And Just Like That, More Surveillance, Thanks Larry (and Elon)

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Larry Ellison’s Oracle Tracks Americans’ Behavior Regarding Health and Entertainment

May 18, 2026 Drey Dossier 5

Oracle is a corporation that was co-founded by Larry Ellison, a Zionist billionaire worth as much as $270 billion! Oracle has healthcare contracts with Medicare, Medicaid and VA data for 150 million Americans.

It monitors streaming and cable. The Ellisons own Warner Brothers/ Discovery, Paramount Plus, CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, and Showtime with 79 million plus subscribers.

They are collecting information on social media after acquiring Tik Tok through a consortium board. TikTok has 170 million monthly users.

Oracle has defense contracts with the Air Force and hosts workloads for all 18 US Intelligence agencies.

All of the data collection is running simultaneously and there are no firewalls between the medical, military and entertainment/news groups.

1-minute video of Larry Ellison explaining how AI can force everyone to be on their best behavior.

The Drey Dossier released this video, The Merger that Needed a War, in March 2026, at the beginning of the Iran war. Drey explains how the war in Iran is being used to cover up the massive power and control that has been consolidated under Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle.

From the Drey Dossier on Substack:

I need your focus for a few minutes on something that slipped through the noise today, and may not get another window soon.

While Israel struck Iran and the United States moved in behind them, while every newsroom in the country was [rightly] covering one of the most consequential moments in years, Oracle Corporation quietly published a blog post announcing that the U.S. government had authorized it to run generative AI on federal government data. That means pattern recognition, automated data analysis, and decision-making tools now approved to operate on your Medicare records and military systems, cleared at the highest civilian and Department of Defense security levels. (And yes, Oracle also just took over the infrastructure running your Medicaid and ACA data — that happened this week too, and we’ll get there.)

The AI running on the classified side is Grok, built by Elon Musk’s xAI, hosted on Larry Ellison’s cloud, processing Top Secret American intelligence data. That went live today. While you were watching Tehran.

There are a lot of parallels between what’s unfolding with Iran right now and the early days of Iraq, and one of them is this: the last time the country was consumed by a war in the Middle East, Ellison quietly built a surveillance state in Britain while nobody was paying attention. He poured roughly £270 million into the Tony Blair Institute, whose staff embedded themselves in NHS and immigration policy working groups, and what came out the other end wasn’t just cloud contracts — it was a mandatory national digital ID scheme that links a citizen’s employment history, benefits, healthcare records, and physical movement into a single government-accessible identity. A wallet on your phone that the state can read. Civil liberties groups called it a surveillance architecture. Nearly three million people signed a petition against it. Oracle holds over a billion pounds in UK government contracts and the infrastructure is already built. I covered that story in full HERE. The reason it matters right now is that he is running the same play, in the same window, in this country.

Read full article here…

from:    https://needtoknow.news/2026/05/larry-ellison-tracks-americans-behavior-regarding-health-and-entertainment-via-oracle/

The Value of “Expected Value”

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(Once Again, an excellent article by  A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR.  I am including only a part of the article.  Check out the link for the rest.)

The Critical Calculation Medicine Won’t Make

How a simple framework reveals that “proven” therapies often lack value while the “unproven” ones lack only approval

A Midwestern Doctor's avatar
A MIDWESTERN DOCTOR
MAY 23, 2026

Story at a Glance:

  • As decisions always have pros and cons, making the correct one is often quite challenging. One framework, “expected value” (EV), solves this puzzle by calculating the relative probability of a good (positive) and bad (negative) outcome.
  • In medicine, while frameworks like EV should be used to guide medical policies and clinical decisions, they frequently are not, resulting in practices like mass COVID vaccination which have explicitly negative EVs being adopted and then held to regardless of public pushback or evidence to the contrary.
  • Much of this stems from our widespread societal faith that large randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are the definitive arbiter of scientific truth, despite their numerous shortcomings. In contrast, valid and affordable approaches for determining scientific truth are continually marginalized, making it nearly impossible to “prove” competing therapies work or that sanctioned therapies have serious harms.
  • Much of this originated from two subjective linguistic interpretations which the FDA then used to prohibit the public’s access to life-changing (but non-commercializable) therapies like DMSO and protect its industry sponsors—which as DMSO stories in this article show, has created profound consequences that have been well-hidden from all of us.
  • This article will explore how this dysfunctional dynamic has harmed the health of America, meaningful changes that could preserve the vital functions of the FDA while simultaneously preventing it from sabotaging America’s health, and the changing political winds we’ve helped create which are gradually forcing those changes to happen.

The majority of decisions in life aren’t clear cut as they have both an upside and a downside (or multiple upsides and downsides). However, rather than being fully cognizant of the complexity of the decision, the human mind will typically narrow the picture and see only one side of the coin to reduce this large cognitive load. Many perpetually unresolved political conflicts essentially result from this, as each side emotionally primes their adherents to focus on the arguments in favor of their position and those which undermine the other side, resulting in both sides having a view of reality where their side is correct and the other is irredeemably wrong—which in some cases holds true, but typically is not.

One of my favorite frameworks for encapsulating this paradigm is the biostatistics concept of “sensitivity and specificity,” which denote how likely a test is to catch something that is there (sensitivity) and how likely it is not to overshoot and only identify things that are actually there (specificity). The value of this framework (beyond providing an informed way to choose medical tests) is that it emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between the two, as if one is increased (e.g., more aggressively screening for something), the other decreases (e.g., that screen will have a higher rate of false positives).

Because of this, ideally, the sensitivity and specificity of a test (and what will then be done with either result) should be appropriate to a patient’s clinical situation and in parallel, work is always done to improve the tests themselves so better balances between sensitivity and specificity can be met. In contrast, in overly politicized issues (e.g., criminal justice), the focus always ends up being on maximizing sensitivity OR specificity rather than finding a reasonable compromise between the two, which maximizes both as much as is feasible.

However, the reality is that you will frequently be confronted with situations where there is a less than ideal balance of upsides and downsides (e.g., sensitivity and specificity) between the two options, but a choice nonetheless must be made. Fortunately, due to how common these situations are, effective decision making strategies have been developed and refined.

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Predicting Expected Values

The classic mathematical formula used to “solve” these situations is expected value (EV), which essentially calculates “on average, how much will this situation benefit or harm me.”

This translates to (magnitude of outcome 1 * probability of outcome 1) + (magnitude of outcome 2 * probability of outcome 2), and this is repeated for all possible outcomes (e.g., it could go to calculating outcome 10) so that the total probabilities add up to 1. So for example, if you had a situation where you paid a dollar to flip 2 coins and then got 99 cents for each “heads” you got, the EV for the four outcomes (HH, HT, TH, TT) would be (1.98*0.25)+(0.99*0.25)+(0.99*0.25)+(0*0.25) or $0.99. Given that your cost to play this game is $1.00, it is hence “not a good idea” to play the game as there is a negative DV (on average you will lose money).

Many businesses (beyond just casinos), in turn, are essentially structured so that the EV of the transactions they make are positive for them (and negative for the customer) hence (excluding highly unusual circumstances) ensuring a steady stream of profit which sustains the business or industry.

