Category Archives: Life

The My Pillow Guy’s Plot to Wreck America

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Anne Applebaum is the author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. She’s an historian and writes for The Atlantic. This is most of an article she wrote about meeting one of the Big Lie’s key supporters. She came away believing he’s a nice guy and a threat to our democracy:

When you contemplate the end of democracy in America, what kind of person do you think will bring it about? Maybe you picture a sinister billionaire in a bespoke suit, slipping brown envelopes to politicians. Maybe your nightmare is a rogue general, hijacking the nuclear football. Maybe you think of a jackbooted thug leading a horde of men in white sheets, all carrying burning crosses.

Here is what you probably don’t imagine: an affable, self-made midwesterner, one of those goofy businessmen who makes his own infomercials. A recovered crack addict, no less, who laughs good-naturedly when jokes are made at his expense. A man who will talk to anyone willing to listen (and to many who aren’t). A philanthropist. A good boss. A patriot—or so he says—who may well be doing more damage to American democracy than anyone since Jefferson Davis.

I met Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, in the recording studio that occupies the basement of Steve Bannon’s stately Capitol Hill townhouse, a few blocks from the Supreme Court—the same Supreme Court that will, according to Lindell, decide “9–0” in favor of reinstating Donald Trump to the presidency sometime in August, or possibly September. . . .

Last January—on the 9th, he says carefully, placing the date after the 6th—a group of still-unidentified concerned citizens brought him some computer data. These were, allegedly, packet captures, intercepted data proving that the Chinese Communist Party altered electoral results … in all 50 states. This is a conspiracy theory more elaborate than the purported Venezuelan manipulation of voting machines, more improbable than the allegation that millions of supposedly fake ballots were mailed in, more baroque than the belief that thousands of dead people voted. This one has potentially profound geopolitical implications.

That’s why Lindell has spent money—a lot of it, “tens of millions,” he told me—“validating” the packets, and it’s why he is planning to spend a lot more. Starting on August 10, he is holding a three-day symposium in Sioux Falls (because he admires South Dakota’s gun-toting governor, Kristi Noem), where the validators, whoever they may be, will present their results publicly. He has invited all interested computer scientists, university professors, elected federal officials, foreign officials, reporters, and editors to the symposium. He has booked, he says variously, “1,000 hotel rooms” or “all the hotel rooms in the city” to accommodate them. (As of Wednesday, Booking.com was still showing plenty of rooms available in Sioux Falls.) . . .

Along with Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the conspiracy posse, he is helping create profound distrust in the American electoral system, in the American political system, in the American public-health system, and ultimately in American democracy. The eventual consequences of their actions may well be a genuinely stolen or disputed election in 2024, and political violence on a scale the U.S. hasn’t seen in decades. You can mock Lindell, dismiss him, or call him a crackhead, but none of this will seem particularly funny when we truly have an illegitimate president in the White House and a total breakdown of law and order.

Lindell had agreed to have lunch with me after the taping. But where to go? . . . Because Lindell is famously worried about Chinese Communist influence, I thought he would like to pay homage to the victims of Chinese oppression. I booked a Uyghur restaurant.

This proved a mistake. . . . Once we got there, he didn’t much like the food. He picked at his chicken kebabs and didn’t touch his spicy fried green beans. More to the point, he didn’t understand why we were there. He had never heard of the Uyghurs. I told him they were Muslims who are being persecuted by Chinese Communists. Oh, he said, “like Christians.” Yes, I said. Like Christians.

He kept talking at me in the restaurant, a kind of stream-of-consciousness account of the packet captures, his mistreatment at the hands of the media and the Better Business Bureau, the dangers of the COVID-19 vaccines, and the wonders of oleandrin, a supplement that he says he and everyone else at MyPillow takes and that he says is 100 percent guaranteed to prevent COVID-19. On all of these points he is utterly impervious to any argument of any kind. I asked him what if, hypothetically, on August 10 it turns out that other experts disagree with his experts and declare that his data don’t mean what he thinks his data mean. This, he told me, was impossible. It couldn’t happen:

“I don’t have to worry about that. Do you understand that? Do you understand I’ve been attacked? I have 2,500 employees, and I’ve been attacked every day. Do I look like a stupid person? That I’m just doing this for my health? I have better things to do—these guys brought me this and I owe it to the United States, to all, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican or whoever it is, to bring this forward to our country. I don’t have to answer that question, because it’s not going to happen. This is nonsubjective evidence.”

