. One gives people something they can demand. The other invites them to identify the material reward with the political triumph of the figure handing it out. WI doesn’t need to call that criminal vote-buying to understand the relation. The more useful question is what kind of incorporation it represents.
Provisionally, call it plebiscitary provision: a material concession presented less as a durable right won and held by the population than as a personalized reward attached to political victory. One campaign proposal isn’t enough to establish a settled form of rule. But it exposes a contradiction the theory has to account for. A state can narrow durable social claims while simultaneously offering spectacular material concessions through a different political channel.
That contradiction leads to the broader category of differentiated incorporation. The population isn’t divided neatly between those capitalism needs and those it abandons. A worker can be exploited on the job, monitored by software, receive a public benefit, carry debt, get a tax break, be mobilized through nationalism and still fear unemployment. A citizen can receive advantages unavailable to the migrant working beside them. A union worker can lose collective protections while being offered an individual payment. The same person can be rewarded, disciplined and made insecure at the same time.
This is why technofascist consolidation can’t be understood only through the language of abandonment or surplus populations. The ruling order still needs masses of people materially and politically. It needs labor where labor remains profitable, consumption where markets depend on it, military service, taxes, votes and enough loyalty to prevent every crisis from becoming a struggle over who owns the factory, the land, the platform, the bank and the state itself.
Consent is therefore built materially. Wages can buy it for a time. Public benefits can stabilize it. Homeownership once helped anchor it. National belonging can divide it. Tax cuts, subsidies and direct payments can reward it. Political spectacle can tell people who deserves the credit. Repression waits where consent breaks down, but repression works best when the larger population has already been divided between those being punished and those being invited to see themselves as beneficiaries of the order doing the punishing.
The emerging form is harder than the simple story of a state withdrawing from social life. It is reorganizing the terms on which people are incorporated into capitalist society: durable rights weakened in some places, eligibility tightened in others, citizenship made more consequential, selective benefits offered elsewhere, all while organized labor loses leverage and executive power grows. That mixture of concession and discipline is how unstable class societies try to survive the contradictions they produce.
And those contradictions don’t stop at the border. The same state reorganizing incorporation at home is pouring money into military technology, artificial intelligence, strategic industry and space power. Domestic consent, labor discipline and population management belong to a larger problem: an imperial state attempting to rebuild the material base from which it commands abroad.
The Empire Is Rebuilding Its Command Center
The weapon in orbit looks different now than it did at breakfast. At first it appeared as one spectacular military headline beside stories about food assistance, political speech and democratic institutions. Follow the relations beneath those stories and the weapon returns with a different meaning. It belongs inside a struggle over how the United States preserves imperial command while the economic foundations that once made that command easier have shifted beneath it.
The United States remains enormously powerful. Relative decline means something more precise than collapse. In 1990, the United States accounted for roughly 22 percent of world manufacturing production while China accounted for less than 3 percent. By 2024, UNIDO put China’s share at 32 percent and the U.S. share at 15 percent. The United States still commands immense productive, financial, technological and military resources, but the postwar era in which it towered above a shattered capitalist world is gone. Productive capacity has spread. Rival industrial centers have grown. Command has become more expensive to maintain.
The Tricontinental analysis calls attention to the other side of that contradiction. Economic weight has become more geographically dispersed while the old imperial powers retain an extraordinary concentration of military force, finance, communications infrastructure and alliance power. Relative economic erosion therefore doesn’t mechanically produce imperial retreat. It can produce the opposite pressure: defend through military, financial and technological command what can no longer be guaranteed through overwhelming productive superiority alone.
Space has become one front in that struggle. The September acknowledgment that the United States possesses active weapons in orbit marks a movement from doctrine and development into publicly acknowledged deployment. The exact systems remain classified. And this is already an arms race, not an American monopoly. The Federation of American Scientists documents destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite tests by the United States, China, Russia and India. Each state enters that competition through its own strategic calculations. For Washington, the question is what such systems defend.
