Here is a >$100k iphone I found by Caviar, it is $196k, and its primary value proposition seems to be the fact it has a Rolex glued to its back
Caviar is a company whose business model seems to be to bejewel iPhones and sell them to Russian oligarchs.
I think you need to argue better for 1) The US not already having that level of capability, and 2) The ability to deploy self-recharging drones enabling that capability, 3) The willingness of the US to actually buy & use such drones, 4) The willingness of the US to use such drones for such purposes, 5) The response of countries not just being to eg put nets over their power-lines (or increased drone detection ability) so that this happens a few times but is not persistent like cyber-attacks are (due to different offense-defense balances in that domain), and 6) The propensity of the US public to actually care at all.
No doubt drones seem an important military development, but self-recharging drones seem silly to me, if operating in enemy territory the slightest bit wary of being attacked. Drones are very much primarily a defensive and surprise attack sort of thing, and countries with sophisticated operational capabilities don't seem too have much trouble getting drones into position for such surprise attacks right now. For instance, see Israel's covert use of drones in June's 12-day war.
Why is this freak-out territory? This doesn't seem directly economically or culturally relevant to anything but war, and the effect on war seems easy to counter: put nets around power lines you need to use, and turn off power-lines you don't need to use, two things you really shoulda been doing anyway during war.
The third most expensive phone, the $110k one, is not bejeweled and in fact seems like it is mostly so expensive because of its specs?
Edit: Oh actually looking up what the specs mean, maybe it's so expensive just because of marketing.
3A side note: "Your strength as a rationalist is in your power to be more confused by fiction than reality". I had also believed there weren't any $100k iPhones, and was not convinced your explanation, and hypothesized the typical reason for such things: economies of scale. But then I sat down, had Claude look up the fixed costs associated with phone production, which turned out to be like $1B, which you could amortize over eg 100k of the richest individuals ($1e9/1e5 phones=$10,000/phone)! So then I figured such a company really ought to exist, I asked Claude if there existed any such phone company, and Claude mentioned Vertu!
There do in fact exist $100k iPhones marketed for the ultra-wealthy, see Vertu's lineup. Their most expensive phone is $504k, and seems expensive mainly because they bejewel it with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds.
The stats for the phone are not mentioned, however they have GIA documents certifying their use of real diamonds.
Next is basically the same deal but with alligator skin.
Then we get more interesting. Their third most expensive phone is $110k which markets itself as the "World’s first AI agent phone for entrepreneurs". Here are the specs
AIs will get more powerful & very significant pretty soon, it seems pretty relevant to ask whether one should take actions to prevent AIs from knowing about you, and pretty plausible to suggest that while the particular problems with being known publicly will stick around, they may get worse, and we may get a very different distribution over upsides and downsides.
I think your comment ignores the fact that OP is stating what problems (and benefits) they expect to be more salient if an AI is able to train on your posts.
Most oppressive governments and militaries in history have not been able to handle a population rising up, and in many cases the miliatry themselves will join the population in rising up, for instance in Russia's 1917 February Revolution.
Presumably in the "adequate" world of dath ilan, if the military supports the revolutionaries, they will and can assume they will be compensated for their trouble at least as much as they are compensated under the oppressive regime if they are necessary for the revolution to succeed, and progressively less as their negotiating position lessons.
1
This seems wrong to me? Discord, text messages, slack, invite-only forums, private social media accounts, and niche forums are all different levels of community size, and while for all of those there is some risk of what you say spreading to everyone you know, and that risk is larger than if you only communicated in person to a single individual at a time, I'm not convinced that that risk is uniform or significant across all mediums. One need only use common sense.
A village meeting for instance is likely more risky on this front too than a post on a niche forum, despite the latter technically being accessible to the whole world.