“So if the answer to the question “What happens if, with today’s technology, there’s a civil war or a social revolution or another total national emergency?,” is “Something like Gaza,” then a new question is begged: “What happens in the more likely scenario that social stability more or less endures in America, even as the technological capacity for social control by the state increases exponentially as a result of AI? Will we live under democracy or tyranny?”
Authoritarianism as an Operating System
What will America look like under an AI-powered government?
Jul 10, 2026
Short of dropping a nuclear warhead, the scale of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza was only physically possible through the use of Artificial Intelligence. In the early weeks of the war, the IDF was using so much of its munitions stockpile it was afraid it would literally run out of bombs, which it would need were a new front to open up in Lebanon, as it eventually did. The question was not one of how much to bomb, but how to maximize the lethality of each bomb dropped. This is where AI came in.
Israel deployed an AI system called “Lavender” to pick targets, and another one called “Where’s Daddy” to execute the strikes. Both were described in detail in 2024 by +972 Magazine. Lavender combed through an enormous amount of information on the residents of Gaza, including social media connections, geolocation data, phone call records, and biometric data, to assign every Gazan a threat score on a scale from 1 to 100. One’s score would constantly go up and down depending upon one’s behavior — whose houses you visit, who you call, who you befriend on Facebook, etc. If your score reached a particular threshold, you were put on a kill list.
The threshold could vary from day to day. When the IDF had plenty of targets, it might remain relatively high. When targets were scarce, Israel just lowered the score that would put you on a kill list, in order to generate more targets, which is to say more Gazans to kill.
If your name found its way onto the kill list, you would come into the aperture of Where’s Daddy. Where’s Daddy tracked your movements, waiting for you to return to your home. Once you did, the AI would send out an order to bomb your building. This meant that your family would likely be incinerated along with you, as well as whatever other families happened to live in your apartment building. It also virtually guaranteed that the overwhelming number of deaths would be non-combatant women and children.
It’s probably safe to stipulate that the Gaza War represents the extreme end of what is possible, with the current state of AI technology, in terms of the coercive power of the state. Post-October 7, the Israeli government became unconstrained by such intangible concerns as human rights, international law, or political legitimacy in carrying out its campaign to annihilate Hamas. The only limiting factors were physical ones: how many bombs the IDF had, and whether they could find their targets. Boiled down to the most basic of variables, these were laboratory conditions for measuring the degree to which the state’s capacity for violence has been enhanced by AI.Subscribe
In most places at most times, those conditions do not hold. Governments aren’t usually at war, and the physical power they wield over those who fall under their control on a day-to-day level is typically either threatened or assumed, not actually made manifest. We know that if we commit a crime, the government has a certain likelihood of finding out, and of identifying, capturing and imprisoning us. That likelihood is obviously increased with new surveillance technologies. But few of us actually test the hypothesis. We assume that we probably can’t get away with breaking the law, so we more or less obey it. A small portion of the population, of course, does commit crimes, and if and when they’re captured and imprisoned, they stand as a reminder to the rest of us that the government is still in control. That’s generally enough to maintain social stability; the state does not have to actually arrest and imprison each one of us to prove that it can do so.
This makes it a lot more difficult to gauge just how much increased control a democratic, peacetime government has over its population as a result of AI. Absent an armed insurrection, we can’t see for ourselves what the state could do to keep us in line if it were sufficiently motivated to do so, and if it were unimpeded by things like morals, laws, and concerns over its legitimacy. We can only imagine it. But Gaza gives us some theoretical ceiling. There is no technological reason why the U.S. government could not do to us what Israel has done to the Palestinians in Gaza. It obviously has the requisite firepower, and the AI tools it could access are, if anything, even more formidable than the ones Israel has used.
That said, there certainly are things that stand in the way of the U.S. government exerting the kind of coercive control over Americans that Israel has wielded over Gazans. It’s just that they’re not physical, but social in nature. We have certain rights afforded to us as citizens, or even as non-citizens residing in the territorial boundaries of the United States. The government isn’t allowed to do whatever it wants to us, as the Israeli government can to Palestinians. There are functioning laws and courts and elections. There are also fuzzier things like values and norms and traditions. These all act as powerful constraints on the government. But they’re not immutable ones. They’re not properties of physical reality. They’re not like running out of bombs, or lacking the technology to find and locate people in time and space. Under extreme social conditions, they could melt into air. The legal and normative system could break down. It’s easy to imagine that happening; in fact, it’s the premise of every post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel you’ve ever read.