The opprobrium and rancor he has brought down upon himself for trying to make his case are, in Lindell’s mind, further proof that it is true. Stalin once said that the emergence of opposition signified the “intensification of the class struggle,” and this is Lindell’s logic too: If lots of people object to what you are doing, then it must be right. The contradictions deepen as the ultimate crisis draws closer, as the old Bolsheviks used to say.

But there is a distinctly American element to his thinking too. The argument from personal experience; the evidence acquired on the journey from crack addict to CEO; the special kind of self-confidence that many self-made men acquire, along with their riches—these are native to our shores. Lindell is quite convinced, for example, that not only did China steal the election, but that “there is a communist agenda in this country” more broadly. I asked him what that meant. Communists, he told me, “take away your right to free speech. You just told me what they are doing to these people”—he meant the Uyghurs. “I’ve experienced it firsthand, more than anyone in this country.”

The government had taken his freedom away? Put him in a reeducation camp? “I don’t see anybody arresting you,” I said. He became annoyed.

“Okay, I’m not talking about the government,” he said. “I’m talking about social media” . . . .
It is true that there has been some organized backlash against MyPillow, which is indeed no longer stocked by Bed Bath & Beyond, Kohl’s, and other retailers. But I suspect that this reaction is every bit as red-white-and-blue as Lindell himself: Plenty of Americans oppose Lindell’s open promotion of both election and vaccine conspiracy theories, and are perfectly capable of boycotting his company without the aid of Chinese bots. Lindell’s lived experience, however, tells him otherwise, just like his lived experience tells him that COVID-19 vaccines will kill you and oleandrin won’t. Lived experience always outweighs expertise: Nobody can argue with what you feel to be true, and Lindell feels that the Chinese stole the election, sent bots to smear his company, and are seeking to impose communism on America. . . .

Alongside the American business boosterism, Lindell’s thinking contains a large dose of Christian millenarianism too. This is a man who had a vision in a dream of himself and Donald Trump standing together—and that dream became reality. No wonder he believes that a lot of things are going to happen after August 10. It’s not just that the Supreme Court will vote 9–0 to reinstate Trump. It is also that America will be a better place. “We’re going to get elected officials that make decisions for the people, not just for their party,” Lindell said. There will be “no more machines” in this messianic America, meaning no more voting machines: “On both sides, people are opening their eyes.” In this great moment of national renewal, there will be no more corruption, just good government, goodwill, goodness all around.

That moment will be good for Lindell, too, because he will finally be able to relax, knowing that “I’ve done all I can.” After that, “everything will take its course. And I don’t have to be out there every day fighting for media attention.” He won’t, in other words, have to be having lunch with people like me.

Alas, a happy ending is unlikely. He will not, on August 10, find that “the experts” agree with him. Some have already provided careful explanations as to why the “packet captures” can’t be what he says they are. Others think that the whole discussion is pointless. When I called Chris Krebs, the Trump administration’s director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, he refused even to get into the question of whether Lindell has authentic data, because the whole proposal is absurd. The heavy use of paper ballots, plus all of the postelection audits and recounts, mean that any issues with mechanized voting systems would have been quickly revealed. “It’s all part of the grift,” Krebs told me. “They’re exploiting the aggrieved audience’s confirmation bias and using scary yet unintelligible imagery to keep the Big Lie alive, despite the absence of any legitimate evidence.”

What will happen when Lindell’s ideological, all-American, predicted-in-a-dream absolute certainty runs into a wall of skepticism, disbelief, or—even worse—indifference? If history is anything to go by … nothing. Nothing will happen. He will not admit he is wrong; he will not stop believing. He will not understand that he was conned out of the millions he has spent “validating” fake data. (One has to admire the salesmanship of the tech grifters who talked him into all of this, assuming they exist.) He will not understand that his company is having trouble with retailers because so many people are repulsed by his ideas. He will not understand that people attack him because they think what he says is dangerous and could lead to violence. He will instead rail against the perfidy of the media, the left, the Communists, and China.