The answer begins with the dependence of modern U.S. military power on orbit. Communications, missile warning, navigation, surveillance, targeting and battlefield coordination all rely on satellites. Knock enough of that infrastructure out and aircraft, ships, missiles, drones and troops don’t merely lose convenience. Command itself begins losing sight, timing and reach. Space superiority therefore concerns control over the infrastructure that lets military force scattered across the planet act as a coordinated whole.
Commercial capital has already been built into that system. As established earlier, the Space Force now treats privately supplied dual-use technology as necessary to future military operations. That relation matters here less as another procurement story than as an imperial fact. Launch systems, satellites, communications services, cloud infrastructure and AI are becoming parts of the material base through which the United States projects power abroad. The flag may fly over the mission while the stock certificate remains in private hands.
Artificial intelligence belongs to the same strategic problem. Commercial AI firms are entering classified military networks because command increasingly depends on processing enormous quantities of information faster than an adversary can. Chips, data centers, cloud systems, models, electrical power and communications networks become more than profitable industries. They become pieces of national military capacity. The capitalist state therefore has reason to cultivate firms whose private accumulation strengthens capabilities Washington treats as strategically necessary.
An empire doesn’t fight from nowhere. Aircraft carriers need shipyards. Satellites need launch sites. AI needs chips, data centers and power. Armies need workers, taxes, logistics, ports, universities, telecommunications and industrial supply chains. Every military projection abroad rests on a social order at home capable of producing, financing and securing it.
That is where the domestic transformations traced through this essay return to imperial strategy without becoming reducible to it. Reindustrialization creates fights over wages, land, subsidies and ownership. Data centers consume electricity, water and physical territory. Automation reorganizes workplaces. Strategic industries demand trained labor and public infrastructure. Border policy sorts workers through citizenship and legal status. Political movements challenge where public money goes and whose interests technological development serves. The state has to reproduce the home base of imperial power while governing the antagonisms produced by that reconstruction.
WI uses Fortress America for this developing tendency: the hardening of the productive, logistical, technological, military and political rear base from which U.S. imperial power can continue operating under more contested world conditions. The “fortress” isn’t simply a border wall or a turn inward. It is an attempt to secure the continental and technological foundations of outward power.
This is reindustrialization without a guaranteed return to the old class compromise. New factories can be heavily automated. Strategic firms can remain hostile to unions. Public subsidies can enlarge productive capacity while ownership stays concentrated. Military procurement can revive industrial sectors without giving workers command over production. The state can rebuild the factory while leaving the boss in the office upstairs.
That distinction cuts through the patriotic language surrounding industrial policy. More factories don’t automatically mean more working-class power. More domestic chip production doesn’t tell us who owns the fabs. AI supremacy doesn’t tell us who owns the models or who gets displaced by them. A larger military-industrial base can strengthen national power while preserving private rule over the wealth, technologies and workplaces that national power rests upon.
The domestic and imperial movements therefore meet in a single historical problem. Washington is trying to rebuild the technological and productive base required for strategic command without recreating the old institutions of mass incorporation on the same terms. The contradiction is sharp: the state needs a stronger industrial, technological and military rear base even as secure working-class incorporation has weakened and the populations living inside that base become more conditionally governed.
That is the point at which the orbital weapon finally returns to the ground. Its significance lies not only in what it can do above the atmosphere, but in the social order required to build, finance, supply and politically sustain it below. The weapon belongs to an imperial state reconstructing the command capacities of empire while reorganizing the terms on which people beneath that command are incorporated into the system.
Consolidation Is the Process
Return to the four headlines from that September morning and none of them looks quite the same. The weapon in orbit is no longer just a military spectacle above the clouds. The disappearing SNAP rolls aren’t simply another fight over welfare. Macklemore’s removal isn’t merely a celebrity controversy. The democracy indicators aren’t floating measurements of institutional mood. Each belongs to a different institution and follows its own immediate cause, but the relations beneath them now occupy the same historical field.