So if the answer to the question “What happens if, with today’s technology, there’s a civil war or a social revolution or another total national emergency?,” is “Something like Gaza,” then a new question is begged: “What happens in the more likely scenario that social stability more or less endures in America, even as the technological capacity for social control by the state increases exponentially as a result of AI? Will we live under democracy or tyranny?”
I hate the analogy because I care about animal welfare, but it’s sort of like the frog asking what temperature the water is as it slowly approaches a boil.
Imagine a Lavender-type system that scores you on multiple threat scales related to national security. It tracks your level of “political extremism” across a matrix of issue categories. It scores you for how you will likely act upon your beliefs, whether it’s just social media posting, or attending a protest, or giving money to “extremist” groups. It gauges how influential you are within your social networks. It tracks whether you’re networked with others who have high threat scores, and how likely they are to influence you. Out of this it estimates the level of menace you present to the social order.
It’s hard for me to imagine that this does not already exist, or at least some variation of it. Certainly the technology exists; it’s basically a political application of algorithmic pricing, which is happening all the time and has been for years. You can get charged more or less for online transactions depending upon your ZIP code, your browsing history, or whether you use a Mac or a PC. Princeton Review has charged more for its test prep services to Asians than non-Asians. Uber has been accused of surging prices for users with dying phone batteries. Former FTC Chair Lina Khan cites the possibility of a retailer charging you more for a thermometer because it knows you have a newborn at home and are likely to be desperate, or an airline quoting you a higher price on a plane ticket because you received an email about funeral arrangements.
If corporations can track your behavior to determine how much you’ll pay for a product, there’s no reason the government couldn’t track it to assess whether you might engage in risky political behavior, as China has been doing for years. And if the U.S. government isn’t already doing so, then its incentives to adopt a Chinese-style social credit system will only increase with the advance of AI.
In China, if you’re a model citizen you can get discounts on bus fares. But if your purchase history indicates you’re an alcoholic, or if you post criticisms of the government on Weibo, or if you’re a journalist exposing political corruption, you might find yourself suddenly unable to travel when you go to the train station and are denied the purchase of a ticket. Your face might appear on posters in public or on apps that show who around you is a social exile.
None of this is likely to ever happen in America as long as we have a functioning Constitution, but there are more subtle and more legal ways to achieve the same end.
Imagine a social credit score that’s less like China’s in-your-face system and more like a FICO score. You don’t necessarily know what it is at any given moment. Perhaps the government doesn’t officially admit that it exists at all, like Israel and its nuclear arsenal. But like algorithmic pricing, you’re vaguely aware that it’s operating in the background, shaping the contours of your daily life. You can feel it in the ether around you as your social habitat tightens or releases its grip on you. The higher your threat score is, the more expensive things become, the harder it is to get a job, or to get your kid into private school, or to get a window seat on an upcoming flight.
It doesn’t operate at the textual level, as it does in China. In China, there’s no mystery to your status; you can look up your social credit score at any time. When you’re on a blacklist, you’ll be told so when you try to take out a home loan or even rent a hotel room.
In the U.S., things would be less explicit, more like a vibe. Here, where we have laws that are supposed to protect us from such things, the touch would be softer and harder to trace. You wouldn’t necessarily even know it’s happening. You’d be aware you’re paying higher prices than you were a year ago, and you’d suspect they’re higher than for other people around you buying the same stuff. But you’re not entirely sure. You’ve never had a problem getting insurance before, but suddenly you find every insurer quoting absurd prices or just denying you any policy at all. It’s weird and disorienting and anxiety-inducing.
