“I really worry about with AI is surveillance…AI is fundamentally a communist technology. It allows governments and corporations to surveil people in very profound and different ways. And that scares me a lot…”
VICE PRESIDENT J.D. VANCE, THE DIARY OF A CEO INTERVIEW
Vance’s friend is wrong.
VANCE’S POLITICAL RHETORIC AND STRATEGY
THERE ARE ACTUALLY HISTORICAL PRECEDENTS TO THE HISTORY OF SURVEILLANCE going back to early modern Europe, specifically the Venetian Republic. Surveillance as a political technology is a European state tradition and originated in European bureaucratic states, and refined in monarchies, republics, and empires. J.D. Vance’s claim that “AI is fundamentally a communist technology” is nothing more than a rhetorical move, and not historically or conceptually true. As a general‑purpose computational technology, AI is not tied to any ideology. Surveillance has been practiced by monarchies, republics, empires, fascist states, liberal democracies and communist states. Vance warns that AI is a tool of “communist surveillance,” but it is important to detach this from J.D. Vance’s distorted worldview. Vance’s framing fits into a broader worldview where the “radical left” is treated as the universal antagonist, and technologies or social changes he dislikes are rhetorically attributed to left‑wing influence, even when the historical or structural reality doesn’t support that claim, and he is close to the people enabling this technology.
This is a political strategy of communication due to the platform he is framing his answers, but the purpose of this contradiction is to simplify complex technological and historical realities into a binary moral narrative. This framing benefits the interests of Silicon Valley investors, AI‑industry donors and tech‑aligned political strategists and deflects skepticism and criticism away from corporations. Politicians are then able to criticize AI without targeting the industries and protect interests and intelligence.
Vance is politically aligned with corporate and governmental actors who are actively developing and deploying AI systems, so his approach is a predictable route towards weaponized rhetoric. China’s social credit system, facial recognition, and internet controls are routinely called “communist totalitarianism” or “Orwellian” by Western conservatives and libertarians who emphasize centralized state control and suppression of dissent. Both communist regimes (USSR, China, GDR Stasi) and fascist/Nazi ones used extreme surveillance, as did republics (Venice) and liberal democracies (Patriot Act-era expansions, EU practices). The technology itself does not carry an ideology; the regime and intent do. This mislabeling dilutes precise historical terms (“fascist” and “communist” have specific 20th-century meanings) and turns them into generic slurs for “things I dislike.” It polarizes debate, prevents cross-ideological critique of surveillance creep, and obscures that the structural driver is modern state capacity and information technology, not any single –ism. Venice proves sophisticated surveillance predates both communism and fascism by centuries and thrived in a (flawed) republic.
As we will study, surveillance as a state technology has deep European roots and is a continuation of long‑standing surveillance traditions within a broader history of modern administrative power.
Where Authority Lies: Republicanism, Liberalism, and Progressive Morality was written after research into Venetian Republicanism not as an attack on republics. The Venetian Republic used a sophisticated system of state informants, secret denunciations, and the Council of Ten, in which even citizens could anonymously accuse others through the bocche di leone (“lion’s mouths”). AI accelerates and combines elements of what states have done for centuries, and these were not communist states. The nature and genealogy of modern surveillance, intelligence and military industry from Europe to the 20ᵗʰ century reveal how much AI is structurally similar to early‑modern bureaucratic surveillance.
The Venetian Surveillance System
The Republic of Venice (c. 697-1797) operated one of early modern Europe’s most sophisticated state intelligence apparatuses, despite being a republic albeit an oligarchic one dominated by patrician families. After a failed coup in 1310 (the Tiepolo conspiracy), the Council of Ten was created as a temporary security body. It rapidly expanded into a permanent institution handling state security, public order, domestic and foreign policy, diplomacy, military affairs, and “secret affairs.” The Secret Service of Renaissance Venice: Intelligence Organisation in the Sixteenth Century by Dr Ioanna Iordanou explains how in 1539 it formalized the Inquisitors of the State (Inquisitori di Stato). It included a centralized hierarchy with geographically dispersed agents namely of diplomats, merchants, military and naval personnel, expatriate functionaries, and paid or casual informers and spies).
