The American Bunker State: Commercial Concentrations of People and their Health Data

Abstract

AI models are currently developed through purloined data by tech oligarchs, such as Peter Thiel (Palantir and Foundry/ImmgrationOS), Elon Musk (xAI and Grok), and Sam Altman (Open AI and ChatGPT). This talk critically examines how tech security companies and political actors collude to track, criminalize, imprison and punish patients through their health data. My discussion will delineate the circular connections between the building of AI data centers to concentrate and process health data and warehouses being bought to detain human beings in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) concentration camps. American technofascists, since the inauguration of the second Trump administration, has deployed both corruption without consequence and state violence to force the capitulation of medical and research institutions, while tracking citizens through their data for purposes other than for their care. The talk will highlight the various forms of resistance that ordinary people are undertaking to protect each other from the technofascists, including strategies to shut down the concentration camps imprisoning people and the data centers that store their data.

Speaker

Mary F.E. Ebeling is Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty in the Center for Science, Technology & Society at Drexel University, in Philadelphia, USA. She is the author of two books, Healthcare and Big Data (2016) and Afterlives of Data (2022), both of which address the biopolitics of the global economy in health data.

After the talk, the COPE project (Consumer Medicine: Philosophical and Ethical Implications), funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, will host an informal reception for continued discussion.