These could just be the mysterious workings of the free market. Or they could be that you’ve been singled out. It’s like being shadow-banned on pre-Elon Twitter: one day, after a particularly spicy post, your engagement would just drop off a cliff. It would seem pretty clear to you that your account had been flagged, but you couldn’t prove it. You could complain to whoever you wanted to, but there was no official notice, there was no appeals process, there was no way to know for sure that you were being throttled. It’s possible that your opinions just suddenly became a lot less interesting to your followers.
Likewise, maybe the reason you’re no longer finding matches on Hinge is just because you’re getting older and less cool. But maybe it’s because you’ve been posting a lot about the Palestinians, or questioning vaccine efficacy, or disputing election results. Maybe your account is being suppressed, just like it feels like it is on all your other social media platforms, and maybe that’s related to the crazy prices you’ve been paying lately on your online prescription drug service, and the months you’ve been waiting for your passport to be renewed, and the surprise visit last week from a city inspector following up on some anonymous complaints about the kitchen renovation done by the previous owners of your house being unpermitted. Or maybe none of those things are related at all.
You’ve also noticed you’ve been getting served up a different flavor of media content in your newsfeeds. You’ve started getting recommendations for podcasts about how there’s a civilizational war underway between the West and the Islamic world, and also tons of posts from people you aren’t connected to and aren’t sure are real rejoicing over how your local data center is going to create tons of new jobs in your community. Your streaming services have started promoting shows to you that you’ve never heard of. One is about the plight of a gay woman in an oppressive Muslim country. Another is about a computer genius who invents an AI that cures Alzheimer’s Disease. You haven’t been shy lately about your opposition to the war heating up in the Middle East, and you signed an online petition just yesterday against the proposed local data center construction. But maybe that’s just a coincidence.
But anyway, your trust in mass media ran out a long time ago. When you want to know how to make sense of the world, you listen to your favorite independent journalists and podcasters. But lately you’ve been questioning how “independent” they really are. For some reason, their political opinions all seem to have converged, and then evolved in the exact same way. They were once isolationists; now they’re all suddenly concerned about some obscure U.S. enemy you’ve never heard them mention before. They used to have regular meltdowns about environmental collapse and the end of civilization; now they’re claiming it will all be solved by stable coins. You’ve been surprised to notice that unlike you, their fans in the comments section now agree with them about all of these things. You also notice that they’re getting some pretty impressive sponsors these days.
Maybe you’re being paranoid. You’re seeing patterns that aren’t there. Or is it obviously real and you’d be naive to think otherwise? You’re not quite sure what to think, and whether suspecting one thing makes you a conspiracy theorist or believing the other makes you a sheep.
But what you do know is that it feels like things go more smoothly in your life when you’re not worked up about something or the other in the news. When you disengage, when you stop paying such close attention to what politicians or the big corporate oligarchs are doing, the world feels more frictionless. Things go according to plan. It’s like you have good karma or something.
This time, though, there’s an actual war shaping up, and you’re about half sure you’re going to lose your job by next year to AI. This is serious stuff, and your convictions can’t be so easily swayed. So you continue to post your opinions about U.S. militarism and the dangers of AI and the tech industry. You continue to show up to protests when you see them announced on Facebook, and you even occasionally make donations to the growing number of groups the government has begun regularly maligning as “extremist.” Things are getting costlier and more difficult and maybe it’s because you’ve been flagged by the system, but you don’t care. There are bigger stakes in the world.
Then, for the first time in your life, you get called into the local IRS office. You’re put through an excruciating audit and have to pay a ridiculous penalty to the Franchise Tax Board. At the same time, you start seeing your social media accounts “temporarily” suspended, one by one. You can’t figure out why; the platforms just keep saying there have been complaints and they have to investigate.
Then early one morning, the police knock on your door with a search warrant. You’ve been accused of financial crimes and they’ve come to take your computer.
Eventually you get the message. Your opinions haven’t changed — if anything, they’ve become even more strident — but you’ve already lost a romantic relationship over the stress, your friends have stopped returning your texts, and your co-workers don’t trust you anymore.
So you just back off. You stop being so loud in your opinions, pay less attention to stuff done by powerful people you can’t control anyway. And as you do, things start to fall back into place. The investigations of your social media accounts are resolved in your favor. You finally get your passport renewed. Your dating life picks up. The city inspection comes to nothing. The government drops its case against you, citing insufficient evidence. Instead of losing your job to AI, you get promoted. Things are going nicely. You’re happier.
