The technology-entitlement-surveillance complex

The Los Angeles Times reports:

Enroll America, a nonprofit organization formed in 2010 to support the [Obamacare] enrollment push, is supplementing its field program with a $5-million digital campaign targeting minority women. It will use data analytics, similar to those the Obama reelection campaign used to spectacular effect in 2012, to find women online who are likely to be uninsured and capture their attention through ads on websites they visit.

"Based on the information that we have on users and that we collect as they are searching and going about their day online, we can meet them where they are with our message," said Anne Filipic, a 2008 Obama campaign alum who later worked in the White House as deputy director at the office of public engagement. "And when they come to our website [at Enroll America], we can actually tailor our website so it shares specific content, or even specific pictures, based on the demographic."

This is exactly the dynamic I described in my blog post The blueprint for the ideal enterprise software company in the age of entitlements. More and more the function of Silicon Valley is to streamline and facilitate access to the welfare state. Either that, or to provide government agencies like the NSA with tools to snoop into our lives and analyze our social networks. For, as WSJ reported last June:

Key advances in computing and software in recent years opened the door for the National Security Agency to analyze far larger volumes of phone, Internet and financial data to search for terrorist attacks, paving the way for the programs now generating controversy. ... The NSA's advances have come in the form of programs developed on the West Coast—a central one was known by the quirky name Hadoop—that enable intelligence agencies to cheaply amplify computing power, U.S. and industry officials said. The new capabilities allowed officials to shift from being overwhelmed by data to being able to make sense of large chunks of it to predict events, the officials said.

In a speech delivered in January 1961, outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower warned about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. In our age, the danger arises instead from the technology-entitlement-surveillance complex. Increasingly, the individual stands helpless in the face of an ever more powerful and all-embracing (totalitarian, that is) government enabled by high technology.

President Obama bemoans the inequality gap that is opening ever wider between the haves and the have-nots in our society. And yet, it is Obama's promotion of an ever-expanding government, gushing lucrative contracts, that creates enormous and irresistible opportunities for entrepreneurs to start up software companies. The Silicon Valley billionaires of the future will make their fortunes by enabling all the various activities of Big Brother.