Bocche di Leone (“Lion’s Mouths” or “Lion’s Mouth denunciation boxes”) were stone carvings (often grotesque faces) embedded in public buildings like the Doge’s Palace where citizens could anonymously drop written accusations of treason, corruption, or moral lapses (Alyssa Palombo, In the Lion’s Mouth: The Spymasters of the Venetian Republic). These institutionalized a culture of suspicion and self-policing. There was also professional code-making and breaking (cryptography and steganography), letter interception, bribery, poisons, and occasional assassinations or “extraordinary measures.” Silent movement through the gondolas on Venice’s unique waterways left no carriage tracks or easy footprints. Venice became “the city of secrets” and “city of masks,” as an intriguing atmosphere of masks, secrets, and pervasive watchfulness.
Venice’s system was not modern totalitarianism but a pragmatic republican tool for preserving an oligarchic trading empire against internal coups, external threats (Ottomans, rivals), and corruption (Secrets of Venice: A History of Espionage). It resembled a corporate-like public-sector intelligence organization with rules, hierarchies, and specialized functions (operations, analysis, covert action).
Genealogy of Modern Surveillance from Europe to the 20th Century
Surveillance already has deep European roots in state-building, bureaucracy, and social control, evolving from early modern practices into industrialized and totalitarian forms.
There are the early modern precedents of Venice (Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance), other Italian city-states, and absolutist monarchies. Centralized intelligence, informant networks, record-keeping, and “legibility” projects (making populations and territories knowable for taxation, conscription, and order). Venice’s Council of Ten was an advanced example of state intelligence as corporate bureaucracy. France, from the Ancien Régime to the 19th century is another example. The monarchy used extensive police surveillance under Louis XIV and Louis XV. The 19ᵗʰ century French state expanded surveillance through the Sûreté and political police.
Britain (18th-19th centuries)
Bureaucratic and colonial foundations from the 18ᵗʰ-19ᵗʰ centuries involved the British state using informants and political policing during the Gordon Riots, Chartist movement, and Irish uprisings. Postal surveillance and intelligence gathering were routine. Modern bureaucracy (military, state administration, capitalist enterprise) institutionalized record-keeping, censuses, IDs, and policing. Colonial empires perfected techniques (fingerprinting originated in British India and was imported back; passbooks, convict registries, and mobility controls were tested abroad then applied domestically). These methods treated populations as data to be classified and managed (Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond).
Russia (Tsarist Empire) and DISCIPLINARY SOCIETIES
The Russian Empire used infiltration, surveillance, and psychological operations long before the Soviet era. The Tsarist Okhrana (late 19ᵗʰ century) was one of the most sophisticated secret police forces in Europe. These 19ᵗʰ-early 20ᵗʰ century disciplinary societies saw the rise of police forces, detective work, photography, and filing systems expanded. WWI saw mass surveillance in Britain and France (postal censorship, alien registration, etc.). Foucault’s panopticon (inspired by Bentham) metaphorically captured the shift toward self-disciplining under the gaze of potential observation (see Surveillance and Metaphor of “Tribunal” in Bentham’s Utilitarianism).
“Surveillance pervades modern society. From CCTV cameras to cellphones to digital tracking, it can be impossible to tell whether someone is watching. This monitoring almost certainly affects our behavior, and theories about exactly how it does have a long history, tracing back to a model of the ideal prison: the Panopticon.”
Visible Yet Unverifiable: The Panopticon – Urban Utopias
Totalitarian peaks during the interwar-WWII and Cold War involved Nazi Germany, who used IBM punch-card technology for censuses and racial classification; and the Soviet Union and East Germany (Stasi) built the most intrusive surveillance states in history, with networks of informants penetrating private life. Post-WWII welfare-security states in the West combined social data collection with signals intelligence (SIGINT). Cold War competition accelerated electronic surveillance.
