Why Palantir’s Data Consolidation Is an Authoritarian Threat

Sideways and the Smart-City Trap

When I wrote The Cult of Trump, I was trying to give people language for something that can be hard to name while you’re living inside it—namely, the slow tightening of control.

In coercive environments, you don’t wake up one day and say, “I’ve lost my freedom.” It happens incrementally when small permissions are granted, boundaries are crossed, and small compromises are normalized until what once felt unthinkable starts to feel inevitable.