The United States is rebuilding military, technological and industrial capacities needed to defend monopoly accumulation and imperial command while the older foundations of secure mass incorporation continue to erode. Private capital owns much of the technology through which that reconstruction proceeds. The state finances markets, guarantees contracts, builds classified systems and decides which industries count as strategic. At the other end of the social order, access to food, healthcare, work, citizenship and political participation is increasingly mediated through conditions, records, classifications and administrative judgment.
That contradiction is the center of the argument. U.S. monopoly capital and the imperial state need a stronger productive and technological base precisely when the institutions that once tied large sections of the working class more securely to the system have weakened. Capital still needs workers, consumers, taxpayers, soldiers and political legitimacy. But decades of deunionization, privatization, workfare, financialization, precarious employment and concentrated ownership have made stable incorporation harder to reproduce. The ruling order must preserve accumulation while managing the insecurity that accumulation keeps throwing back into society.
The response taking shape is uneven because the population itself is incorporated unevenly. Some people are bound to the system through wages, others through debt, benefits, homeownership, citizenship privilege, military service or political identification. Some encounter intensified supervision. Some become deportable. Some are offered selective concessions. Some political movements retain institutional access while others find themselves pushed toward administrative or security scrutiny. A worker can receive a benefit, carry debt, fear unemployment, be monitored by software and still identify with the order producing those conditions. Incorporation and discipline can occupy the same body at the same time.
Technology gives this arrangement reach. Databases make populations searchable. Commercial surveillance gives the state information it didn’t collect itself. AI and cloud infrastructure accelerate military and administrative decision-making. Workplace systems measure labor minute by minute. Electoral databases turn citizenship into an administratively actionable category. None of those technologies creates the class relation that gives the information meaning. Property, law and state power decide what the category can do. Technology makes the decision faster, more scalable and easier to connect to other institutions.
That is why technofascism can’t be reduced to surveillance, automation or artificial intelligence. Those are instruments and infrastructures inside a larger social transformation. What matters is their growing integration with monopoly ownership, state command, conditional social reproduction, political classification and coercive power. The same capitalist order that finances frontier AI for military networks can use digital systems to manage workers, migrants, benefit recipients and political populations through entirely different institutions. Their legal powers remain distinct. Their social functions are becoming increasingly compatible.
Resistance keeps that compatibility from becoming destiny. Courts block executive actions. States refuse federal demands. Tribal governments force exemptions. Workers organize against employers and government agencies. Movements challenge surveillance, deportation, war and technological development. Capitalists themselves fight over contracts, regulations and control. Those conflicts aren’t decorations around the edge of an otherwise finished system. They are part of the historical process determining what the system can become.
That is why consolidation matters. A state form is built through struggle. Powers are tested, challenged, normalized, narrowed, expanded and sometimes defeated. Private infrastructure becomes indispensable to public command. Emergency categories migrate into ordinary administration. New technologies lower the cost of old forms of control. Resistance forces concessions and detours. Capital fractions compete over who will own the next layer of production and command. History doesn’t hand the ruling class a finished blueprint. It gives contending forces institutions, crises and material limits to fight through.
Four stories sat on the morning newsfeed pretending to have nothing to do with one another. That appearance wasn’t exactly false. A SNAP office isn’t a missile battery. A stadium promoter isn’t the FBI. A voter database isn’t a military AI system. The mistake begins when those institutional differences are treated as proof that no deeper historical relation connects them.
What connects them is the reconstruction of state power under a changing regime of accumulation and imperial command: technologically formidable where strategic power demands it, increasingly conditional where ordinary people claim material security, more classificatory where unstable incorporation requires sorting, and more attentive to political opposition where those contradictions begin producing organized resistance.
Weaponized Information calls that developing historical process technofascist consolidation. The pieces haven’t fused into one finished machine. They don’t need to before the process can be named. What is consolidating is the capacity to preserve concentrated ownership and imperial command while governing a society in which secure incorporation becomes harder to reproduce below.
The system is unfinished. The fight over what it becomes has already begun.
