These are uncertain times in the United States of America.
We’ve got geopolitical fires burning all over the world, and at home we can’t agree on the color of shit.
A growing number of people are starting to wonder whether what we’re dealing with is even something we can vote our way out of anymore.
But at least we have entertainment.
Movies and TV streaming endlessly. Music. Books. Sports. Endless distraction, always on demand.
Sports, especially, have always been one of my favorite ways to check out for a few hours.
So like many nights in the fall and winter, I was watching a college football game.
We hit one of the far too many commercial breaks, and like usual, when the ads came on, my face went straight into my phone.
I was doom scrolling when, through the haze, I suddenly heard a line that snapped me back to the room.
“That’s why the government chose AT&T to build FirstNet.”
My head shot up. In front of my family, without thinking, I said out loud:
What the fuck is this now?
Why FirstNet Should Concern You
That reaction wasn’t ideological.
It wasn’t partisan.
It wasn’t even fully informed.
It was instinct.
Because buried inside that calm, patriotic ad voice was something we should never hear casually dropped into a football broadcast like it’s a new flavor of Doritos:
The government has its own network.
And it controls priority access to it.
FirstNet is marketed as a public-safety communications network, a dedicated cellular system for first responders and government agencies during emergencies.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable.
Who wouldn’t want firefighters, EMTs, and disaster response teams to have reliable communication when emergencies happen?
That’s the story.
The structure is something else entirely.
Priority Access Is Still Control
FirstNet isn’t just about reliability.
It’s about priority and preemption, the ability for government approved users to jump the line and, if necessary, push everyone else off the network.
That distinction matters.
Because the moment you create a system where the state decides who gets access first, you’ve crossed from infrastructure into power.
And power doesn’t stay politely scoped to its original justification.
In an emergency, priority access sounds like common sense.
In practice, it establishes a precedent:
The government defines what counts as an emergency
The government decides who qualifies as essential
The government controls the switch
That’s not paranoia.
That’s architecture.
The Structural Problem (Not the Sales Pitch)
Here’s the issue, freedom doesn’t usually die from bad intentions. It dies from good ones that scale.
FirstNet centralizes communication authority during moments when communication matters most, crises, unrest, disasters, instability.
Those are exactly the moments when governments historically expand power, suspend norms, and “temporarily” adjust rules.
And before anyone says “this is just for first responders,” remember,
every permanent expansion of state power started as a narrow exception.
Every one.
Surveillance programs start with terrorism.
Financial tracking starts with fraud.
Emergency powers start with disasters.
Network control starts with safety.
None of them stay there.
A Brief History of “Temporary” Emergency Powers
If this all sounds familiar, it should.
Modern democracies don’t usually collapse through coups anymore.
They erode through exceptions.
And those exceptions almost always arrive wrapped in the same language,
Temporary.
Necessary.
For your safety.
Just this once.
History is not subtle about this pattern.
In the Roman Republic, emergency powers were granted through the office of the dictator, a role explicitly designed to be temporary.
Six months.
Solve the crisis.
Relinquish power.
That was the theory.
The Republic didn’t fall because someone declared permanent tyranny overnight. It fell because the exception kept getting invoked, the term kept getting stretched, and the crisis never quite ended.
Sound familiar.
In Weimar Germany, Article 48 of the constitution allowed the government to suspend civil liberties during emergencies. It was invoked dozens of times before Hitler ever touched it.
By the time it mattered, the public was already accustomed to rule by decree as a normal response to instability.
Emergency powers didn’t cause authoritarianism.
They made it easy.
In the United States, we like to pretend we’re immune to this logic.
We’re not.
The American Version: Crisis as a Ratchet
The American model doesn’t rely on dramatic declarations. It relies on ratchets.
Something bad happens.
A power is granted to address it.
The power becomes normalized.
Oversight weakens.
The power never fully goes away.
Then the next crisis hits, and the baseline has shifted.
The Patriot Act was sold as a temporary response to 9/11.
Two decades later, its logic is baked into the operating system of the security state.
Surveillance authorities expanded.
Sunset clauses were renewed.
What was once unthinkable became procedural.
Financial emergencies followed the same path.
After 2008, extraordinary interventions were justified to prevent collapse.
Bailouts were framed as emergency medicine.
But the underlying architecture, the fusion of government guarantees with private risk taking, didn’t unwind.
It solidified.
COVID followed the same pattern.
Emergency public health powers.
Temporary restrictions.
Rapid normalization of executive authority.
Broad discretion with limited accountability.
The debate wasn’t whether emergency powers existed, only how long they should last.
Remarkably little was rolled back.
Instead, new norms formed.
This isn’t because of malice.
It’s because crisis logic always favors expansion.
FirstNet fits squarely inside this lineage.
Communication Control Is a Special Kind of Power
Not all emergency powers are equal.
Controlling money is powerful.
Controlling movement is powerful.
But controlling communication is foundational.
Every modern mass movement, every protest, every political response relies on communication networks. Whoever controls access during moments of instability doesn’t just manage logistics.