While everyone has a general grasp of EV (e.g., if you saw a dollar bill fly into the freeway, almost no one runs onto the highway to try to grab it as the risk of being hit by a car makes the EV very bad there), a few points are critical to understand about it:

First, most people do not have a strong grasp of probabilities, and as such, predatory industries will frequently mislead them about the actual probabilities, leading them to believe bad EV choices are actually good EV choices.

Second, rather than being a simple binary calculation, EV calculations are often complicated because there are many potential outcomes (variables).

Third, EV can encompass a variety of outcomes beyond financial gains or losses, at which point it becomes harder to fit into a numerical formula.

For example, many of the policies that were pushed on us during COVID-19 essentially arose from people being implicitly presented with erroneous EV formulas by the mass media, and then extrapolating decisions off those formulas which appeared beneficial (positive EV) but in reality were harmful (negative EV) with a correct formula.

To illustrate, the odds of a child dying from COVID-19 were effectively 0 (and in the small number who died, there was almost always a severe underlying condition), so no real benefit could be derived from vaccinating, whereas injuries (including fatal ones) routinely occurred. So, the EV of a child taking the COVID vaccine was always negative (as there was no “positive” outcome, whereas a negative one could occur).

Likewise, when the Pfizer NEJM paper came out (which made many, including most of the medical profession, decide they had to get the vaccine no matter what since it was “95% effective!” and would end the pandemic), the paper itself stated:

  1. Adverse reactions were much more common in the vaccine than the placebo group (27% vs 12% for a direct event and 21% vs. 5% for an unrelated adverse event)
Similar reaction rates were reported in the other age groups. Additionally, “severe fatigue” was reported in 4% of recipients.
  1. In contrast, for COVID infections, those same symptoms occurred, typically 1-2 times as frequently (sometimes 3x).
  2. 8/18,198 (0.044%) vaccinated developed COVID and 162/18,325 (0.88%) of the unvaccinated developed COVID (a 20-fold decrease).
  3. Seven days after the initial dose, 1/18,198 vaccinated and 9/18,325 unvaccinated developed severe COVID (COVID typically requiring hospital care).
    Note: this metric was changed to after the first vaccine (whereas the primary efficacy measurement ones were after the second vaccine), since 5 of the severe infections in the placebo group happened prior to the seven day post vaccine cut-off (which was hidden in the appendix). Had this standard been used for all COVID infections too, it would have been (39+8)/18,198 vs. (82+162)/18,325 (a 5.16 fold decrease falling far short of the “95% effective” benchmark), whereas had the study’s primary criteria been used here, it would have been 1/18,198 vs. 4/18,325 (a 4-fold rather than 9-fold decrease)—illustrating how studies always change their metrics and criteria in whatever manner makes the product look best.
  4. 4 serious adverse events attributed to vaccination were reported (shoulder injury from injection, right axillary lymphadenopathy, paroxysmal ventricular arrhythmia, and right leg paresthesia).
  5. 2 vaccine recipients died and 4 placebo recipients died (all from causes unrelated to COVID-19).
  6. Nothing in this study evaluated transmission.

When I read this paper, I was jaw dropped, as it was blatantly stating there was an extremely negative EV for the vaccine as you were trading the symptoms from a COVID infection for a 1/119 chance (0.88%-0.044%) of not getting COVID, so if you assumed COVID-19 symptoms on average were twice as frequent as vaccine symptoms you were increasing your likelihood of getting ill 60-fold by vaccinating (along with the injection site specific symptoms only seen from the vaccine) in return for a possible halving of COVID symptoms (although in reality, people often felt far worse post-vaccine than during COVID). If you attempted to counterweight that by the major benefits of vaccine, the most important one, death, was not prevented, while the medium one “severe COVID” had required between 2,293 to 6,123 vaccinations to prevent one instance (with the higher figure arising if a consistent metric had been used by Pfizer), and the only other possible justification for vaccinating (reducing transmission) had not been tested in the paper.

Furthermore, since fairly consistent methods are used to doctor papers, I was relatively certain:
•Vaccine efficacy had been overstated (e.g., COVID cases in vaccine recipients were not reported) and severe injuries in vaccine recipients also were not reported—both of which were later corroborated by numerous trial participants and trial researchers.
Note: while the trials were happening (inspired by what I’d learned happened in the Gardasil trials where many of the reported adverse events were magically erased), I joined online support groups for the trial participants and noted that many of the adverse events they reported did not appear in the final trial report, and that the overall severity from a reaction to the vaccine was significantly worse than what I typically saw people experience with COVID-19. My suspicion adverse reactions were covered up in the trial solidified once the vaccine hit the market, because almost immediately, I had multiple patients each day seeking help for severe and unusual vaccine reactions and people I knew from around the country began contacting me to ask if the vaccine could cause strokes or heart attack (as it had happened to someone they knew)—and most importantly, my sample size for these early reports was far smaller than the 18,198 vaccine recipients in the trial.

•Any benefits not reported in this paper (e.g., transmission or reducing death) would never be found for this vaccine as every possible attempt had been made to exaggerate the benefits and they could only decline from this point forward (e.g., before long everyone would have immunity to the original strain and COVID-19 would mutate to something no longer covered by the vaccine).
Note: at a six month follow up, deaths were slightly higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated group. Likewise, despite there being no evidence that the vaccine prevented transmission (and its symptom-reducing design arguing against this even being possible) health authorities and the media widely promoted the vaccine as preventing transmission to pressure people to vaccinate, until real life data forced them to backtrack on their claim.

•Flipping the criteria for severe COVID-19 (compared to minor COVID) to make the vaccine look better demonstrated that data manipulation was occurring in the paper (hence casting everything else into doubt). Later, as I started noticing a lot of people become severe ill with COVID-19 (and in many cases dying) immediately after vaccinating (including individuals who had minor PCR confirmed asymptomatic infections), I realized this issue had most likely been detected by Pfizer and hence why the criteria for evaluating COVID hospitalizations was changed to “seven days post the second vaccination” (which resulted in many vaccine COVID-19 deaths being labeled as “unvaccinated” deaths).
Note: “disease provocation” due to vaccine-induced immune suppression is a longstanding problem with vaccination (e.g., a good case can be made many of the pre-polio vaccine polio outbreaks were due to vaccination, COVID-19 was the two most common fatal COVID vaccine reactions reported to VAERS and longitudinal data showed the more COVID vaccines you got the more likely you were to get COVID-19)—all of which is discussed here.

Put differently, my immediate thought after looking at the paper was that if after all their best attempts to make the vaccine look as good as possible, it was still this bad, it meant the actual data was likely appalling. Remarkably however, when I discussed this paper my physician colleagues, they could only “see” the 95% effective figure (the 20-fold relative reduction) and all the other points I raised, which were in the paper, went in one ear and out the other, hence illustrating that most people simply do not have a good grab on probabilistic reasoning (outside of those in competitive fields where optimizing EV choices is necessary for success).

