Dots for now
(Note from Lucy: sometimes things move so fast you can't keep up with them. The blog post below was written prior to the one you received on Friday. The one on Friday was my loudest, clearest, most informed cry for action. This one was written as a prelude to that one but things moved fast. I tee up posts in advance because many weeks I can't write at all.)
The trick is in connecting them. It's becoming a more and more obvious "trick."
Remember this all started BEFORE January 20 with the #ElonGoons and The Heritage Foundation trying to raise funds from Jewish donors to dox volunteers at Wikipedia. Note the meta-importance of the previous link being to the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive - another source of shared reality that #Trusk would like to destroy.
Executive orders about nonprofits and threats of legal action from the US Government - these are direct attacks on the First Amendment, rights to association and assembly. Textbook dictator playbook.
The role of the tech press (Wired, 404media) in breaking stories about #Elon's rampages through personal data.
The role of github as a source for reporting on the changes being made to government software code
The role of Elon's personal interests in the U.S. government and how the DOGE team prioritized its sabotage (USAID, NLRB, etc)
The role of security experts like @brianKrebs@insfosec.exchange in taking the tech press reporting even deeper
Building on their years of efforts to undermine election security, the Administration decapitated CISA, which protects digital networks, because of the agency's role in fighting propaganda and disinformation.
There's research (hosted - at least for now - on a NSF website) that questions the dynamic between online outrage and collective action. As is often the case, more research is needed. The authors of the posted letter to Cell Press conclude:
"The architecture of social media may instead amplify the downsides of outrage, limiting the effectiveness of collective action aimed toward social progress and the participation of marginalized groups."*
All of this points to a digital coup. It's only part of the evidence. What your spidey senses have been telling you is true. Digital will come before military. A coup is a coup.
All of this is digital civil society morphing right in front of our eyes. A mix of individuals, independent press outlets, collective action to do the reporting and sensemaking. Plus the role of digital systems - from physical infrastructure up through software code - in "shaping" government (in this case, de-shaping? un-shaping? destroying might be better verb).
On the one hand, digital dependencies have made it much easier for #Elon's rogue band of CS majors to cause chaos. On the other hand, those same digital dependencies make it easier to "see" what they're doing via sources such as GitHub.
One thing is painfully clear - the lack of meaningful federal law over the last THIRTY years on all things privacy, security, and personal data related is not working out well for your average American taxpayer.
*Now that I'm disabled expressing outrage online is one of the few tactics I can undertake, so this is important to me. My forthcoming book, with a great group of authors, looks at how digital systems manipulate association and assembly. Available in June.