Maybe the scenario just described sounds like something out of Black Mirror. But then so does using robot dogs in warfare, which was an actual episode of the show and is now real life.
The U.S. isn’t China. We don’t have a clearly and explicitly authoritarian state to which the private sector is unquestionably subservient. But already, you can see the fusing of politics and commerce that would be necessary for such a vast social credit system to emerge in the absence of single party rule. The line between the public and private sectors in America has always been blurry, but today, with a president making billions off of cryptocurrency, the world’s richest man being tasked to run a new quasi-agency of the federal government, and one of the biggest tech investors in the world writing the administration’s AI policy, it’s unclear that there’s any line left at all.
And it’s not hard to see how sectors outside of tech could be corralled into the mix. The Treasury Department routinely puts out advisories on money laundering operations, sanctions evasion schemes and other alleged financial crimes and asks banks to issue red flags for these practices. The banks are then required to report suspicious activity to the government. This seems like common sense, but under the Trump administration, we’ve already seen it begin to reflect the administration’s political priorities, such as in a recent advisory about employers hiring undocumented workers. One can imagine myriad ways this could become even more politicized than it already is. And one can imagine similar memos going out to social media platforms and other private service providers.
A liberal administration intent on repressing its political enemies could direct banks and social media companies to root out the financial infrastructure of right-wing “domestic extremists.” We’ve seen such efforts before, as when the Southern Poverty Law Center repeatedly accused PayPal of being “the banking system for white nationalism,” before it was revealed that the SPLC itself was laundering money and funding white nationalists as paid informers.
A conservative administration could do the same thing. In 2021, PayPal teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League to root out “hate groups.” Today, the ADL routinely accuses anyone critical of Israel of being “anti-semitic.” One could easily envision the Treasury Department issuing an advisory asking banks and other corporations to help protect Jews by dismantling the financial and communications infrastructure of “extremist” groups that oppose Zionism. It’s almost surprising it hasn’t happened already.
Likewise, corporations could use the same shadow social credit system to target their own enemies, whether they’re antiwar protesters, environmental activists, unions, or just lawful competitors.
The IDF soldiers who informed +972 Magazine about Lavender and Where’s Daddy noted repeatedly that the systems were built on statistics. Their kill lists may have included many civilians who had nothing to do with Hamas, but in the aggregate, they were statistically accurate enough to justify ignoring these inconvenient tragedies. What AI enabled Israel to do is to take a population of millions and, to borrow a term from the late political scientist James C. Scott, to render it legible. It could divide that amorphous mass of humanity into a neat hierarchy of numbers that could be dropped into a spreadsheet. And then the extermination process could proceed in an orderly and rational process, like culling sheep from a flock.
Minus the killing part, we should expect no less of AI when it comes to governing the rest of us. As our jobs are replaced by machines, as our free time becomes limited only to the hours in the day and our sense of purpose is sapped from our lives, we will become more unruly. Rather than a citizenry or even a labor resource, we will be seen by the state as, principally, a threat to be managed. That threat will require new methods and technologies of surveillance, assessment, scoring, categorizing, rewarding and punishing. If there’s a Universal Basic Income, it could be pegged to the degree of our obedience as measured by our social credit score. There will be those who rebel, and whose punishment will serve as an example to others. But they’ll be marginal. At a population level, we will be evaluated, segmented, and incentivized into docility. America will finally be domesticated.
I hate the analogy because I care about animal welfare, but it’s sort of like the frog asking what temperature the water is as it slowly approaches a boil.
Imagine a Lavender-type system that scores you on multiple threat scales related to national security. It tracks your level of “political extremism” across a matrix of issue categories. It scores you for how you will likely act upon your beliefs, whether it’s just social media posting, or attending a protest, or giving money to “extremist” groups. It gauges how influential you are within your social networks. It tracks whether you’re networked with others who have high threat scores, and how likely they are to influence you. Out of this it estimates the level of menace you present to the social order.”