By Mathias Risse
BLOG series:
Notes from the New Frontier of Power
Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address
Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address upon leaving office in 1961 is among the most powerful presidential speeches of the 20th century. Eisenhower issued warnings that, over time, have only become more potent and have recently been echoed in Joseph Biden’s Farewell Address, 64 years and 12 presidents later. Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address, but even more strongly the striking presence of numerous tech billionaires in his entourage, including at his inauguration itself, should make us pause, recall Eisenhower’s speech, and draw more attention to epistemic rights as human rights. Other red flags should be raised from a human rights standpoint at this stage, but it is concerns about how our informational age is handed over to an oligarchy that is my topic here. Epistemic rights are rights we have as knowers and as knowns, the rights to information, knowledge, and truth—subjects central to our current digital age.
Eisenhower was one of America’s greatest generals before running for president. He was a leading member of the military establishment at a time of unprecedented technological and scientific breakthroughs that did not just have instant military applications, but could happen only because of perceived military needs and generous military funding. The most obvious breakthrough is the development of atomic energy that was on display in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Atomic energy was then channeled into a comprehensive armament program during the Cold War. By that time, Eisenhower had changed jobs and was Commander-in-Chief of America’s forces. Another example is digital electronic computation, whose development was much accelerated since the 1930s because of its usefulness for military purposes (which required complicated calculations).
One of the great scientific minds behind these advances was Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann, arguably among the most brilliant mathematical minds of all time. In a piece published a few years before his untimely death in 1957, von Neumann asked whether we can even survive technology—a remarkable question for a thinker who did more than almost anyone to make 20th-century technology useful for military purposes. He reaches no clear answer, and concludes by pointing out that all we know for sure is that surviving technology will take patience, flexibility, and intelligence (ref. von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?”). So, Eisenhower is not alone among those in positions of leadership to start worrying about how much technology has been revolutionizing military capabilities and in so many other ways has dramatically changed the world around us. But it is indeed his 1961 Farewell Address that is the most striking statement by any American leader of the 20th century about the perils of all this technological change specifically for democratic governance. Eisenhower warns us of the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” (ref. Farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961; Final TV Talk 1/17/61 (1), Box 38, Speech Series, Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, 1953-61, Eisenhower Library; National Archives and Records Administration).
Eisenhower expresses concern about “military-industrial complex.” This phrase is quoted often, and it should continue to amaze us that someone with his standing in these circles would admonish us to beware of this complex—much as it should amaze us that one of the great minds behind technology towards the end of his life would so greatly worry about where the world is headed. Eisenhower begins with a brief review of his career in the military and in politics. He praises Congress for having cooperated with his Administration on vital issues “to serve the national good rather than mere partisanship.” Eisenhower looks back at the half-century of his own public service as a period shaped by warfare. He proudly calls the U.S. “the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world.” He is also aware, however, that “America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches, and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.” He writes during the Cold War, a few years after the Sputnik Shock impressed upon Americans the technological capabilities of the Soviet Union—a country that had emerged victorious from World War II as much as the U.S. had. Eisenhower worries about this competitor, insisting that “we face a hostile ideology—global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration.”
As far as Eisenhower is concerned, the U.S. is doing a decent job at keeping this formidable foe in check. But the primary purpose of his Farewell Address is to issue warnings regarding two groups that might undermine the democratic values and commitments of the nation in the very process of protecting it from this foe. The first is the “military-industrial complex,” a name he uses for “the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry,” something new “in the American experience.” Given all these connections between military and the defense industry, its sheer influence “is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.” It is in spite of its sheer necessity, he admonishes us, that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” This alliance of captains of industry, military leaders, politicians, and administrators, in all their might, endangers “liberties or democratic processes.” “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
There is another group that is both necessary to national defense and worrisome from the standpoint of democratic values: a “scientific-technological elite,” which has emerged because a country run by the military-industrial complex depends on research at an enormous scale, research that is ever “more formalized, complex, and costly,” research in whose conduct “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” The scientific-technological elite—von Neumann would have chief among them—are scientists, university leaders, politicians, and administrators who run this part of society. As far as both these overly powerful groups are concerned, “it is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”
With these warnings issued, Eisenhower adds another one that sounds every bit as prescient as what he already stated: “As we ponder society's future, we … must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.” This was decades before climate change would become broadly acknowledged. And as we move forward, he invites us to “avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.” Hear, hear.