Note: the formula which goes hand in hand with EV is Bayes’ theorem [P(A|B) = [P(B|A) × P(A)] / P(B)], which provides a method for updating the probability of something being true as new evidence becomes available. In medicine, it is essential for correctly interpreting diagnostic tests (e.g., understanding that a positive result from a screening test in a low-risk population is more likely to be a false positive than a true one), yet remarkably few physicians actively apply it in their clinical reasoning1,2—which in turn leads to a significant amount of overtesting (some of which in fairness, they know is not justified but is done to avoid potentially being sued), overdiagnosis, and unnecessary treatment.

Finally, it should be noted that the EV of the COVID vaccines was much easier to calculate than that of most other vaccines in use (because there was a much smaller set of variables and much more available data on those variables). For example, to begin calculating the benefit of a routine vaccination, you first need to start with:

Then you need to weigh that against the risks of each vaccine in the series (as later ones typically cause more injuries), with separate calculations done for each degree of injury severity, along with subgroup susceptibility (as some people are much more sensitive to vaccine injury than others) and then once that is done, somehow assess the cumulative effect of all the different vaccines being taken (as vaccine toxicity and immune dysregulation are cumulative). However, rather than try to engage in that complex calculation, the medical industry’s solution has been to assume all vaccines are “magically safe and effective” and like the COVID vaccine, give both incredibly optimistic models of efficacy while only focusing on a few inconsequential reactions (e.g., temporary injection site reactions).

As such, much in the same way doctors were convinced the COVID-19 vaccines would end COVID because it was “95% effective” (when nothing of the sort then happened) and that the vaccine was much safer than getting COVID (despite trial data indicating the opposite), virtually no knowledge exists on the actual EV of most vaccines because they were given a simplified formula to calculate them which only highlights a few key variables industry wants people to focus (which arrive at a high EV). This sales strategy, in turn, is quite effective as it allows people to avoid the hard mental work of having to complete a complex calculation (hence appealing to human laziness), while simultaneously appealing to the human ego by providing the illusion of mastery and authority in the area (by regurgitating the simple arguments used to authoritatively enshrine a positive EV for the vaccines).

Note: a while back I tried to calculate the risks and benefits of each childhood vaccine (as they vary immensely with some being much worse than others)—all of which is detailed here.

Lastly, it should be acknowledged that the original emergency use authorizations for the COVID vaccines were granted under the premise that no other treatment existed, the vaccine’s massive potential benefit justified the existing uncertainty over its effectiveness, and that authorization could be modified as more data emerged. However, not only did other treatments already exist, the FDA then shredded the EV of the vaccines by continually doubling down as more and more evidence of ineffectiveness and harm accumulated.

Stagnating Science

The following holds true for our current society:

•It highly values science and scientific truth to the point that many people worship it in place of religion.

•In order for science to be “valid” (and widely promoted by the media) two bars typically must be cleared—a large randomized control trial is conducted that arrives at a statistically significant corroborating outcome and the scientific authorities must bless a given scientific conclusion.

In some cases, this is a very helpful framework, but in many instances, it is extremely vulnerable to abuse. This is because:

•Large RCTs are extremely expensive (tens of millions of dollars), to the point that they typically can only be financed by national governments, massive pseudo-non profits (e.g., the Gates Foundation), or pharmaceutical companies.

•Any controversial study that somehow makes it through that ideological filter will still often be routinely dismissed by the medical authorities (and in many cases retracted once too many people start citing it).

•Studies that do not meet this threshold are very easy to dismiss, and will virtually always be dismissed if they arrive at a conclusion that threatens a major interest.
Note: it is very common for the abstract or conclusion of a study to provide a summary which contradicts the study’s results if the actual data is “politically incorrect” or “undesirable” (as most people only ever read summaries). Fortunately, AI now makes it very easy to expose this tactic.

•Since most scientists are dependent upon either grants or pharmaceutical funding (the only two sources of funding for costly research), they quickly learn they cannot pursue “controversial research” and hence do not produce research that will tank the rest of their career.

Because of this, we’ve run into a situation where most research is highly conservative and incrementally builds upon existing discoveries rather than making new revolutionary discoveries which advance science and change paradigms. For example, this is how Gerald Pollack aptly described our current situation.

from:  https://www.midwesterndoctor.com/p/the-critical-calculation-medicine?publication_id=748806&post_id=196647596&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The Traveler’s Diary – May 24, 2026

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Every day brings new challenges within the Universe, the. Environment, and the soul. 

There will be a great swath of land laid barren, as though some giant demon has walked across it and left nothing in his wake but destruction, and there will be sighs and mourning, but along with that will come the realization that as long as the people are willing to accept these kinds of things as just something that happens – on all levels and in all areas – they will be the victims of what these who feel themselves to being charge are desiring to do.

For you see, they merely see themselves as being in charge when in truth they are ruled by other forces that have dug their way out of the dregs of time and who are looking for their final victory.

That cannot be for the forces of good and realization are too strong.  It has taken them many many eons to accept their power, their responsibility, and to accept exactly who they are and what they are truly capable of.

Divide and conquer is no longer in the works for when a man bleeds, when a child is hurt, those of compassion cry with the victim, and more and more people are realizing the in many ways they (too) are being looked upon as victims.  But they are only the victims if the do not and will not accept their power.  (Even now) you can see more and more people accepting the power and manifesting it in ways in which they are able..

Remember not everyone is called to stand in front of the tank, but every alive soul is being called, according to their abilities, to do what they are able, to say “NO,” “NOT SO” to those who are desperately trying to control.

The amount of illusion in the areas of those who have positions in the government is astounding.  They do not think, as Miss Austin likes to say, that “they are on the menu”.

These days will bring realization and openness to that illusion, and then they will find the the devils are coming for them. 

Documentary on Technocracy – Learn What It Means for You

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The first-ever full-length documentary on Technocracy

The Agenda: Their Vision, Your Future
Patrick Wood's avatar
PATRICK WOOD

Long in the making, it is finally released! This documentary was made in the UK, and while I sat for an interview, it shows that others around the world are getting the big picture. My works, videos, and books on Technocracy broke this story starting in 2015, and have clearly impacted each of the presenters.

In five days since its release, it has received 150,000 views, 5,500 thumbs up, and over 800 comments. It could go over the top viral if enough people share it!

I am re-posting it on Substack for posterity’s sake, in the event that YouTube decides to axe it. Here is the original link:

Please share this video especially with all the nay-sayers in your life!

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from:    https://patrickwood.substack.com/p/the-first-ever-full-length-documentary

The Endgame?

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An Assessment Of The Accelerating Timeline for “You Will Own Nothing”

Patrick Wood's avatar
PATRICK WOOD
MAY 21, 2026

I am an economist, first and foremost. I’m going to give you a sobering look at the progression of Technocracy and what to expect in the future. Take it for what it is. I have been following the global elite and Technocracy for over 48 years, and since my first book with Antony Sutton, Trilaterals Over Washington, Vols. I and II, I have never pulled any punches and never watered anything down. I have been warning for 12 years that the endgame was upon us. I gave you the receipts for my thinking. Time is running out… soon.

My epic new book, The New Economics of Technocracy: You Will Own Nothing, laid bare the structure, architecture, and strategy being used to dominate the world. My earlier book, co-authored with Courtenay Turner, was released in November 2025: The Final Betrayal: How Technocracy Destroyed America.

(Patrick Wood’s Technocracy News is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you don’t read these books, I can’t help you. There will be no discussion. For those of you who have read these books already, you should tear into this essay with determined resolution to get to the bottom of it.