Certainly he will not stop believing that Trump won the 2020 election. . . .

Lindell mostly speaks in long, rambling monologues filled with allusions and grievances; he circles back again and again to electoral fraud, to the campaigns against him, to particular interviewers and articles that he disputes, some of it only barely comprehensible unless you’ve been following his frequent media appearances—which I have not. . . . I asked him about the events of January 6. He immediately grew more precise. “I was not there, by the grace of God,” he said. He was doing media events elsewhere, he said. Nor did he want to talk about what happened that day: “I think that there were a lot of things that I’m not going to comment on, because I don’t want that to be your story.”

Not too long after that, I suddenly found I couldn’t take any more of this calculated ranting. (I can hear that moment on the recording, when I suddenly said “Okay, enough” and switched off the device.) Although he ate almost nothing, Lindell insisted on grabbing the check, like any well-mannered Minnesotan would. In the interests of investigative research, I later bought a MyPillow (conclusion: it’s a lot like other pillows), so perhaps that makes us even.

When we walked outside, I thought that I might say something dramatic, something cutting, something like “You realize that you are destroying our country.” But I didn’t. He is our country after all, or one face of our country: hyper-optimistic and overconfident, ignorant of history and fond of myths, firm in the belief that we alone are the exceptional nation and we alone have access to exceptional truths. Safe in his absolute certainty, he got into his black SUV and drove away.

Charge Him Now: Obstruction of Justice

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Remember this? It was news in May 2019:

President D___ T___ would have been indicted for obstruction of justice in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation if he did not hold the nation’s highest office, nearly 700 former federal prosecutors argued in an open letter published on Medium on Monday.

The ex-prosecutors — who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations dating back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower — said Attorney General William Barr’s decision not to charge T___ with obstruction “runs counter to logic and our experience.”

The letter added, “Each of us believes that the conduct of President T___ described in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”

“We believe strongly that, but for the OLC memo, the overwhelming weight of professional judgment would come down in favor of prosecution for the conduct outlined in the Mueller Report,” the letter continued.

The Mueller report cited 10 episodes indicating that T____ could be prosecuted after he left office. He left office more than six months ago, but there is no sign so far that the Department of Justice is pursuing the matter.

Before leaving office, the former president also tried to overturn the results of the election. I’m not sure there is anything in federal law that explicitly makes that behavior illegal. The laws against treason and sedition are narrowly written and may not apply to a president doing everything he can to illegally remain in office. Congress probably never imagined that kind of behavior.

Nevertheless, this latest news is remarkable:

Former President D____ T____ . . . explicitly pressured {the acting attorney general] to declare the 2020 election “corrupt” in a December phone call, according to documents published Friday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee. [They are] the most recent evidence of T____’s extraordinary campaign to overturn the election’s results.

The House committee—which is investigating the T____ administration’s potentially unlawful efforts to influence the outcome of the election—made public notes taken by former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen’s deputy, Richard Donoghue, during a Dec. 27 phone call between T____ and top officials from the Department of Justice.

In the notes summarizing the call, Donoghue recalled T____ asking Rosen and other top officials to “just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and congressional allies [Forbes].

But, according to The Guardian:

D____ T____ insisted on Saturday that when he told senior justice department officials to “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me”, he was not attempting to subvert US democracy, but to “uphold the integrity and honesty of elections and the sanctity of our vote”. . . .

One Washington editor, Benjy Sarlin of NBC News, wrote on Twitter: “We can’t take a continuous historic scandal for granted just because he says it out loud all the time. These are Watergate-level allegations.”

On Friday, Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House oversight committee, said: “These handwritten notes show that President T____ directly instructed our nation’s top law enforcement agency to take steps to overturn a free and fair election.”

If that isn’t treason or sedition, strictly speaking, it sure sounds like “interference with the orderly administration of law and justice”, i.e. obstruction.