Then with the digital transition of the late 20ᵗʰ-21st century, OECD discourses shifted from viewing data collection as a privacy threat to framing it as essential for “smart” governance, efficiency, security, and customization.
The genealogy is not linear progress but recurring patterns where states need information for coordination, security, revenue, and control; technology and bureaucracy amplify it; colonial and imperial laboratories export techniques home; and crises (wars, terrorism, pandemics) normalize expansion.
AI Surveillance Is Structurally Similar to Early-Modern Bureaucratic Surveillance
AI surveillance automates and scales the core logic of early-modern bureaucratic systems rather than inventing something entirely new. Through classification and legibility, early modern bureaucracies (ledgers, censuses, tip boxes, informant reports) made populations “readable” for identification, profiling, threat assessment, and resource allocation. AI does the same through facial/gait recognition, pattern recognition, predictive analytics, and data aggregation — reanimating historical practices of scientific classification tied to social hierarchies such as race, class, and behavior.
Venice’s Council of Ten or royal bureaucracies collected and analyzed data manually through hierarchies and networks, but AI removes human limits on volume, speed, and constant coverage, enabling “panoptic” effects at population scale without needing vast human police forces.
Just as awareness of Lion’s Mouths or potential informants encouraged self-censorship and conformity in Venice, awareness of AI monitoring (cameras, data trails, social scoring elements) promoted anticipatory compliance (behavioral control and self-discipline). Algorithmic systems are the modern “black boxes.” Traditional bureaucracy was limited by clerks and agents, while AI multiplies capacity exponentially for predictive policing, content moderation, movement tracking, and profiling — turning limited tools into omnipresent dragnets.
Both are tools of state (or corporate-state) power that reduce complex human behavior to data points for governance, risk management, and control. AI accelerates what bureaucracy professionalized in making society administratively legible and governable.
IDEALIZATIONS OF GOVERNMENT
The public’s fantasy ideal of democracies and republics stems from low civic literacy and the dangerous allure of “perfect systems.” The linked open letter argues that “perfect political systems” are a trap belonging to autocrats, divine monarchs, technocrats, and utopians. In republics like the United States, the system is an ongoing experiment that demands moderation, intellectual vigilance, character, discipline, and civic knowledge, not perfection. A great majority of Americans struggle with basic civics tests, fostering ignorance that leads citizens to treat the republic as a flawed or unfinished project ripe for dismissal or radical overhaul. This ignorance fuels disillusionment, and when reality falls short of an idealized “perfect” democracy (free of compromise, conflict, or coercion), people on both sides gravitate toward utopian alternatives. The Right may dream of autocracy or one-party dominance to “purge” opponents; the Left pursues structural overhauls promising equity without trade-offs. Both paths ground solutions in animosity rather than reflective citizenship and have repeatedly failed. Perfect Political Systems as a Trap was written to influence people to rise above this by teaching civic duty, leading by example, and rejecting fascist-style “hero” executives or totalitarian shortcuts.
This fantasy sets the stage for abandoning republics: imperfect systems with checks, rule of law, and accountability are rejected in favor of ideologies (communism, socialism, or technocratic utopias) that promise a coercion-free “perfect” order yet historically deliver far more pervasive control. A search for utopian or “perfect” systems free of surveillance, bureaucracy, or coercion consistently reveal that such ideals are either unrealistic (early “utopian socialists” criticized by Marxists as fanciful and voluntarist) or lead, in practice, to intensified control.
Large, complex societies require coordination for defense, taxation, law enforcement, infrastructure, welfare, and dispute resolution. This necessitates information collection, i.e., some form of surveillance and bureaucracy. Small-scale intentional communities or historical anarchies may minimize it temporarily but rarely scale or endure without evolving structures. Attempts to impose “perfect” egalitarian or classless orders (various communist and socialist experiments) produced some of history’s most thorough surveillance states precisely because they sought total social transformation and eliminated independent power centers.
The fantasy of a coercion-free utopia is what drives the abandonment of republicanism. Imperfect republics with its separation of powers, elections, courts, and (imperfect) privacy norms are rejected for ideologies promising transcendence of conflict and surveillance. History shows the replacement systems usually deliver more of both, under new branding.