To the rest of America who have fought me tooth and nail for decades (from the left and right, you know who you are), I have only one final thing to say to you: “I told you so, and I was right.” ⁃ Patrick Wood Editor.)

When Klaus Schwab declared at the 2016 World Economic Forum that “you will own nothing and be happy,” most observers treated it as aspirational futurism. A decade later, the architecture to deliver the first half of that sentence is being built in front of us — and it is being built faster than nearly anyone outside the industry has acknowledged.

I have been documenting Technocracy for almost 20 years. The pattern is always the same. The technocrats describe the future they intend to build. Critics dismiss the description as paranoia. The future arrives on schedule. Then a new generation is told the new arrangement was inevitable.

What is different this time is the speed. And the speed is itself accelerating.

I want to lay out a defensible timeline for May 2026 with the full understanding that it will look different in six months. That is not a hedge. It is a feature of the moment we are in. The compressors are themselves compressing.

The Original Estimates Were Too Conservative

Industry analysts have been forecasting tokenization timelines using growth-rate models built for human-paced engineering and human-paced legislation. Boston Consulting Group projected $16 trillion in tokenized assets by 2030. McKinsey echoed similar figures. The World Economic Forum suggested ten percent of global GDP would move on tokenized rails by 2027.

These numbers were defensible eighteen months ago. They are no longer defensible today.

Six forces have entered the picture that none of those models accounted for. Each one shortens the timeline. Stacked together, they multiply.

The first is artificial intelligence and its compounding doubling curve. The second is regulatory capture by the technocratic class. The third is the buildout of more than five thousand AI data centers as the physical substrate. The fourth is the Pax Silica Declaration binding signatory nations to American AI infrastructure. The fifth is the federal-wrapper strategy for routing around state property law. The sixth is the Bank for International Settlements as the global alignment mechanism for tokenized monetary infrastructure.

Three of those compressors I had previously misclassified as immovable constraints. They are not. They are accelerants.

The AI Acceleration

METR, an AI evaluation organization, has been measuring how long a task an AI model can reliably complete. The doubling time used to be seven months. It is now closer to four. On software-engineering benchmarks, the doubling time is under three months.

This matters because tokenization is, at its technical core, a software-engineering problem. Smart contracts must be written. Audited. Integrated with custody systems. Reconciled with off-chain registries. Connected to oracles. Hardened against exploits. Compliance logic must be embedded.

Every one of those tasks is being accelerated by AI tooling that did not exist two years ago. The TON ecosystem is already shipping AI-assisted smart-contract toolchains. Base has launched dozens of agentic AI projects executing on tokenized assets. Broadridge surveyed 900 financial-services technology leaders in February 2026 and the headline conclusion was unambiguous: “GenAI delivering now, tokenization is next.”

The build phase that should have taken a decade is being completed in three to four years.

The Technocratic Capture

The second compressor is what Harvard’s Sabeel Rahman has called the “technocratic impulse” — the regulatory posture in which legislators defer rule-drafting to the very industry they are meant to oversee.

Members of Congress cannot read smart-contract code. They do not understand zero-knowledge proofs. They cannot evaluate consensus mechanisms. Representative Ro Khanna stated the problem out loud: Congress does not have the knowledge base.

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Industry is happy to provide the missing knowledge. And the missing legislative text.

Big Tech alone deployed $1.1 billion in political spending through 2025 to shape AI rules and preempt state regulation. The crypto industry deployed comparable sums to pass the GENIUS Act and move the CLARITY Act through the House.

The pattern is visible in the regulatory record:

  • The GENIUS Act was drafted in close consultation with stablecoin issuers themselves.
  • The SEC’s January 2026 statement that tokenized securities “may or may not” carry shareholder rights was language requested by tokenization platforms.
  • The Department of Labor’s “asset-neutral” safe harbor of March 30, 2026 uses verbatim phrasing from industry comment letters.
  • Chair Atkins’s Project Crypto framework cites industry-developed standards like ERC-3643 as the regulatory model.
  • The December 2025 AI preemption Executive Order was prepared with substantial industry coordination.

This is not bribery. It is something subtler. The legislators are being handed pre-built solutions to problems they cannot independently evaluate. They sign because they have nothing else to sign.

This is what regulatory capture looks like when the captured do not realize they have been captured.

The 5,000 Data Centers

The reader might ask why this is happening now. The answer is partly political. But it is also physical.

The United States is in the middle of a buildout of AI data center capacity, unlike anything in industrial history. Estimates put the global figure at well over five thousand operational and announced data centers, with the United States hosting more than half of large-scale capacity.

These facilities are not just running language models. They are the physical substrate on which the tokenized economy will execute.

Every tokenized stock trade requires compute. Every smart-contract execution requires compute. Every oracle update, every compliance check, every identity verification, every agentic AI transaction on a tokenized rail requires compute.

The data center buildout is the engine room of the architecture. It is being financed by sovereign-wealth capital from the UAE and Saudi Arabia, by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, and the new entrants — Stargate, CoreWeave, and the rest.

This is the part Schwab’s quote glossed over. “You will own nothing” requires somewhere for the not-owning to happen. The data centers are that “somewhere”.

Pax Silica and the Treaty Workaround

I previously assumed cross-border legal recognition of tokenized assets would set a hard floor on the timeline because treaty cycles run five to fifteen years. That assumption is already obsolete.

The Pax Silica Declaration binds signatory nations to American AI infrastructure as the operating substrate for their digital economies. Once a country is inside that arrangement, it inherits the technical standards, identity systems, compliance hooks, and settlement rails that come with it. That is not a treaty in the traditional sense. It is soft annexation through infrastructure dependency. Legal recognition follows the wire.

Then there is World Liberty Financial. The WLF deal with Pakistan for cross-border payments was not on most analyst maps a year ago. It is now operational. WLF is positioning USD1 as an upgrade to the dollar itself, deployed through bilateral arrangements with friendly jurisdictions. A stablecoin issued by a politically connected American entity is being used to settle cross-border flows in a sovereign state of 240 million people.

This is a treaty substitute executed at the speed of a smart contract. Pax Silica plus WLF plus USD1 means the cross-border problem is being solved through bilateral infrastructure deals and dollar-aligned tokenized settlement, not through the Hague or the UN.

The treaty cycle of five to fifteen years collapses to whatever the bilateral signing schedule is.

The Federal Wrapper Around State Property Law

I also previously assumed that state-by-state title statutes would slow the tokenization of sovereign property because state law moves slowly, and there are fifty of them.

That was the wrong frame.

The architects do not need to replace every state’s title system. They need a federal wrapper that leaves state title systems formally in place while allowing tokenized representations to function as the operative instruments for transfer, financing, securitization, and beneficial-interest trading.

This is the same legal trick used for mortgage-backed securities under MERS. The deed stays where it is. The economic interest moves through a parallel federal layer that the underlying state recording offices treat as authoritative. State recording becomes ceremonial. Federal tokenization becomes operational.

A federal wrapper of this kind requires one act of Congress, not fifty acts of state legislatures. With CLARITY-Act-style preemption already in motion and the precedent of the AI preemption Executive Order of December 2025, the wrapper can be deployed in a single legislative cycle.