The Department of Justice has work to do in the matter of former president D___ J. T____.

Or doesn’t the rule of law apply to him?

The Original Sin

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These are the opening and closing paragraphs of a review in The New York Review of Books (the review is “Uncanny Planet” by Mark O’Connor; the book is Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade by Nathaniel Rich):

In the opening lines of the Bible, having brought forth the world and everything in it, God makes his inaugural address to Adam and Eve. “Be fruitful, and multiply,” he tells them, “and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” God’s first, foundational decree explicitly casts the relationship between humanity and nature as one of separation and control. The whole sorry business with the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and the banishment doesn’t come about for another two chapters, but if you were in the mood for a little heretical revisionism you might argue, just for fun, that the true original sin can be located not in man’s first disobedience, but in God’s first command.

The attitude toward nature that He defines and sanctifies with those words is, after all, precisely the attitude that led human beings to exploit nature so ruthlessly, and for so long, that the planet is now in danger of becoming unlivable for vast numbers of its inhabitants, both human and nonhuman. Our adherence to this view of the world and our place within it, in other words, has amounted to its own kind of Fall. . . .

[The first line of Stewart Brand’s original Whole Earth Catalog — “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it” —] recalls Francis Bacon’s characterization of his scientific work, and by implication that of the scientific method itself, as rescuing humanity from its fallen state. Bacon saw science and technology as the means by which we could reclaim our former oneness with the divine. The “true ends of knowledge,” he wrote, were in

a restitution and reinvesting (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever he shall be able to call creatures by their true names he shall again command them) which he had in his first state of creation.

The path of knowledge that led us out of Eden will, if we follow it long enough, eventually lead us back. . . . 

Though Rich’s book is hardly what you’d call a polemic, the stories in it gather toward an argument, which could be seen as a less nakedly utopian version of Bacon’s aims. There are over 7.5 billion of us on a rapidly warming planet; the seas are rising, the forests are burning, and every year hundreds of species go the way of the passenger pigeon. There is no reversing the Fall. There is no going back to whatever might be meant by “nature.” We must become “as gods,” not in order to return to a state of prelapsarian wholeness, but to move forward to some kind of livable future.

It’s Not a Fringe Benefits Case

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It’s blatant fraud and tax evasion. Daniel Shaviro, a professor of taxation at New York University’s School of Law, explains why the case against the former president’s company and its Chief Financial Officer is extremely serious: 

In the days before the July 1, 2021 issuance of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Weisselberg-X Organization indictment, public anticipation was positively underwhelming. It would just be a fringe benefits case, we were told – meaning, a dispute, of a picayune sort that almost never yields criminal charges, regarding whether or not an employee’s use of, say, a company car or apartment yielded taxable income . . . . Everyone does it, we heard, and it shouldn’t be the basis for a criminal fraud charge. What’s more, this ostensibly would just be a New York State or City income tax issue, not federal, thus limiting the scale and monetary significance of the claimed wrongdoing.

Then the indictment dropped, and it turns out that public expectations could scarcely have fallen further short than they were of the magnitude of what was actually being charged. Let me spell out the particulars under several headings:

1. This is no mere fringe benefits case. It is a straight-out fraud case, claiming that the defendants kept double books: phony ones to show the tax authorities, and accurate ones to be hidden from view. The question of whether a given company apartment or car might in theory (with appropriate supporting facts) have been an excludable fringe benefit turns out to be almost completely irrelevant. A better analogy to what is being charged here is the following:

Suppose that your employer pays you monthly, through automatically deposited paychecks that end up being included on your annual W-2. But suppose that each month you could stop by the front office, request an envelope full of cash in unmarked bills, and have your W-2 reduced accordingly. So your true income would be the same as if you hadn’t stopped by, but you’d be reporting less salary. If your employer kept careful records of all the cash it gave you, and also still deducted it all, we would basically have this case. That is far different from simple failure to pay taxes on fringe benefits, which is how the indictment has been widely misunderstood, thanks in part to X’s defense lawyers’ laying the groundwork before the charges were made public on Thursday.

