The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s verdict on Nova: a “dystopian panopticon.” In September 2024, Oracle’s Larry Ellison stood before financial analysts and described where all this is headed with admirable candor: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

And he meant it as a selling point.

It is worth recalling how we got here, because the road, while sadly well-worn, is instructive. In April 2004, Google launched Gmail, and Americans in some quarters had a minor conniption. Google scanned the text of your email to place ads beside it; no human read anything, the company insisted, but 31 privacy organizations demanded the launch be suspended. A California state senator introduced a bill to stop it. Editorial pages lectured. The idea that a corporation would read your correspondence to sell you shoes struck ordinary Americans as self-evidently creepy.

That was the high-water mark of our resistance.

Google’s Eric Schmidt later described the company’s policy as getting “right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” But the creepy line, it turns out, is not a line at all. It is a treadmill. Each incursion recalibrates what counts as normal, and the next one starts from the new baseline. We accepted the scanned inbox, then the tracked search history, then the phone that logs our location every few seconds, then the doorbell that streams to a server, then the speaker that listens in the kitchen. Every step was convenient. Every step was voluntary, more or less. And each step made the next one unremarkable.

So, when a private company wired up 6,000 municipalities with AI-powered cameras and made every American’s driving history searchable by tens of thousands of police officers – plus, as audits kept revealing, federal agencies that were never supposed to have access – there was no 2004-style temper tantrum. There couldn’t be. The capacity for that outrage was slowly spent over 20 years.

This is what a slow decline looks like. Not a boot, not a coup, but a subscription.

The surveillance is only half the issue. Read what Silicon Valley’s most powerful men say they are building, and a familiar image emerges.

Some predict AI will deliver universal high income and a world of such abundance that saving for retirement won’t matter. Bill Gates, when not rationalizing his time with Jeffrey Epstein, muses that humans won’t be needed “for most things,” and floats the two-day work week. Sam Altman writes of a coming age in which intelligence is too cheap to meter and the machines handle the tedium while we flourish. Work becomes optional. Leisure becomes universal. The algorithms will manage things.

Set aside whether any of it is true. Notice what kind of promise it is: You will be freed from the burdens of running your own life, because a smarter class of managers – made of silicon, this time – will run it for you. Your commute will be optimized. Your neighborhood watched. Your needs anticipated. Your income guaranteed. All you must do is surrender the management of it all. And in so doing, your civil rights – and your humanity itself.

We have heard this promise before, almost word for word … a hundred years ago.

The progressives of the early 20^th century were not villains in the classic sense of the word. They were, by their own lights, humanitarians armed with the newest science. Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and the so-called reformers around them looked at the messy, inefficient business of American self-government and offered a deal: Hand the complicated questions to trained experts. They’d be nonpartisans, they said, scientific, disinterested. Government would finally run like the modern machine it ought to be. Wilson said the Constitution’s clunky separation of powers belonged to the age of Newton; government, he argued, was a living thing that must evolve past such complicating checks. The citizen’s job would shrink, pleasantly. The expert’s job would grow, efficiently. Everyone would have more time for the higher things, the greater good.

It was the same trade-off the so-called “tech bros” now pitch, with slide rules instead of servers: liberation through management.

The only problem is that 20^th century progressives only delivered half of their promise. They built the managerial apparatus, layer upon layer upon layer: the alphabet agencies, the administrative rulemaking that now outproduces Congress by orders of magnitude, the delegation of lawmaking to bodies no voter can touch. What never arrived was the expanded freedom.

The expert class did not hand citizens more self-government once the trains ran on time; it discovered, decade after decade, new domains that required its supervision. The promise was leisure from politics. The product was a permanent, unelected government and a citizenry gradually reclassified from self-governing agents into objects of administration: clients, cases, data points. The federal government the progressives inherited could be laid out and summarized in a pamphlet. The one they built, ironically, probably requires AI-powered data centers to understand and navigate.

The tech founders’ promise is the progressive promise with cooler hardware: not expert commissions but algorithms, not the Bureau of Efficiency but the Nova platform, not the case file but the vehicle fingerprint. The vocabulary has changed; “optimization” for “scientific management,” “abundance” for “progress,” but the trade-off is identical. You are offered comfort and asked to surrender control. And as before, the comfort is speculative while the control is given away up front. Universal high income has not arrived. The 20 billion monthly scans are already here.

In my documentary, “The Thread of Liberty: Saving Our Republic,” I note that in 1840, in the second volume of “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville tried to imagine what despotism would look like in a democratic age and concluded it would look like nothing history had ever produced. Not cruel, but soft. He described “an immense and tutelary power” that “covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform.” A power that “does not tyrannize, it hinders,” that keeps its citizens “in perpetual childhood” precisely by providing for them, that “every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent.” He wondered what would remain of a people who were spared “all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living.”

Tocqueville could not have foreseen the license plate reader. But “citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording” is soft despotism wrapped in a marketing pitch. Best behavior is not the behavior of free citizens; it is the behavior of the supervised. A republic does not require subjects who behave because they are watched. Those people belong in Russia or Iran or China. A republic requires citizens who govern themselves because they are free. The habit of self-government, like any habit, atrophies when someone else does the governing.

Is there any hope? Perhaps. A Flock backlash has emerged, and it is working through the channels the Founders left us.

Since early 2025 dozens of cities have canceled or suspended their Flock contracts: Flagstaff, Santa Cruz, Cambridge, Eugene, Austin (progressive outposts, interestingly). The Los Angeles Police Department halted its use of the cameras. A Virginia judge ruled that warrantless dragnet plate collection looks like a Fourth Amendment search, and the Institute for Justice is litigating the point. City council meetings in Berkeley to Redwood City are packed with residents asking the oldest American question: Who gave you the authority?

This pushback is not being initiated by a federal privacy czar, not a blue-ribbon commission of experts, but town councils, local judges, aggrieved, neighbors organizing. It turns out that remedy for the managerial promise is the very thing it proposes to replace. Imagine that.

The cameras are not the disease. They are a symptom of a century-old habit of trading self-government for the promise of being well-managed. A promise that has never once been kept, and whose down payment is always the same: watch me, regulate me, decide for me, and in exchange I will finally be comfortable. The progressives called it “administration.” The tech bros call it “abundance.” Tocqueville called it, more honestly, a kind of servitude that “does not break wills, but softens them, bends them, and directs them.”

The camera on the pole at the entrance to your neighborhood is asking you a question to challenge you. It is the same question the republic has always asked. Not, “Are you behaving?” Larry Ellison is free to own that one.

The question is whether you are still willing to govern yourself.

Ned Ryun is the founder and CEO of American Majority.