That bottleneck is essentially removed.

The BIS Whip

The third constraint I had wrongly classified as a floor was the alignment of 195 jurisdictions on tokenized monetary infrastructure. That is not a 195-decision problem. It is a Bank for International Settlements problem.

The BIS sits above the central banks. Through Project Agorá, Project mBridge, the Innovation Hub network, and the Unified Ledger initiative, it has been pre-positioning the technical and governance scaffolding for tokenized monetary alignment for years. Member central banks are already conforming their domestic CBDC and tokenized-deposit work to BIS-published standards.

When the BIS decides the architecture is ready, it does not need 195 separate political decisions. It needs roughly two dozen central-bank governors at the table in Basel agreeing to a coordinated launch, after which the remaining jurisdictions align by default through correspondent-banking dependency, IMF conditionality, and SWIFT-successor-rail compatibility.

That is the whip. The Basel capital accords were imposed on the global banking system through exactly this mechanism. There was no global vote. There was a BIS framework, and compliance followed.

The 195-jurisdiction floor exists only as long as the BIS chooses not to crack the whip. Once it does, alignment compresses from decades to roughly the implementation window of a single coordinated rollout — call it eighteen to thirty-six months.

The Rolling Process

Now to the question that matters most. When does this hit ordinary people?

The answer is not a date. It is a sequence.

Nobody wakes up on a Tuesday in 2030 and discovers all their assets are gone. The architecture is being designed so that the losses arrive in waves. Different victims. Different asset classes. Different legal vehicles. Different demographics.

The first wave is already underway. Retail crypto users buying offshore tokenized stocks — xStocks, Robinhood EU, Kraken’s tokenized US equities — are the first generation to discover that what looks like a stock token may carry no shareholder rights, no dividend pass-through guarantee, and no recourse if the platform fails.

The next wave is stablecoin holders facing GENIUS Act compliance triggers — whitelisted-only redemption, freeze authorities, and the discovery that a “dollar token” is not a dollar. USD1 and the WLF rollout will accelerate this wave.

After that come the US retail buyers of third-party-wrapped tokenized stocks under the SEC’s innovation exemption. Synthetic exposure without entitlements. The price tracks. The rights do not.

Then come the 401(k) participants — roughly seventy million Americans — whose target-date defaults will quietly absorb tokenized private equity, tokenized credit, and crypto under the DOL’s new safe harbor. They will not be asked. They will not be told. The illiquidity and valuation losses will surface only in the next downturn.

Then pension beneficiaries. Then self-directed IRA holders. Then fractional real-estate token buyers who discover they own LLC interests, not deeds. Then conventional shareholders of Russell 1000 stocks whose governance gets diluted by third-party wrappers. Then physical property owners under the federal wrapper, whose state-recorded deeds become ceremonial. Then cash users as CBDCs and tokenized deposits become the dominant settlement layer.

That is a ten-wave sequence running across roughly a decade — but with the first six waves now compressed into the next four to five years.

Each wave’s victims look different from the last. That is the point. No common identity forms. No political coalition forms. No reversal happens.

The Revised Timeline as of May 2026

Putting the six compressors together, with the three former floors now reclassified as accelerants, gives a defensible answer for the present moment.

The original analyst estimates of 2038–2042 for 80 percent global asset tokenization are obsolete by every measure I can identify. They were drawn before the AI doubling data, before the technocratic-capture cycle of 2025–2026, before the data center buildout reached its current pace, before Pax Silica was operational, before WLF and USD1, and before the federal-wrapper strategy was visible.

My previous revision placed the saturation window at 2030–2033 with an aggressive case of 2029–2031. That estimate is now also too conservative.

The defensible May 2026 timeline:

  • Mid-case: 80 percent global asset tokenization by 2029–2032.
  • Aggressive convergence case: 2028–2030.
  • Architecture load-bearing across all asset classes: 2027–2028.
  • First six waves of dispossession substantially completed: 2027–2030.
  • Full ten-wave sequence: completed by 2032–2034.

That is the picture from where we sit today. My honest expectation is that this estimate will move forward by another six to nine months when I revisit it in late 2026. The compressors are themselves compressing. AI doubling pulls forward the technical buildout, which pulls forward the regulatory permissions, which pulls forward the next set of bilateral infrastructure deals, which pulls forward the BIS readiness window. Each loop tightens the next.

I am writing this with the explicit caveat that any reader looking back from November 2026 should expect to find the dates have moved earlier, not later.

Why It Will Be Brutal

The brutality is not in any single wave. The brutality is in the cumulative effect.

News emerged in January 2026 that all NYSE-listed stocks will be tokenized. By April, the platform was unveiled. We now know it will be launched by year-end. Formerly, such an operation would have taken years to cut through regulations, deliberation, and testing; not so with Technocrats driving the process.

A retail trader loses on a tokenized stock platform in 2026. A worker discovers their target-date fund underperformed because of illiquid alts they did not choose in 2027. A pensioner watches benefits cut as “necessary recalibration” in 2028. A small landlord finds their LLC token diluted by sponsor amendment in 2029. A homeowner finds their deed has become ceremonial under a federal wrapper in 2030. An elderly cash user finds their preferred medium quietly unusable in 2032.

Each of these is dismissible in isolation. The aggregate is the most thorough redefinition of property in American history.

The technocrats know this. They have always known it. Wyoming’s Select Committee on Blockchain spelled out the destination in 2020: once tokens are recognized as title, tokens replace physical title. That is not a metaphor. That is the statutory roadmap.

Industry voices are equally candid. A January 2026 LinkedIn analysis titled “The Programmable Square Foot” declared: “Static ownership is fading. Programmable value is taking over.” State Street describes tokenization as a process that “redefines ownership.” Better Markets warns of “shadow stocks” that look like the real thing but lack the legal substance.

Programmable. Redefined. Shadow.

These are the words of the people building it. They are not hiding what they are doing. They are simply describing it in a register that most of the public cannot decode.

Where This Leaves the Reader

I am not writing this to alarm anyone. I am writing it because the timeline has changed, and the public discussion has not caught up. And because the timeline will change again before this essay is six months old.

The legal permission to dispossess is being passed faster than the technical capacity to execute, and both are being passed faster than the public capacity to understand what was done.

Four things follow from this.

First, the window for political resistance is now measured in months, not years. The compression of the legislative cycle means the architecture will be substantially load-bearing by 2027–2028. After that point, undoing it requires a future Congress to take affirmative action against an entrenched industry, a foreign infrastructure dependency network, and a BIS-aligned monetary system. That is a far higher bar than the original passage.

Second, the rolling nature of the dispossession means waiting for a defining event is fatal. There will be no single crisis. There will be a sequence of small ones, each affecting a different population, each dismissed as an edge case until the aggregate is irreversible.

Third, the convergence of AI, technocratic capture, data center buildout, Pax Silica, the federal wrapper, and BIS alignment is the actual story. No single one of those is enough on its own. Together they are a regime change in what property means and who controls it.

Fourth, the timeline itself is a moving target. Anyone who assumes the dates I have given here will hold for two years is reading the same map the analysts read in 2024 — and that map is now wrong by a decade.