Biden’s 2025 Farewell Address
Joe Biden delivered his Farewell Address on January 15, 2025. Biden, too, reviews half a century of public service. Unlike Eisenhower, he does not pay his respects to Congress for cooperating around essentials. Having faced a different political reality, he points out that “believing in the idea of America means respecting the institutions that govern a free society—the presidency, the Congress, the courts, a free and independent press.” He does so in the spirit of bemoaning a shortfall rather than expressing gratitude. After claiming a number of successes for his Administration, and emphasizing that “it will take time to feel the full impact of all we’ve done together,” Biden turns to matters that give him “great concern.”
He starts off by talking about an oligarchy that “is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” He mentions climate change, which he sought to combat by signing into law “the most significant climate and clean energy law ever, ever in the history of the world.” But he adds that “powerful forces want to wield their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis, to serve their own interests for power and profit.” Anyone who listens to Biden’s speech this far is already pondering the same themes covered by his Republican counterpart in 1961. Biden makes the connection explicit, emphasizing that both Eisenhower and he himself worried about the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Biden points out that:
"Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology of our time, perhaps of all time."
He goes on to elaborate on the possibilities and perils of AI. “But unless safeguards are in place,” he sensibly adds, “AI could spawn new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation. We must make sure AI is safe and trustworthy and good for all humankind.” He continues with several other admonitions, returning once more to dangers from the concentration of power and wealth. He ends with reflections on the perceived strengths of the country and some expressions of gratitude.
Trump’s Inaugural Address and Beyond
Just days after Biden’s Farewell Address, on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump gave his second Inaugural Address. Reading it side by side with Biden’s Farewell Speech might make any reader think these presidents must speak about different countries. Trump presents himself as replacing a government that “confronts a crisis of trust,” one composed of “a radical and corrupt establishment [that] has extracted power and wealth from our citizens while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair.” He depicts a country incapable of assisting its citizens in emergencies, that blunders into crises abroad, weaponizes its justice system against its citizens (citing himself as such a victim), and sports an education system that teaches children to be ashamed. He announces a national energy emergency to make it easier to obtain permits to extract fossil fuels: “We will drill, baby, drill,” with the goal of exporting “American energy all over the world,” using “that liquid gold under our feet” for the country to become wealthy.
Biden’s concerns are not Trump’s, and so Eisenhower’s concerns are not Trump’s either. Trump is unfazed about a military-industrial complex or a scientific-technological elite, and does not care about exploiting resources in the present that would create burdens for future generations. The 47th president is unconcerned about the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” As if to prove Eisenhower and Biden right, Trump positioned Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, X’s Elon Musk, and Apple’s Tim Cook more prominently in the audience than the nominees for his cabinet. America is not Russia, and it would be misguided to make comparisons to Putin lining up his oligarchs to show the world that he controls all segments of society while also signaling that fealty to the ruler is the price to pay for belonging to the economic elite. It would also be misguided to dwell too much on comparisons with the Germany of 1933, given how broadly dispersed genuine economic and political power the U.S. is, and how genuinely entrenched the democratic spirit is across the nation. But it would be similarly misguided to see this line-up of monetary might merely as a display of America’s brightest to give a nod to its innovative capacities.
What is remarkable about the elite that filled the TV screens during inauguration is just what they control. In their various ways, the companies run by Zuckerberg, Pichai, Bezos, Musk, and Cook are the champions of collecting, storing, distributing, mining, and monetizing data—information used to make themselves richer and shape the future not just of the U.S. and other countries where they are dominant, but the future of humanity as a whole. The presence of these tycoons of industry manifests a fusion between unprecedented economic power and political power at a time when constitutional rulings put the president largely beyond legal accountability for what he does in office, and at a time when, at least for the next two years, this president will rule with a majority in both houses of Congress.
One of Trump’s first executive orders aims at “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship” of U.S. citizens. The order bans federal officials from conduct that “would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen” and instructs the attorney general to investigate if the Biden Administration engaged in efforts to censor Americans. As the order pointed out, it was “under the guise of combatting ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,’" and "that the Biden Administration infringed on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens” to push its on narrative on matters of public interest. Some weeks earlier, Zuckerberg already announced that Meta would abolish fact-checking, insisting that “fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created.” Meta also appointed prominent Republican Joel Kaplan as Chief of Global Affairs.
