AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show with the award-winning investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr, who’s covering one of the key issues of our time, taking on what she calls the “broligarchy” — the new age of tech bro oligarchs. Cadwalladr gained international recognition for her exposé on the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018. She worked for The Guardian and Observer at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: Carole Cadwalladr now runs the Substack How to Survive the Broligarchy.

Welcome to Democracy Now! It’s quite some time for you to be here in the United States. You’d usually be in London. You see what’s happening in Congress right now, where they’re talking about keeping AI — the states’ hands off AI, states in the United States, for 10 years. And you also see the leaders of AI in this country, including Elon Musk, as basically, in some ways, running this country. How do you take on the broligarchy? And why do you think that’s important?

CAROLE CADWALLADR: Because I think, you know, we understand how government works. We understand how power works. I mean, this is so much the subject of your show. State power is — you know, that is how the world works. But what has happened is there has been an alternative sense of power that has grown up. And that is Silicon Valley. And basically, over a very, very short period of time, they have amassed a huge amount of knowledge, and therefore power, over us, over the entire population of the world. And they’ve done that because they gave us things that we thought we wanted. You know, they gave us great products, great services — you know, Facebook, Instagram, Google Search.

But now what we’re seeing is that these companies, with this huge amount of knowledge about every aspect of our lives, are now allying themselves with the U.S. government, with what we can see is an authoritarian regime. I mean, I hesitate to use that word, but that is what the U.S. is becoming. And now this is a new type of power. And this is — the world hasn’t seen this before, in which you have state power now with this enormous surveillance engine machine, which is Silicon Valley. And it’s the coming together of these two things which I think is a totally terrifying new reality, that you are experiencing first in the U.S. here, but actually other authoritarian countries have already — they’re ahead of you in some ways, and this is now spreading across the world.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, in fact, you make an analogy in your TED Talk in April, just earlier this year, between what’s happened in Russia and what’s happening now in the U.S. And you warn these tech bros, saying that, you know, you cannot ally yourself with an autocrat, believing that you will be protected. So, if you could elaborate on that, and how you see this analogy working — I mean, the business elite allied with, as you said, autocrats elsewhere — and what form you see it taking here?

CAROLE CADWALLADR: So, I think you’re in a — in the U.S., you’re in a more vulnerable — sorry, a more vulnerable position even than people in Russia, because, so, what we saw when Putin took power, there was initially — he let the oligarchs, he let these business elites, he let them alone. Like, “Make money, and I will leave you alone. I’m going to — you know, you’re going to have the power to build, you know, through massive illegality and corruption, to grow these vast, enormous amounts of wealth.” But then came the crackdown. And increasingly, if they didn’t do exactly what he wanted, if they didn’t support him in every way, well, then they suffered for it. And in cases, you know, this guy, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, he — Putin fell out with him and exiled him to Siberia for a decade. You know, another oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, he was killed in mysterious circumstances.

So, this idea that these leaders of these tech companies, you know, think that by sucking up and cozying up to Trump, that it’s all going to be golden, they’re just going to make vast fortunes, I think that, I hope they see, is an erroneous belief. But also, I think, for the American people, is that these were just business leaders in the U.S. What is different — in Russia. What is different in the U.S. is that these are companies which are integrated into all of our lives. And so, that, for me, is the thing which is profoundly, profoundly troubling, which is you have the machinery of a surveillance society, which is now being, as I say, enmeshed with this increasingly authoritarian government.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about — I mean, with Cambridge Analytica, which you helped expose, they were providing information to Brexit. And you would ultimately be sued by one of the financiers. The vice president was Steve Bannon, who is a key ally of President Trump. Now here in the United States, you’ve got Palantir. And I’m wondering if you can talk about the Trump administration tapping this data-mining company, founded by the billionaire tech investor, like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, South African, to compile data on people in the United States for a master database, and why this is so dangerous.

CAROLE CADWALLADR: So, I think, you know, what was the good thing, if I can say this about Elon Musk, is that he made the threat from these Silicon Valley companies visible for the first time. We now know who Elon Musk is. We now know how dangerous he is. And I think we now have to go through the same process with understanding who this guy, Peter Thiel, is, and this company, Palantir. And one thing to know is that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were business partners. They go way back. They actually founded PayPal together, which is the online money transfer system. So, this is — there is a small bunch of people who have, with very similar ideas, essentially been on this power grab.

And what we have seen happen in the last few months is a rapid and unaccountable and illegal harvesting of different — DOGE went into different government offices and in — you know, we saw it in the U.S. Treasury first. That was an illegal access to those computers, at which point DOGE took that data. Now, that pattern has been repeated in departments across the federal government. New York Times said, I think, it was 314 different databases which were taken. That has now been merged together, and now Palantir is being brought in.

So, Palantir, the first thing you should know about it — you’ve just been watching these incredible reports about Gaza and Palestine. Palantir is a military contractor. It is being used by the Israeli government to find people, to profile them, to pick out targets and to eliminate them. And the CEO of Palantir, a guy called Alex Karp, has said that out loud. He said, “This is what we do.” He said, “Where necessary, we kill people.” That is now the company that is in the heart of the U.S. federal government. That is the company now which has the data of every citizen in this country.

And I think, you know, people should be freaked out. OK, if you’re not freaking out yet, you should be, because this — we have seen there is a pattern across history, across the world, which is, this is what authoritarians do. They want as much information about the population as possible, so that they can surveil them, they can control them, they can search out their enemies, they can target them, and they can punish them, and they can silence them. That process has already started in the U.S., and we see it in the U.S. amongst the most vulnerable population. We see it happening to immigrants. We see it happening to foreign students. Now, that is just the test case, because these are the people with the fewest rights. But what happens to them is now going to come to other people.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to do Part 2, and we’re going to post it online at democracynow.org. Carole Cadwalladr, award-winning investigative journalist, her Substack, How to Survive the Broligarchy. And we will link to her pieces, “The dark lord of Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel enters the chat.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. Thanks for joining us.