I have called this Technocracy for almost two decades because that is what it is. The 1930s technocrats believed engineers should run the economy because politicians were incompetent to manage industrial complexity. The 2026 technocrats believe blockchain architects, AI engineers, and tokenization specialists should design the rules of property and finance because politicians are incompetent to manage digital complexity.

The difference is that today’s technocrats do not need to seize power. They are invited in by legislators looking for someone to write the technical bits of the bill.

That is the pattern. That is the timeline. That is why the thesis of “You Will Own Nothing” is no longer a 2030s problem. It is a now problem with a 2028–2030 endpoint, rolling forward one wave at a time.

The question is whether enough readers will see all ten waves as a single pattern before the fourth wave normalizes the technology beyond recovery.

That is the contribution this work has to make.

I will revisit this timeline in six months. I expect the dates will have moved earlier.

Endnotes

Boston Consulting Group and ADDX, “Asset Tokenization to Grow into US$16 Trillion Opportunity by 2030,” Ledger Insights, September 11, 2022.

Rony Dahan, “Global Adoption of Tokenization: Where Institutions Are Leading,” LinkedIn, September 23, 2025.

World Economic Forum, “Tokenized World: The Future of the Economy in 2030,” BBVA, May 5, 2026.

METR, “Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks,” March 19, 2025.

METR, “Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models,” May 7, 2026.

arXiv preprint, “Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks,” 2503.14499v2.

AI Digest, “A New Moore’s Law for AI Agents,” April 8, 2025.

BlockchainXTech, “How AI Is Accelerating Web3 Development & Automation,” LinkedIn, November 16, 2025.

Crypto Briefing, “TON’s New AI-Ready Toolchain Accelerates Smart Contract Development,” May 12, 2026.

BingX, “Top AI Agent Projects in Base Ecosystem 2026,” February 12, 2026.

Broadridge, “GenAI Delivering Now, Tokenization Is Next,” PR Newswire, February 24, 2026.

K. Sabeel Rahman, “Envisioning the Regulatory State: Technocracy, Democracy, and Institutional Experimentation,” Harvard Journal on Legislation.

Public Citizen, “$1.1 Billion in Big Tech Political Spending Fuels Attacks on State AI Laws,” November 20, 2025.

Wikipedia, “Regulatory Capture.”

Forbes, Zennon Kapron, “America Is About to Have Two Stock Markets for the Same Company,” May 19, 2026.

Better Markets, “The SEC’s Embrace of Tokenization Must Prioritize Investor Protection,” March 23, 2026.

SEC Statement on Tokenized Securities, January 28, 2026.

US Department of Labor, “Proposed Rule: Fiduciary Duties in Selecting Designated Investment Alternatives,” Federal Register Doc. 2026-06178, March 31, 2026.

US Department of Labor / EBSA Press Release, March 29, 2026.

Latham & Watkins, “DOL Proposes New ERISA Safe Harbor for Alternative Investments in Retirement Plans,” March 30, 2026.

Ogletree Deakins, “DOL Unveils Proposed Rule to Remove Restrictions on Alternative Investments,” March 29, 2026.

Executive Order 14330, “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors,” August 7, 2025.

Cleary Gottlieb, “2026 Digital Assets Regulatory Update: A Landmark 2025,” January 14, 2026.

Fireblocks, “5 Key Digital Asset Policy Changes in 2025 and What to Expect in 2026,” December 16, 2025.

Latham & Watkins US Crypto Tracker, Legislative Developments.

Americas Credit Unions, “GENIUS, STABLE, and CLARITY Acts and State Laws,” June 23, 2025.

Morgan Stanley, “The ‘GENIUS’ of Greater ‘CLARITY’ on Stablecoin,” July 17, 2025.

McGuireWoods Consulting, “Executive Order Targets State AI Regulation Through Federal Preemption,” January 19, 2026.

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, “New Executive Order Signals Federal Preemption Strategy for State Laws on Artificial Intelligence,” January 6, 2026.

Holland & Knight, “What to Watch as White House Moves to Federalize AI Regulation,” December 14, 2025.

Pillsbury, “Real Estate Tokenization: Recent Developments in New Jersey and Dubai,” July 15, 2025.

Wyoming Select Committee on Blockchain, “Real Estate Tokenization,” May 19, 2020.

ScienceDirect, “Is the Tokenization of Property the Next Step in the Financialization of Housing?,” 2026.

Lobusto, “The Programmable Square Foot: Real Estate Tokenization and the $2 Trillion Opportunity,” LinkedIn, January 23, 2026.

Binaryx, “BlackRock’s 4-Stage Tokenization Plan Explained,” February 27, 2025.

State Street, “Digital Asset Regulation Accelerates in 2026,” March 2026.

Atlantic Council, Central Bank Digital Currency Tracker, May 13, 2026.

Financial Stability Board, “The Financial Stability Implications of Tokenisation,” October 21, 2024.

World Bank ID4D, “Tokenization.”

Canton Network, “State of RWA Tokenization 2026 Report,” December 16, 2025.

World Economic Forum, “What to Expect for Digital Assets in 2026,” January 12, 2026.

Frontiers in Blockchain, “Tokenization and the Reshaping of Traditional Finance,” February 11, 2026.

SNS Insider, “Asset Tokenization Market Size, Share & Growth Report, 2035,” September 22, 2025.

Pointsville, “Global RWA Tokenization Industry: Market Analysis and Forecast,” August 19, 2024.

Rep. Ro Khanna, statement on AI regulation, July 13, 2023.

Bank for International Settlements, Project Agorá, Project mBridge, and Unified Ledger initiative materials.

World Liberty Financial / USD1 Pakistan cross-border payments deal coverage, 2026.

Pax Silica Declaration, signatory framework documents, 2025–2026.

MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems), federal-wrapper precedent for state title law.

Brickken, “How to Tokenize Real Estate: A Step-By-Step Guide,” February 19, 2026.

from:    https://patrickwood.substack.com/p/an-assessment-of-the-accelerating?publication_id=721283&post_id=198786723&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Traveler’s Diary – May 23, 2026

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There was something you wanted to get across.

Yes, and it has to do with things happening in your world.  As you saw, there was an earthquake in the area of what you call Hawaii and that was part of what we alluded to yesterday, but it is well to know that this is not the end of the shaking on that part of your globe.  Moreover the shaking will go deeper and affect various places in your world unexpectedly.  Your scientists – seismologists we think they are called, they feel that the rout and progression of movements in your Earth has been well documented, however they are not aware of faults and empty chambers n which spurts of energy can travel and gain in momentum.  When this happens, there will be activity in areas which were never thought to be active.  Along with this, it is time to look at the weather for the Earth, Gaia, is taking over and the predictability that your meteorologists aided by these who are manufacturing stress within the climate on your earth through various technological and chemical means, (can no longer be used to) determine how their actions are now going to result.

The politicians who have based much on their actions on the intel that they have been getting from those who remanufacturing a false environmental crisis —- please be advised that there is what you term “climate change” throughout the planetary system, so perhaps it is better to consider it planetary change or change of the Earth’s system (along with the rest of the planets)

The scientists think they have figured it all out, however their physics is flawed for being incomplete, and they will begin to see holes in the equations that have been using to bring about what they consider their worldwide coup.