Almost immediately, Trump also repealed a 2023 executive order signed by Biden intended to reduce risks of AI for consumers, workers, and national security. The 2023 order asked of developers of AI systems that create risks for national security, economy, public health, or safety to share results of safety tests with the government, in line with the Defense Production Act. Only then could these systems be released to the public. Trump also announced a private sector investment of up to $500 billion to fund AI infrastructure. The endeavor involved yet other companies, Open AI, SoftBank, and Oracle, in a joint venture called Stargate.
As of this writing, barely ten days have passed since inauguration, and one could list other measures to substantiate an overall picture of the Trump Administration forming an alliance with the major players of the tech industry to create a future in ways that pay no heed to constraints in terms of risk assessment, safety standards, combatting mis- and disinformation, inclusiveness, protection of privacy, algorithmic fairness, and so on. That is, the future that is now on the way pays no heed to human rights or social justice. And I have not even spoken about the developing world or anything at all in the domain of foreign affairs. Surveillance capitalism, as defined and analyzed by Shoshana Zuboff, is aggressively moving into its next phase, though one might argue that what we are observing now for the most part is not novel but is merely bringing into the open and further advancing something that has been in the making for decades. The angle from which I choose to comment on these developments is to highlight the importance of epistemic rights for the world we (or they?) are now building.
The Human Rights Connection
The human rights movement is grounded in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and has since given rise to a broad range of domestic and international laws, new institutions such as regional human rights courts and the International Criminal Court, and globally disseminated networks of grassroots movements and non-governmental organizations (for the human rights movement, see Lauren, The Evolution of International Human Rights; Forsythe, Human Rights in International Relations. For an assessment of its success, see Sikkink, Evidence for Hope).
Since the late 1970s, scholars and activists have distinguished three generations of human rights, the first comprising civil and political rights; the second involving economic, social, and cultural ones; and the third ushering in collective or solidarity rights (this distinction seems to go back to Czech jurist Karel Vasak, see e.g., Vasak, “Human Rights—A Thirty-Year Struggle”). The distinction was inspired by the themes of the French Revolution: liberty (liberté), equality (égalité), and fraternity (fraternité). First-generation rights deal with liberty and participation in political life, protecting individuals from excessive state power. They trace their origins as far back as the Magna Carta of 1215, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, the U.S. Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the U.S. Bill of Rights of 1791, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789. Second-generation rights became prominent after World War II. Economic, social, and cultural rights guarantee an equal status to people as citizens beyond civil and political rights. Third-generation rights cannot be exerted by individuals in isolation: they necessarily involve group contexts. They include not only rights to self-determination, economic development, humanitarian assistance, and a clean environment, but also the respective rights of ethnic, religious, linguistic, and sexual and gender minorities.
The generational analogy hardly intends to capture linear progression with one generation giving rise to the next, only to then disappear. The “generations” are interdependent and interpenetrating. However, once such a generational model is available, one is naturally inclined to ask what the next generation would be. And indeed, for almost as long as there has been talk about generations, there has been sporadic talk about a fourth, which captures the dynamism of the human rights movement. The topics that fourth-generation rights are supposed to cover have varied, ranging from future generations or genetic lineage to women, indigenous people, or technological change (for an overview, see Thorp, Climate Justice, chapter 1. For an influential effort to declare a fourth generation to be about women’s rights, see Coomaraswamy, “Reinventing International Law.” For the effort to connect fourth-generation rights to integrity of genetic lineage, see Bobbio, The Age of Rights. For discussion, also see Tella, Challenges for Human Rights, 66).
Epistemic rights, recall, are rights individuals have in their capacities as knowers and knowns: that is, rights they have as persons who inquire about things (knowers), or in their capacity as entities about which something is known (knowns). Epistemic rights are not absent from the Universal Declaration and the movement it has brought forth, but they are much more significant in this digital age than they have been so far. The progression from Eisenhower’s to Biden’s Farewell Address and from there to Trump’s Inaugural Address and its immediate aftermath reveal how badly needed epistemic rights are. Let me restate here a proposal around epistemic rights as human rights I have made elsewhere. There is much to discuss about these rights: just why would they be human rights; how would they fit in with the history of the movement; just what is the meaning of rights-talk in this context (is it more about provisions or more about entitlements, for instance); what are the detailed arguments in their support, both as rights of sorts and specifically as human rights? I have addressed these matters elsewhere, so here I simply say that rights of this sort are part of what is needed to push back against the version of surveillance capitalism that we see in front of us (ref. Risse, Political Theory of the Digital Age, chapters 5-7).