Annotated Bibliography
Government, Legal, and Primary Institutional Sources
Congressional Budget Office. Estimated Budgetary Effects of Public Law 119-21.
This Congressional Budget Office analysis details the fiscal effects of the 2025 reconciliation law, including projected reductions in federal SNAP and Medicaid spending and substantial new appropriations for defense, homeland security, and immigration enforcement. It is useful for comparing how federal spending priorities are being redistributed across social provision, border enforcement, and military capacity.
Congressional Budget Office. Defense Funding Analysis of Public Law 119-21.
This CBO analysis examines the additional mandatory defense funding authorized through the reconciliation law, including approximately $156 billion through 2029. It provides a detailed accounting of congressional investment in weapons, military infrastructure, and other defense priorities.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. Analysis of Robotic Process Automation in SNAP.
USDA examines the use of robotic process automation in state SNAP administration. The study includes cases in which automation reduced administrative errors or simplified reporting requirements, showing that the effects of automation depend heavily on the rules, institutional design, and administrative purposes surrounding its use.
U.S. Department of Agriculture. National SNAP Information Database Notice.
This Federal Register notice documents the creation, structure, security environment, and authorized uses of the National SNAP Information Database. It is an important primary source for understanding the growing centralization and interoperability of federal benefit records.
National Archives. Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944.
The legislation commonly known as the GI Bill expanded federal support for veterans’ education, homeownership, and economic reintegration after World War II. It became one of the central institutions through which millions of Americans gained access to higher education, housing, and postwar economic security.
Federal Housing Administration. Underwriting Manual.
Historic FHA underwriting rules provide primary evidence of the racial discrimination embedded in federally supported housing finance. The manual is an important source for understanding how public policy helped construct racially unequal access to mortgages, property ownership, and suburban development.
White House. Executive Order 14410: Implementing Schedule Policy/Career in the Excepted Service.
This executive order transfers thousands of policy-influencing federal positions into the Schedule Policy/Career category. It provides the legal basis for changes to employment protections and executive authority over portions of the federal civil service.
White House. President Donald J. Trump Increases Accountability in the Federal Workforce.
This administration fact sheet explains the stated rationale for Schedule Policy/Career and describes the grounds on which covered employees may be removed. It is useful for comparing the administration’s justification of greater presidential control with the institutional consequences of reducing civil-service protections.
White House. Executive Order 14251: Exclusions from Federal Labor-Management Relations Programs.
This order excludes numerous federal agencies and subdivisions from labor-management relations protections on national-security grounds. It provides a major example of national-security authority being applied directly to collective bargaining and civilian federal employment.
White House. National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.
NSPM-7 directs federal agencies and Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate networks associated with political violence, including their financing, recruitment, and organizational relationships. The memorandum also identifies ideological tendencies such as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity among the recurring indicators it associates with violent political activity.
White House. Trump Dividend: America Is Winning, and Americans Should Win With It.
This White House release documents Donald Trump’s proposal to provide a $5,000 payment to adult U.S. citizens if Republicans retained control of Congress. The proposal offers a useful case study in the relationship between electoral politics, personalized executive leadership, and material promises directed toward citizens.
Space Systems Command. Commercial Space Office Statement on Dual-Use Technology.
This Space Force source describes commercial dual-use space technology as essential to maintaining U.S. space superiority and prevailing in future conflict. It provides direct evidence of the military’s growing dependence on privately developed satellite, communications, and space infrastructure.
U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute. Protecting, Isolating, and Controlling Behavior: Population and Resource Control Measures in Counterinsurgency.
This U.S. Army study examines population control, movement restrictions, census practices, resource regulation, intelligence collection, and efforts to separate insurgent organizations from surrounding populations. It is useful for understanding the institutional logic of counterinsurgency as a system of population management rather than simply battlefield combat.
Economic, Labor, and Administrative Research
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. SNAP Participation Tracker.
CBPP tracks changes in SNAP participation following the 2025 federal policy changes. Its data documents the loss of food assistance by millions of people and provides a national picture of declining program participation.
ProPublica. Reporting on Arizona SNAP Losses.