Those politicians who feel themselves so smugly placed will find that their platforms become shaky and fall down.  This is a hard one to predict for the individuals concerned are all accomplished in lying as their hobby.  The ones with the worst advisers will be the first to be shown as failures and then the others who are choosing not to listen to those who are counseling them will come next. 

For you must realize that at this time it is not the recent past of conspiracies and manipulations that is determining what will happen, rather there is assistance coming from those within their dimension(s) who have a strong desire to maintain and regenerate this planet. 

This summer will be hot in more ways than one, but it is well to stay grounded and secure in your truth.  It is also not a bad idea to prepare for problems.

Phish, the Sphere, the Cage, Your Kids, and What Comes Next

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The Portal

Notes From Inside The Rehearsal Venue

Joshua Stylman's avatar
JOSHUA STYLMAN

I went to Phish at the Sphere. Yes, I know this may shock, and possibly even disappoint, people who have been following my writing. I most definitely broke a few of my own rules to get there.

Putting aside my own long and complicated relationship with this band, the trip to the Sphere was the kind of thing I’d normally write a piece warning people about, and yet, I went anyway. I wanted – maybe even needed – to see what I’d see. So, I accepted the invitation from a friend to join him and some others for two nights in Vegas.

The friends I traveled with are people I love but haven’t seen in a while. We met up with a larger group there, some old friends, some new, most of whom I hadn’t seen since the world got really weird. Some are aware of my tendencies to dive into rabbit holes, others were meeting me for the first time and had no idea what my deal was. Overall, the crew I was hanging with is far more technology-optimistic in a way I am no longer. The disagreement was real and we held it lightly. My sense is that most think I overread the world and ascribe intent to what they perceive as naturally emergent behavior.

The trip started with me being asked for ID at the airport. When I showed my license and was told I needed a “Real ID” I pulled out a passport. One of the guys on my flight watched and asked, Why can’t you get a digital one? Not hostile at all but genuinely confused why I hadn’t taken this step yet, assuming I would eventually. When I explained that I am abstaining because I’m afraid of The Authentication Layer, he couldn’t parse the friction. I tried to explain and he tried to follow. We both gave up politely and moved on.

We spent the day hanging out before the show. Some of the conversations bled into some interesting areas. Things like whether or not we should use sunscreen, or homeschool our kids. Each one got some goofy stares and some head scratching. I always try to walk a fine line between having civil, thoughtful conversations with people and becoming a zealot proselytizing a worldview. I got some looks back of affection and mild concern, but it was all in good fun and good faith. For what it’s worth, I’m pretty comfortable being the butt of the joke.

At some point I’d said something about being a little wary of the venue itself, which elicited blank stares. The conversation got around to why exactly, and I tried to explain and made it worse. I made a joke about graphene nanobots being sprayed on us from the rafters. They looked at me like I was a lunatic. Which of course I am.

•••

I should mention that I’m not a Vegas guy. In fact, I hadn’t been in over twenty years. The place is crazier than I remembered. Even from a nice hotel, you spend the weekend in a running joke about the women in the lobby (Is she working?) and the larger local economy of constructed experiences. The casino floors timed to the daylight you can’t see. The entire city built to make you forget there’s a desert outside.

Vegas has been the rehearsal venue for synthetic reality for decades. Paris built on top of a desert, Egypt next door to Italy, a skyline that copies skylines. This city taught Americans to drive across the country to spend a weekend inside a curated version of somewhere else. Baudrillard called this hyperreality forty-five years ago and used Vegas as the exemplar, a place where the copy precedes the original and the original stops being the point. The Sphere is what Vegas was always trying to be. It won’t stay in Vegas, however, Sin City is the natural destination of the prototype.

•••

That’s the context I carried into the room.

Some of my dissident friends mocked me for going. Of course, I get it. I knew what I was signing up for intellectually but I wanted to understand it experientially – and maybe even spiritually. I wanted to see whether what I’d been writing about lived in my body the way it lived on the page, and I wasn’t going to find that out from a YouTube clip.

If I were running a venue like this, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t use it as an R&D lab. Seventeen thousand bodies in a controlled sensory environment, every chair instrumented, every face on camera, every response measurable in real time. Anyone interested in the human condition understands that’s a dataset. To be clear, I’m not saying that’s what’s happening here, just that the capability is plainly there.

By tomorrow somebody could theoretically be remote-controlling me through a chair I was sitting in willingly. I went anyway. A lot of the people in that room, including some of my friends, think what’s being built is wonderful, even essential. They think we’re all getting smarter, more connected, more capable – perhaps they’re right. But the capability is the capability, and walking through those doors was me consenting to the trade. I don’t regret it, not even a little. It was worth seeing for myself.

•••

So, how could I possibly describe the experience of being in the Sphere? Anyone who’s been there already knows. Those who haven’t will know soon enough. I’m not talking about the building itself, which is utterly fascinating. What I’m referring to is the thing the building is doing.

The fidelity is past the point where your nervous system can sort it in real time. The visuals are one layer. There’s also air currents you can feel on your face, timed to what you’re seeing. The chair vibrates with the bass in a way that isn’t speakers. It’s the room becoming part of the instrument. You don’t watch the show. You’re inside it.

The Sphere is not just a bigger screen or a better venue – it’s a new medium entirely.

I’ll admit, the first night I barely watched the band. I was staring up. I caught myself halfway through the set and felt vaguely guilty about it, like I’d shown up to a friend’s wedding and spent the ceremony looking at the chandelier. The second night I trained myself to stay locked in on the stage. Believe it or not, I actually had to work at it. The room itself wants your attention, it commands it, and, in a way, the band has to compete with the room they’re playing in.

Phish threaded the needle masterfully. The improvisation was there and the crowd was alive. They pulled off what most acts won’t be able to, because Phish fans came in with forty years of muscle memory for what a real moment is supposed to feel like, and the band knows enough not to let the visuals do the work the music is supposed to do.

If you were there to see Phish, you saw Phish. It just wasn’t the Phish I’d been seeing since the early 90s. Usually I’m locked into the interplay between band and crowd, the feedback loop that makes a jam band a jam band. This time the room was a third party in that conversation, and a loud one.

Somewhere in the middle of the second set, during a long slow build, I looked over at the friend who’d asked about the digital ID. Eyes closed, not staring up. He was listening. For a brief moment, he glanced at me and grinned and went back into it. We were having the same night. I just couldn’t stop noticing the room.

•••

Here is what my friends would say, and they’d have a point: Every generation panics about the medium that arrived after they got their tastes set. Radio was going to ruin children. Television was going to rot us. Rock and roll was the devil. The internet was going to atomize us. Video games were going to make a generation of killers. Smartphones were going to destroy attention. Every panic produced a body of essays exactly like the one I’m trying to write right now, and many of those essays have aged badly. The kids who grew up inside the new medium developed muscles their parents didn’t have. The medium got absorbed into life and life kept going.

The Sphere is amazing. Their kids and mine are going to live inside experiences I can’t anticipate and will probably envy. The future is going to be more textured, not less. Loosen up and enjoy the show, right? I need to let that perspective sit because it’s a possibility that my friends might be right.