They shape reality.
Historically, communication control has always been one of the first tools seized during unrest:
Telegraph lines during labor strikes.
Radio control in wartime states.
Media licensing during internal conflicts.
Internet throttling during modern protests.
The method changes.
The logic doesn’t.
FirstNet doesn’t need to be used repressively to be dangerous. It only needs to exist as an option.
Once a government can guarantee its own communications while degrading or deprioritizing everyone else’s, it holds a structural advantage during political stress.
That advantage doesn’t require abuse to matter.
It alters incentives.
Emergencies Are Defined by Those in Power
An “emergency” is not an objective category.
It’s a designation.
Someone decides when an emergency begins.
Someone decides when it ends.
Someone decides what qualifies.
Those decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. They’re made by institutions whose primary incentive is stability, continuity, and control.
Public unrest can be an emergency.
Mass protest can be an emergency.
Economic disruption can be an emergency.
“Disinformation” can be an emergency.
Once communication priority is framed as safety, its scope stretches.
You don’t need censorship laws when you can out communicate the public during crises.
You don’t need to silence voices when you can drown them out structurally.
That’s the quiet danger here.
Normalization Is the Real Weapon
The most troubling part of that FirstNet commercial wasn’t the technology.
It was the tone.
It wasn’t framed as extraordinary.
It wasn’t controversial.
It wasn’t debated.
It was presented as a patriotic footnote during a football game.
Something that had been already decided, already settled, already normal.
That’s how power embeds itself.
Not through fear, but through familiarity.
Once the public accepts that of course the government has its own network, the next step isn’t a leap.
It’s a shrug.
Of course it has priority.
Of course it preempts traffic.
Of course it activates during unrest.
After all, it’s for safety.
By the time anyone asks whether this architecture is compatible with a free society, the answer no longer matters.
The system is already live.
Why Intentions Don’t Save You
At this point, defenders retreat to intent.
“This isn’t meant to be used that way.”
“This is about emergencies.”
“This is about saving lives.”
All probably true.
Also irrelevant.
Systems don’t care what they were meant to do.
If a tool can be expanded quietly, it will be.
If a power can be normalized, it will be.
If a switch can be flipped, it eventually will be.
The Oppenheimer Effect
What’s on display here is a textbook case of the Oppenheimer Effect.
Not evil.
Not conspiracy.
Not bad intentions.
The Oppenheimer Effect is what happens when builders of powerful systems misjudge how those systems will be used, they model downstream actors using their own values, norms, and restraint. Instead of modeling incentive structures under pressure.
The people who designed FirstNet likely imagined hurricanes and earthquakes.
Professionalism.
Discipline.
Narrow use.
What they failed to model was how the same tool looks to institutions facing unrest, legitimacy crises, or loss of control.
That gap between intended use and incentive driven use is where freedom quietly erodes.
The Freedom Cost Is Paid Later
The tragedy of emergency powers is that their costs come later.
You don’t feel them when they’re built.
You don’t notice them when they’re justified.
You only experience them when you need what they replaced.
Shared access.
Shared risk.
Shared constraint.
Those things don’t feel important until they’re gone.
And by the time they matter, the response is always the same:
“This isn’t the time to debate this.”
It never is.
Democracy Requires Shared Vulnerability
A free society depends on something deeply uncomfortable for governments, shared vulnerability.
When citizens and the state operate on the same communication infrastructure, the government is constrained by the same limits as the public.
When that symmetry breaks, when the state gets a protected lane, a private switch, a higher priority, accountability weakens.
If the government can always communicate while the public cannot, information asymmetry becomes baked into crisis response.
That’s not democracy.
That’s command structure.
And command structures don’t answer to the public.
They manage it.
Corporate-State Fusion Makes It Worse
FirstNet isn’t even purely governmental.
It’s built and operated by a private telecom giant under government contract.
That’s the most dangerous hybrid imaginable, public authority, private infrastructure, minimal oversight, and national security justifications for secrecy.
When state power and corporate incentives fuse, transparency dies quietly.
There’s no clear line of responsibility and no real mechanism for citizens to challenge misuse.
You can’t Freedom of Information Act a network outage caused by “operational necessity.”
You just lose service.
This Isn’t About AT&T
This isn’t an AT&T problem.
It isn’t even a FirstNet problem.
It’s a design problem.
A system where access can be prioritized, traffic can be preempted, definitions of emergency are flexible, oversight is minimal, and expansion is easy and will eventually be used beyond its original scope.
Not because someone twirls a mustache.
Because incentives don’t care about intentions.
The Real Question
The real question isn’t whether FirstNet helps first responders today.
It probably does.
The real question is this:
What kind of country are we building when the government has guaranteed access to communication, and the public doesn’t?
Because once that switch exists, once that hierarchy is normalized, once it’s advertised casually during a football game, you don’t have to lose democracy all at once.
You just have to lose it during the next emergency.
And then call what remains normal.
Via Stulti 
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