This investigation examines the sharp decline in SNAP participation in Arizona alongside staff reductions, overwhelmed administrative systems, and outdated state technology. The reporting offers a concrete example of how policy change, institutional capacity, and bureaucratic failure can combine to restrict access to public benefits.
National Bureau of Economic Research. Research on SNAP Work Requirements and Benefit Denials.
This study examines the effects of SNAP work requirements using administrative data. It finds increases in benefit denials, including procedural denials, and helps clarify how eligibility conditions can remove people from assistance through administrative processes.
National Bureau of Economic Research. Research on SNAP Work Requirements and Employment.
This research finds substantial declines in SNAP participation among adults subject to work requirements without detecting corresponding increases in employment. It is particularly useful for distinguishing the disciplinary effects of benefit conditions from their stated employment objectives.
National Employment Law Project. When Bossware Manages Workers.
NELP documents the spread of digital surveillance and automated decision systems in workplaces. The report examines technologies used to monitor location, productivity, scheduling, pace, and performance, providing a detailed account of how digital management expands employer control over workers.
Peck, Jamie. Research on Workfare Restructuring.
Peck’s scholarship examines the transformation of welfare policy toward workfare and labor-market discipline. His work helps situate modern benefit requirements within the larger restructuring of social policy around employment, conditionality, and administrative enforcement.
Public Administration Review. Study of Racial Disparities in SNAP Work-Requirement Waivers.
This peer-reviewed study examines the political and racial distribution of SNAP work-requirement waivers. It finds that counties with larger Black populations faced lower probabilities of receiving waivers under significant political conditions, illustrating how apparently universal administrative rules can produce unequal outcomes.
Navajo Nation Office of the President. Statement on SNAP and Medicaid Exemptions.
This Navajo Nation statement describes Tribal advocacy that secured exemptions from new SNAP and Medicaid work requirements through federal treaty and trust obligations. It provides an important example of Tribal sovereignty materially altering federal social-policy implementation.
Capital, Military Technology, and the War Economy
Costs of War Project, Brown University. Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020–2024.
The Costs of War project calculates that private corporations received roughly $2.4 trillion in Pentagon contracts between 2020 and 2024, with a large share concentrated among major defense contractors. The report is an important source for examining the relationship between military spending, corporate profit, and private control of weapons production.
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. Private Finance and the Quest to Remake Modern Warfare.
This study examines the influx of venture capital into military technology and the growing influence of defense startups such as Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX. It also analyzes tensions between newer venture-backed firms and established defense contractors competing over Pentagon procurement.
Breaking Defense. Reporting on Commercial AI Inside Classified Pentagon Networks.
Breaking Defense reports on Pentagon arrangements involving major technology firms deploying advanced AI capabilities in highly classified military environments. The article documents the direct integration of commercial artificial-intelligence systems into military information processing and command infrastructure.
Public Citizen. Generative Influence.
Public Citizen documents the rapid growth of federal lobbying around artificial intelligence, including extensive lobbying by defense companies, technology firms, venture capital interests, and trade organizations. The report provides a detailed view of the political machinery surrounding AI regulation, procurement, and industrial policy.
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Analysis of 2025 Tax-Law Distribution.
ITEP estimates how the tax provisions of the 2025 reconciliation law are distributed across income groups. Its analysis finds that a large majority of the net tax reductions flow to the richest fifth of Americans, offering a useful measure of the law’s distributional effects.
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Six Companies Reaped Record-Setting $83 Billion in Federal Tax Breaks.
This analysis documents exceptionally large federal tax benefits received by six major corporations, including Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. It provides concrete evidence of the scale of public tax advantages accruing to some of the country’s largest technology corporations.
Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Corporate Tax Breaks, Income, and Racial Inequality.
ITEP examines the racial distribution of corporate equity ownership and the benefits generated by corporate tax reductions. Using Federal Reserve wealth data, the study shows how unequal asset ownership causes corporate tax benefits to reproduce existing racial as well as class inequalities.
