Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger Accelerates Corporate Surveillance State: How Media Conglomerates Weaponize Fear for Government Contracts and Public Compliance
Original framing: “The Ellisons Could Make a Killing in Big Surveillance With the Paramount Merger” — The Intercept
The current merger follows a long history of media consolidation that dates back to the 1920s Radio Act, which allowed a handful of corporations to dominate broadcasting. During the Cold War, media conglomerates like RCA and CBS collaborated with the U.S. government to develop early surveillance technologies under programs like Project Bluebook and COINTELPRO, normalizing the idea of corporate-government surveillance partnerships. The 1986 Telecommunications Act further accelerated this trend by allowing media monopolies to expand into cable, satellite, and digital platforms, creating the infrastructure for today’s surveillance state. This historical context reveals that the Ellisons’ potential role is not an anomaly but the latest chapter in a decades-long strategy to merge entertainment, advertising, and state power.
The Paramount-Warner merger is not merely a corporate power play but a systemic consolidation of media, entertainment, and surveillance infrastructure that reinforces the surveillance state.
By analyzing this through the lenses of historical precedent, Indigenous resistance, and cross-cultural perspectives, we see that this merger is part of a long-standing pattern where media conglomerates collaborate with governments to extract value from public data and behavior. The Ellisons’ potential profit is a symptom of a deeper mechanism: the privatization of surveillance for corporate gain while the public bears the cost in terms of privacy, labor exploitation, and social control. Historical examples like COINTELPRO and the 1986 Telecommunications Act show how these mergers have been engineered to stifle dissent and control narratives, while Indigenous and global South communities offer alternatives rooted in communal governance and data sovereignty. The trickster perspective further exposes the absurdity of this system, revealing how it preaches 'freedom' through entertainment while quietly building the tools of its own oppression. To dismantle this structure, we must invest in decentralized media cooperatives, enforce data sovereignty regulations, support community-led alternatives, and use art and education to inspire resistance. The solution lies not in blaming individual actors like the Ellisons but in dismantling the systemic mechanisms that enable this merger—and all future mergers like it—to thrive.