CONCLUSION
J.D. Vance’s assertion that “AI is fundamentally a communist technology” collapses under historical scrutiny. Surveillance as a systematic practice of state power long predates both communism and fascism; it emerged as a core technology of European state-building in the early modern period, most notably in the oligarchic Republic of Venice. The Council of Ten and its network of informants, cryptographic offices, and anonymous denunciation boxes (bocche di leone) institutionalized the collection, analysis, and weaponization of information to preserve public order, suppress internal threats, and project power abroad. These mechanisms were pragmatic instruments of republican (and later monarchical and imperial) administration, not ideological inventions of the twentieth century.
Artificial intelligence does not introduce a new species of surveillance so much as it automates and scales the same logic of bureaucratic legibility that European states refined over centuries. Where Venetian officials once relied on human informants, coded dispatches, and physical tip boxes, contemporary systems use facial recognition, predictive analytics, and vast data aggregation to achieve comparable, and vastly more pervasive, effects of identification, classification, behavioral modification, and risk management. The structural continuity is that both reduce complex human behavior to administratively useful data points in the service of governance and control. Labeling such technologies “communist” or “fascist” according to contemporary political convenience obscures this deeper history and prevents serious cross-ideological examination of how informational power actually operates.
The pursuit of a “perfect” political system free from surveillance, coercion, or administrative necessity remains a dangerous illusion. Large-scale societies require information flows for coordination, security, taxation, and welfare; attempts to abolish these necessities in the name of utopia have historically produced more total forms of surveillance rather than their elimination. Republican frameworks, for all their imperfections and ongoing struggles with civic literacy, at least contain institutional mechanisms (separation of powers, public contestation, legal accountability, and periodic renewal) that can constrain surveillance creep when citizens exercise them. The alternative is preventing subordination to whichever regime or corporation most effectively monopolizes the gaze of surveillance power. As one professor stated, “AI is here, and isn’t going away!” Then, we must say to this that historical awareness of surveillance’s European administrative roots, rather than partisan sloganizing, offers the clearest foundation for responsible governance of AI in the present.
Biden’s administration treated AI risks (including surveillance and bias) as problems requiring coordinated federal guardrails. The Trump Administration approach treats heavy domestic regulation and certain equity-focused interventions as the primary problems, while advancing U.S. technological primacy and countering ideological influences it views as “distorting AI.” Both involve the exercise of state power over a dual-use technology. The Venetian Republic’s Council of Ten used sophisticated surveillance tools to protect its (oligarchic) republican order, and modern administrations do the same for their respective visions of order and security. The technology itself remains structurally similar across ideological lines.
Durable patterns of administrative surveillance and control predate any single president and will likely persist beyond the current one unless structural constraints on informational power are strengthened through sustained, cross-partisan mechanisms rather than the usual alternating rhetorical campaigns.
REFERENCES
- Kees Boersma, Rosamunde van Brakel, Chiara Fonio, and Pieter Wagenaar, eds. Histories of State Surveillance in Europe and Beyond. London: Routledge, 2014.
- Iordanou, Ioanna. “The Secret Service of Renaissance Venice: Intelligence Organisation in the Sixteenth Century.” Intelligence and National Security, 2022.
- Dr. Ioanna Iordanou. Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
- Odyssey Traveller. “Secrets of Venice: A History of Espionage.”
- Alyssa Palombo. “In the Lion’s Mouth: The Spymasters of the Venetian Republic.” CrimeReads, July 11, 2024.
- Social History Society. “Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance.”
- The Ballot Boy. “The State Apparatus.”
- Urban Utopias. “Visible Yet Unverifiable: The Panopticon.” June 6, 2020.
Other contextual references in this essay utilizes established scholarship concerning the Panopticon (Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault), colonial and metropolitan surveillance practices, Nazi-era data processing, Stasi informant networks, and OECD digitalization discourses, which are widely documented in the historical and surveillance studies literature cited above.
The Minervan Republic 