2. It is not just a state and local income tax fraud case. It is also – via New York State fraud, conspiracy, and grand larceny statutes – a federal income tax fraud case. The indictment’s first three and longest counts detail a “scheme to defraud” the federal Internal Revenue Service, including through a “conspiracy” with multiple “overt acts,” and the commission of “grand larceny.” In other words, just as the Manhattan DA could indict someone for committing such crimes (within its jurisdiction) against the likes of you or me, so here it has identified the IRS as the main victim of the defendants’ actions. Indeed, the word “federal” appears thirty times in the Manhattan DA’s 24-page charging document.

Given the facts alleged, it is hard to fathom that the IRS – if it agrees that those facts are true – would not promptly indict the defendants for federal income tax fraud. Failing to bring charges would amount to saying that overt and deliberate tax cheating of the most brazen kind need not be addressed criminally. If a private individual, rather than the Manhattan DA had somehow gathered all of this information and reported it to the IRS, he or she would be in a great position to claim a whistleblower award. And while federal authorities often refrain from piling on, by bringing their own charges when state authorities are already prosecuting a case; the indictment here makes explicit that the fraud was, in the main, directed against the federal government itself.

3. If the Manhattan DA can prove the facts asserted, this is not a trivial case, or one that ordinarily would not be brought, or one that bespeaks political bias, or is just about pressuring a witness whom the DA wants to “turn.” It is unimaginable to me that any prosecutor would not bring these or similar charges under the asserted facts. If the case is proven, the DA will not have been criminalizing political disagreement, as critics complain. Rather, it will have been criminalizing crime – and not a moment too soon from a broader enforcement standpoint, given widespread concerns about plunging enforcement, not just against income tax fraud, but against white-collar crime more generally.

That’s the general overview. However, delving into the details can help to show why all this is so. A clear understanding is best conveyed by turning the indictment’s formal presentation of the charges into more of a straightforward narrative. The rest of this commentary presents the main elements of the story that the indictment tells.

One should keep in mind, of course, that all this is just the Manhattan DA’s case. . . . For convenience, I will set forth the prosecutorial version of what happened without repeating (more than sporadically) that it all still needs to be proven.

4. The true economic deal alleged by the indictment – Weisselberg had a fixed economic deal with the X Corporation. He was to be paid a fixed amount – which, for the years 2011 through 2018, equaled $940,000 annually, comprised of $540,000 denominated as base salary and $400,000 denominated as an end-of-year bonus. Nothing else in the employment agreement and arrangements between the parties that the indictment discusses would change this fixed bottom line. Any supposed “fringe benefit” – and, as we will see, the term really does not fit well here – that the X Organization (through any of its entities) furnished to Weisselberg would be treated as compensation in the company’s internal records, and charged against his $940,000 receipt. Thus, for example, suppose the Organization paid him $50,000 in cash, either directly or through a payment to a third party supplier (including other X entities) of consumer benefits to him. In that case, all else equal, Weisselberg would get $890,000, rather than $940,000, with that lower amount being treated as compensation in issued W-2s and1099s, and by him on his own tax returns. But the Organization’s internal records would still show that he had received $940,000 of compensation, including this $50,000.

5. Fraudulent double bookkeeping – Implementing this scheme required having two inconsistent sets of records: (a) the fake ones for tax reporting that excluded a part of his compensation (under the parties’ financial deal and the company’s secret bookkeeping), and (b) the true accounting records that the company maintained privately. Experts on tax enforcement agree that keeping two sets of books, in this fashion, is “a red flag” and “a classic indication of an overt act of evasion,” often causing the government to have a “slam-dunk case.”

6. Additional overt acts to conceal the fraud – Even in the company’s own ledgers, as distinct from those that were disclosed to relevant tax authorities, Weisselberg took steps to conceal his receipt of benefits. . . . 