Epistemic rights apply to individuals in four distinctive roles: as individual knowers, collective knowers, individual knowns, and as collective knowns. In the role of individual knower, a person is protected as an inquirer, as somebody who seeks to know something, asks for information, etc. In the role of collective knower, the individual is protected as a participant in an environment in which rules are followed and norms are respected that enable individuals to pursue their inquiry. In the role of individual known, a person is protected in terms of what information about them is available to others. Finally, in their role as collective known, individuals are protected as part of an overall system in which what is known about society as a whole, or about subgroups of it (data patterns), is treated in certain ways. These epistemic roles, in turn, ought to be protected in light of four values: welfare (well-being and prosperity), autonomy (independent decision-making), dignity (respectful, non-infantilizing, and non-humiliating treatment), and self-government (control over leadership). To be sure, these values have nowhere been explicitly endorsed as the key values of the human rights movement. But they do capture what the human rights movement has been all about. They also reflect the human concerns toward whose protection or promotion knowledge should be deployed (I take the focus on these values from Sunstein, The Ethics of Influence. Sunstein explores the extent to which core values (those four) are affected by governmental use of behavioral economics (nudging)).
A List of Epistemic Rights
The most important addition to the set of epistemic rights that the human rights framework already contains—such as a right to education—are rights to protect persons in their roles as collective known. In this era of surveillance capitalism, it is these rights that are primarily in jeopardy. At the same time, they were not taken seriously in the earlier stages of the human rights movement just because possibilities of collecting data were much more limited than today. The upcoming list should be understood cumulatively: rights introduced to protect epistemic actors in one role also protect them in others, but I only mention them once.
- Rights to protect persons as individual knowers
Welfare: What is primarily needed is a substantially boosted right to education, including basic literacy in digital lifeworlds. Future economic and political possibilities increasingly depend on such a capacity.
Autonomy: Freedom of thought, expression, and opinion, including the right to seek information, are already established as human rights. What is also needed is an explicit right to have governments and companies take measures to moderate content, preventing the use of the tools that digital lifeworlds provide for the systematic spread of falsehoods that would undermine people’s ability in independent decision-making.
Dignity, self-government: Nothing more to be added with the aforementioned rights in place.
- Rights to protect persons as collective knowers
Autonomy: There already are cultural rights indispensable for dignity and free development of personality and the right to freely to participate in cultural life, to enjoy the arts, and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. These need to be adjusted to the data episteme (and actually taken seriously). The way control over information (“infopower”) is exercised can be legitimate only if rights are in place that generate possibilities of participation in the design of the data episteme.
Welfare, dignity, self-government: Nothing more to be added with the aforementioned rights in place.
- Rights to protect persons as individual knowns
Autonomy: There need to be rights to protection of personal data, combined with much education about how important such protection is. There also needs to be a right to be forgotten (that is, after a while, searches no longer turn up certain bits of information).
Dignity: There already are rights to be protected from arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence and from attacks upon honor and reputation. These rights must be adjusted for digital lifeworlds with their new possibilities of synthetic media (e.g., deepfakes).
Welfare, self-government: Nothing more to be added with the aforementioned rights in place.
- Rights to protect persons as collective knowns
Self-government: There need to be rights to substantial control over collected data. One hallmark of the data episteme is a humungous amount of data collection. Control over them needs to be broadly shared. This is the most important genuine addition to the body of existing human rights. When the UDHR was passed in 1948, nothing like this data deluge and its possible uses by government and companies was on the radar.
Welfare, autonomy, dignity: Nothing more to be added with the aforementioned rights in place.
Conclusion
The images from Trump’s inauguration—featuring the world’s most prominent tech tycoons—show that we live in dramatic times in which a few individuals with stunningly outsized amounts of wealth are in the position to shape the future of the world. They are doing so in a coalition with a president who currently holds an almost unprecedented amount of power because the Supreme Court has backed him up in his self-understanding around presidential immunity and because, for now, he governs with a supportive Congress.
This is also a president who has kept his place in the limelight by aggressively pushing lies about election fraud after he was defeated in 2020, has thereby built bridges to grievances, anger, and fears that many people inevitably feel, and has made fealty to himself the vital criterion for anyone to hold important office in his second Administration. How long the alliance between Trump and any one of these tycoons will last is anyone’s guess. What I propose in this commentary is a list of human rights—epistemic rights that to some extent come in addition to what we already have in the movement—I submit is necessary to make sure our future is one we built together, rather than what Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. elect to build for themselves. Theorists can make proposals. What it takes to make these matters a reality is a movement.