AI Now Institute. AI Arms Race 2.0: From Deregulation to Industrial Policy.
AI Now examines the increasingly close relationship between artificial intelligence, industrial policy, national-security strategy, computing infrastructure, and major technology corporations. The report is useful for understanding AI development as an economic and geopolitical project rather than simply a technological competition.
United Nations Industrial Development Organization. International Yearbook of Industrial Statistics.
UNIDO provides comparative data on global manufacturing production and the changing distribution of industrial capacity. Its figures are especially useful for tracking the rise of Chinese manufacturing and changes in the relative share of world industrial production held by the United States.
Federation of American Scientists. Analysis of Destructive Anti-Satellite Testing.
The Federation of American Scientists documents destructive direct-ascent anti-satellite testing by the United States, China, Russia, and India. The analysis places current space militarization within a broader international arms competition rather than treating counterspace development as the project of a single state.
Surveillance, Classification, and the Data State
Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor.
Eubanks examines automated welfare administration, predictive systems, and digital poverty management in the United States. Her detailed study of Indiana’s welfare system shows how technological systems can intensify older institutional practices of eligibility screening, suspicion, and exclusion rather than replacing the political choices embedded in those institutions.
Gandy, Oscar H. Jr. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information.
Gandy develops a political economy of personal-data collection organized around identification, classification, and evaluation. His work remains foundational for understanding how institutions use information not merely to observe individuals but to sort them into categories that affect access to credit, services, opportunities, and institutional treatment.
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.
Browne places modern surveillance within the longer history of racial slavery and racialized movement control. Through slave passes, lantern laws, branding, fugitive notices, and other systems of identification, she demonstrates that surveillance has long participated in producing and policing racial boundaries.
Brayne, Sarah. Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing.
Brayne examines the expansion of data-driven policing and the movement of surveillance technologies across intelligence, policing, and other government institutions. Her research includes discussion of Palantir and the intelligence-sector networks through which data integration technologies entered contemporary policing.
American Civil Liberties Union. Reporting on Palantir and Immigration Enforcement.
The ACLU examines Palantir’s role in immigration-enforcement systems used by ICE to connect records, identify individuals, and support operations. The reporting illustrates how data integration can move beyond passive recordkeeping and become part of locating, arresting, and deporting people.
American Civil Liberties Union. DHS Is Circumventing the Constitution by Buying Data It Would Normally Need a Warrant to Access.
This ACLU investigation documents federal agencies purchasing commercially collected cellphone-location data. It provides an important example of government surveillance capabilities being expanded through private data markets rather than through government-built surveillance systems alone.
Elections, Executive Power, and Political Classification
Brennan Center for Justice. Tracker of Justice Department Voter-Information Requests.
The Brennan Center tracks Justice Department requests for state voter-registration files, lawsuits against states that refused to comply, and subsequent court rulings. The tracker provides a detailed chronology of the federal government’s effort to acquire voter information at a national scale.
Brennan Center for Justice. Analysis of 2026 Election Executive Order Litigation.
This analysis examines litigation over Executive Order 14399 and federal efforts involving citizenship verification, voter-roll maintenance, and mail voting. It also documents judicial limits imposed on portions of the administration’s election-related directives.
Brennan Center for Justice. Nashville v. Department of Homeland Security.
This litigation concerns election-related conditions attached to Homeland Security Grant Program funding, including requirements involving the federal SAVE citizenship-verification system. The case illustrates the growing intersection between national-security funding and local election administration.
International IDEA. Global Democracy Report: Rule of Law Weakens as United States Hits 50-Year Lows.
International IDEA’s comparative democracy dataset documents declines across numerous U.S. indicators, including measures concerning judicial independence, freedom of expression, legislative effectiveness, and access to justice. The report provides a broad institutional backdrop for more specific disputes over executive authority, voting administration, and judicial restraint.
Ideological Administration, Immigration, and Domestic Security
Reuters. Reporting on Macklemore’s Removal From Ed Sheeran Tour Dates.