7. A large number of the items that the company funded (and then subtracted from Weisselberg’s reported compensation) had no relationship whatsoever to the sort of items that, under appropriate circumstances, might potentially constitute tax-free employee fringe benefits. . . . The following items that the company paid for, on Weisselberg’s behalf, most emphatically do not fit the profile of potentially excludable fringe benefits:

• private school tuition expenses for Weisselberg’s family members
• a Mercedes Benz automobile that was the personal car of Weisselberg’s wife
• unreported cash that Weisselberg could use to pay personal holiday gratuities

(To treat cash as a “fringe benefit” would imply that the term covers all employee compensation. Does this mean that, whenever one is paid with cash off the books and does not report it, the IRS is merely quibbling over fringe benefits? Of course not.)

• personal expenses for Weisselberg’s other homes and an apartment maintained by one of his children; these included such items as new beds, flat-screen televisions, the installation of carpeting, and furniture for his home in Florida
• rent-free lodging and other benefits to a family member of Weisselberg .

In the light of such items, along with the secret double bookkeeping and internal company treatment of all these items as compensation, there are only three possible explanations for calling this a “fringe benefits” case. The first is that one has not read the indictment or otherwise acquainted oneself with the pertinent facts. The second is one that is ignorant, not just of extremely basic aspects of federal and state income tax law, but also of common English language usage. Calling bundles of cash and the provision of flat screen televisions in employees’ vacation homes “fringe benefits” – especially when they are not extra pay, but replace ordinary paycheck salary, dollar for dollar – would appear to leave no employee compensation outside the term’s potential scope. The third is that one has decided to misinform one’s audience.

8. Fraudulent mischaracterization of employee compensation, supported by deceptive bookkeeping – The company also reported Weisselberg’s annual end-year payments ($400,000 for the years 2011-2018) as non-employee compensation, using Form 1099 rather than the W-2 that is used for salary. He relied on this mischaracterization to make deductible annual contributions out of these amounts to a Keogh plan, which is a tax-deferred pension plan that one can deductibly fund by using self-employment income, but not employee wages. To help support this characterization (which the indictment asserts Weisselberg knew was false), end-year payments would be made by X Organization entities of which he was not an employee, such as the Mar-a-Lago Club and Wollman  Rink Operations LLC. This creation of a false paper trail – since he had not directly performed services for these entities supporting the receipt of such payments from them, even as an independent contractor – fits the alleged pattern of not merely taking incorrect tax positions, but engaging in intentionally misleading overt acts in support of a conspiracy to defraud. It also arguably shows consciousness of guilt.

9. Evasion of New York City income tax by falsely denying local residence status – The indictment states that, from 2005 through 2013, Weisselberg and the other corporate defendants acted to “conceal his status as a New York City resident” and thus “enable[d him] to avoid the payment of New York City income taxes”. It further adds that he “spent most of his days each year in New York City, working in the X Organization offices at X Tower. He was a New York City resident, and knew that he was a New York City resident, but falsely claimed to his tax preparer and to the tax authorities that he was not a New York City resident” . . . 

It is a widely-known fact among New York-area taxpayers – and not just those with specific tax and accounting knowledge, like Weisselberg himself – that, if one has an apartment in New York City (as he did) and is in the City for at least a part of more than 183 days in a given year, then one counts for that year as a City resident. This is not an issue that turns on any broader (or other) facts and circumstances. Under the indictment’s stated facts, therefore, Weisselberg unambiguously was a New York City resident for all of the years from 2005 through 2013, based on an objective black-letter rule that is hardly arcane or obscure.

10. What was X’s role in all this? . . . There is little direct discussion of what X himself did or knew personally in relation to the facts asserted in the indictment. If X is subsequently indicted by the DA in connection with the crimes alleged here or anything else, his conviction would require proof in court, beyond a reasonable doubt, of his requisite criminal actions and intent. In the courtroom of public discussion and debate, however, any claim that the crimes asserted in the indictment could have occurred without his participation and knowledge may be viewed by many as begging credulity [i.e. he’s as guilty as hell].

The Data Priests

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On June 15, Matthew Crawford of The New Atlantis testified at a hearing on smart home technology held by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy & Consumer Rights. This is from his opening statement:

I have no expertise in antitrust. I come to you as a student of the history of political thought.

The convenience of the smart home may be worth the price; that’s for each of us to decide. But to do so with open eyes, one has to understand what the price is. After all, you don’t pay a monthly fee for Alexa, or Google Assistant.

The Sleep Number bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the sixteen-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else.

Meanwhile, the user agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel” your Sleep Number account. You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, its privacy policy once stated that the bed would also transmit “audio in your room.” (I am not making this up.)

The business rationale for the smart home is to bring the intimate patterns of life into the fold of the surveillance economy, which has a one-way mirror quality. Increasingly, every aspect of our lives — our voices, our facial expressions, our political affiliations and intellectual predilections — are laid bare as data to be collected by companies who, for their own part, guard with military-grade secrecy the algorithms by which they use this information to determine the world that is presented to us, for example when we enter a search term, or in our news feeds. They are also in a position to determine our standing in the reputational economy. The credit rating agencies and insurance companies would like to know us more intimately; I suppose Alexa can help with that.

Allow me to offer a point of reference that comes from outside the tech debates, but can be brought to bear on them. Conservative legal scholars have long criticized a shift of power from Congress to the administrative state, which seeks to bypass legislation and rule by executive fiat, through administrative rulings. The appeal of this move is that it saves one the effort of persuading others, that is, the inconvenience of democratic politics.

All of the arguments that conservatives make about the administrative state apply as well to this new thing, call it algorithmic governance, that operates through artificial intelligence developed in the private sector. It too is a form of power that is not required to give an account of itself, and is therefore insulated from democratic pressures.

In machine learning, an array of variables are fed into deeply layered “neural nets” that simulate the binary, fire/don’t-fire synaptic connections of an animal brain. Vast amounts of data are used in a massively iterated (and, in some versions, unsupervised) training regimen. Because the strength of connections between logical nodes is highly plastic, just like neural pathways, the machine gets trained by trial and error and is able to arrive at something resembling knowledge of the world. The logic by which an AI reaches its conclusions is impossible to reconstruct even for those who built the underlying algorithms. We need to consider the significance of this in the light of our political traditions.

When a court issues a decision, the judge writes an opinion in which he explains his reasoning. He grounds the decision in law, precedent, common sense, and principles that he feels obliged to articulate and defend. This is what transforms the decision from mere fiat into something that is politically legitimate, capable of securing the assent of a free people. It makes the difference between simple power and authority. One distinguishing feature of a modern, liberal society is that authority is supposed to have this rational quality to it — rather than appealing to, say, a special talent for priestly divination. This is our Enlightenment inheritance. It appears to be in a fragile state. With the inscrutable arcana of data science, a new priesthood peers into a hidden layer of reality that is revealed only by a self-taught AI program — the logic of which is beyond human knowing.

The feeling that one is ruled by a class of experts who cannot be addressed, who cannot be held to account, has surely contributed to populist anger. From the perspective of ordinary citizens, the usual distinction between government and “the private sector” starts to sound like a joke, given how the tech firms order our lives in far-reaching ways.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon have established portals that people feel they have to pass through to conduct the business of life, and to participate in the common life of the nation. Such bottlenecks are a natural consequence of “the network effect.” It was early innovations that allowed these firms to take up their positions. But it is not innovation that accounts for the unprecedented rents they are able to collect, it is these established positions, and the ongoing control of the data it allows them to gather, as in a classic infrastructure monopoly. If those profits measure anything at all, it is the reach of a grid of surveillance that continues to spread and deepen. It is this grid’s basic lack of intelligibility that renders it politically unaccountable. Yet accountability is the very essence of representative government.

Mr. Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company.” If we take the man at his word, it would seem to raise the question: Can the United States government tolerate the existence of a rival government within its territory?

In 1776, we answered that question with a resounding “No!” and then fought a revolutionary war to make it so. The slogan of that war was “Don’t tread on me.” This spirited insistence on self-rule expresses the psychic core of republicanism. As Senator Klobuchar points out in her book Antitrust, the slogan was directed in particular at the British Crown’s grant of monopoly charters to corporations that controlled trade with the colonies. Today, the platform firms appear to many as an imperial power. The fundamental question “Who rules?” is pressed upon this body once again.