Reuters documents the decisions by venues and tour promoters that resulted in Macklemore being removed from later Ed Sheeran tour dates after his Palestine-related remarks. The reporting also records competing accounts from Macklemore, Robert Kraft, and other involved parties regarding the reasons and extent of coordination behind the decision.
AEG Presents. Corporate Overview of AEG Music Operations.
AEG’s corporate materials describe its extensive network of tours, festivals, theaters, clubs, arenas, and stadium operations. The source provides useful background on the concentration of ownership and control within large-scale live entertainment infrastructure.
Capital Improvement Board of Managers. Institutional Information on Lucas Oil Stadium.
The Capital Improvement Board documents the public institutional structure surrounding Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. It provides one example of how major entertainment venues can combine public ownership with private sports, entertainment, and promotional interests.
Georgia World Congress Center Authority. Institutional Information on Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
GWCCA materials document the role of a Georgia state authority in the ownership and administration of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The source helps clarify the public-private institutional structure behind major cultural and sporting venues.
Tampa Sports Authority. Institutional Information on Raymond James Stadium.
The Tampa Sports Authority documents the public-agency structure associated with Raymond James Stadium. It provides another example of the overlap between public ownership, commercial entertainment, professional sports, and private management.
Electronic Frontier Foundation and Coalition Partners. Letter Concerning Government Administrative Subpoenas for Online-User Information.
This coalition letter documents government efforts to obtain identifying information about users who posted about or criticized immigration enforcement. It provides evidence of the relationship between commercial platform records, administrative subpoenas, political speech, and state identification.
Knight First Amendment Institute. AAUP v. Rubio Litigation Materials.
These materials document federal litigation concerning efforts to detain or deport noncitizen students and faculty engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy. The case offers an important record of the intersection between immigration authority, political speech, and administrative power.
Knight First Amendment Institute. Trial Evidence Reveals Concerted Effort to Deport Noncitizens for Their Political Speech.
This account summarizes evidence introduced in litigation concerning government intelligence reports on several pro-Palestinian students and scholars. The records provide a detailed look at how speech, associations, outside allegations, immigration records, and federal administrative processes can intersect.
WIRED. Investigation of “Anti-Technology Extremism” Intelligence Reporting.
WIRED’s investigation draws on more than 1,000 pages of intelligence and law-enforcement records concerning the emerging category of “anti-technology extremism.” The material includes genuine threats and violence alongside surveillance of nonviolent criticism, protests, data-center opposition, and other forms of political activity.
Imperialism and the Global Strategic Context
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage.
This study examines the continued concentration of military, financial, and institutional power in the traditional imperial centers alongside the increasing geographic dispersal of global production. It offers a framework for understanding how military and technological power can remain highly concentrated even as the distribution of industrial and economic capacity changes.
News Sources Establishing the Opening Conjuncture
The Guardian. US Confirms for First Time It Has Deployed Weapons in Space.
This report documents the U.S. government’s first public acknowledgment that active space-control weapons had already been deployed in orbit. It provides the immediate factual basis for the article’s discussion of the militarization of space and the expansion of military command into orbital infrastructure.
ABC News. Reporting on Millions Losing SNAP Benefits.
ABC News reports on the sharp decline in SNAP participation and growing uncertainty around food-assistance funding and eligibility. The article provides an immediate snapshot of the social consequences that are examined in greater depth through budgetary and administrative research elsewhere in the bibliography.
The Guardian. Reporting on Macklemore’s Removal From Ed Sheeran Tour Dates.
This report documents Macklemore’s removal from later tour appearances following his pro-Palestinian remarks and the refusal of some venues to host concerts with him on the bill. It provides the initial factual record for examining the role of venue ownership, promoters, and entertainment infrastructure in shaping access to mass audiences.
The Guardian. Reporting on U.S. Democracy Indicators.
This report summarizes International IDEA data showing major declines in several measures of U.S. democratic performance. It serves as a concise entry point into the broader institutional evidence concerning judicial independence, executive authority, elections, and political rights.
Weaponized Information 
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