And yet some of the people – including many I respect – would tell this group of friends they’re being too generous. They’d say we lost the thread years ago, that the door closed quietly, that it isn’t whether the muscle adapts but whether it’s worth adapting to a world this far from what was given to us.

I’m somewhere between those two and the side of the room I’m closer to shifts on any given day. The bigger question is whether it’s preventable or preordained.

Most of what I want to say sits in the gap between them. Not collapse but rather drift. The cage is the cumulative shape of what you stopped noticing. Each layer of the engineered reality stack arrives as a gift. None of the individual gifts looks like a problem. They add up over a long enough time horizon, and the time horizon is the thing nobody tracks because there’s no incentive to.

•••

I keep coming back to what the Sphere showed me. The layer between my senses and the world can be written. Not metaphorically but quite literally. By people I don’t know, with goals I can’t see, at resolution my body cannot reject. My eyes report cosmos, my skin feels the wind and my spine was grooving to the bass. None of it is the world the body is in. All of it is real to the body that’s in it.

That’s the thing the prior panics didn’t have to account for. Radio put a voice in your living room. Television manufactured an image of events you didn’t witness. Streaming tuned a personalized version of the world to keep you watching. Each layer added definition, and each layer worked at a level above the body. The body remained the floor. Even when you’d been lied to about everything else, you still knew when you were hungry, cold, tired, in love, in danger. The body was the last instrument we had for reality-testing that hadn’t been engineered.

The Sphere is the proof of concept that the substrate can be too. The muscle my friends are counting on to adapt is the muscle that’s being engineered.

Once the floor can be engineered, reality-testing from the inside stops working. You’d need someone outside the room to tell you what’s outside the room.

•••

The Sphere is the cage with the seams showing. The dome, the chairs, the air timed to the visuals, you can see the architecture because that’s what you bought a ticket to see. The other ones have been sanded down. The personalized feed that learned what makes you happy/angry. The smart speaker listening for keywords. The maps app deciding what counts as a road. The smoothing of every public square. Programs to study how visual and sensory environments shape mass psychology have been running for decades. You’ve been beta-testing the portal for years. The Sphere is just the version where you can still see the seams, because for once the architecture was being revealed.

This is what entertainment is for in a managed society. Not distraction but rehearsal. Huxley nailed it almost a century ago:

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

Compliance through pleasure is more stable than compliance through coercion, because there’s nothing to push back against. You don’t resist what feels good. The Sphere is the rehearsal venue for a sensory layer that’s coming whether or not you want it. It’s the last venue where you can still physically walk out of the room.

•••

I’ve now been sitting with this for a couple of days and what I can’t shake is that the Sphere isn’t really the subject. It’s just the place where I could see it.

The subject is the shift itself. What all of us can feel underneath everything right now, even when many of us, including the people I was with, may disagree about what it actually is. Even my most tech-optimistic friends feel it. They may have different names for it and different feelings about it and different bets on where it lands. But none of us is walking around right now feeling like the world we’re in is the same world we were in five years ago. Something is moving under our feet, and the Sphere is one of the places where the movement breaks the surface long enough to be photographed.

That’s why I went. Not just for the concert itself, although that was a gift. It was to check the reading. To see whether what I’d been writing was real or whether I was making it up. To stand inside the loudest version of the thing I’d been describing and find out whether my body confirmed it or whether I was Cassandra, or whether I was just the guy at the bar overexplaining what a concert meant.

My body confirmed it. So did my friend’s body. We just had very different reads on what to do with the confirmation.

•••

Maybe I’m wrong about all of this.

Maybe I’m pattern-matching. I’m well aware I do that. After all, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Maybe the lineage I just drew is a story I’m telling myself because I’ve been writing about engineered reality for a few years and everything I see now looks like the thing I’ve been writing about. Maybe my friends are right and I’m the one who needs to chill.

I want to sit with that too.

There was a stretch on the first night when the visuals went somewhere I can only describe as cosmic. Depth past depth, the room dissolving into something my brain processed as standing inside a galaxy. I thought about my kids. How I’d want them to feel that at least once. Not a movie about space but inside it. That’s a real gift and I felt it.

That’s the trap. The gifts and the cage are the same technology. The question is who’s holding it, what they’re authoring, and whether anyone left in the room remembers what unauthored space is supposed to feel like.

•••

On the way out of the second show, the friend who’d asked about the digital ID was a few steps ahead of me. Loose, happy, talking with someone else about the slow build, hands moving. He turned around, saw me, gave me the same grin from the floor, what a night. We were stepping out of the loud version of the portal into the quieter one (if you can call Las Vegas Blvd quiet). He didn’t notice. He’s not wrong. He may be more right than I am.

I went home not knowing whether I’d seen the future and it was beautiful, or seen the future and it was a cage, or whether those are the same thing.

What I do know is that I had a great time. That’s probably the part that scares me most.

from:    https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-portal

No To Pesticide Manufacturers

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The use of pesticides on our farms is dangerous.  Many of these toxins are cancer causing, and there must be accountability if not some kind of modification of the use, at the very least fair warning of potential hazards.

 

House strips controversial pro-pesticide policies from farm bill

BY RACHEL FRAZIN – 04/30/26 10:46 AM ET

The Hill’s Headlines — April 30, 2026

The House on Thursday voted to strip pro-pesticide policies, which have been a source of controversy and GOP infighting, from the farm bill.

The amendment to take the provisions out of the farm bill, which sets the nation’s agriculture policy for five years, was adopted in a 280-142 vote.

It was led by Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) and was expected to get significant bipartisan support.

One controversial measure the amendment addressed would have made it harder for Americans to sue pesticide makers, preventing states and courts from penalizing the companies for failing to include warnings on their labels about health effects that go beyond those formally recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The amendment also dealt with two other provisions that would have barred localities from adding regulations that go beyond those imposed by states or the EPA, as well as block the need for additional permits for pesticide use.

The policies received significant pushback from both Democrats and Republicans aligned with the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement — and complicated the farm bill’s path.

In the days leading up to the bill’s passage, Luna said on the social platform X “we will slaughter the farm bill” unless the provisions were removed.

House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.) defended the provision, arguing that  states want to go and “have something that is specific to their state, maybe it’s based on the ecology of their state, or whatever it might be, they just have to submit it to the EPA, and the EPA will add it into the labeling.”

The Supreme Court this week took up a similar issue and could rule that existing laws already bar failure-to-warn lawsuits if the EPA does not recognize a particular health impact.

from:    https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/5856958-pesticide-amendment-farm-bill/

How Much Does that Cost?????

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What Is Surveillance Pricing Anyway?

You may be the victim of surveillance pricing without even knowing it. But what does that even mean?

Surveillance pricing is the increasingly popular practice where some online retailers adjust prices for individuals based on data collected about that person, including browsing history, location, purchase history, and more. They often use third-party intermediaries to adjust those prices.

According to a preliminary report released by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in early 2025, these third-party intermediaries can even track your mouse movements. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about it.1

KEY TAKEAWAYS

  • The FTC found that companies collect personal information about online shoppers and use it to tweak the prices they pay for products.
  • Your browsing habits, geographic location, and more may influence the prices you pay.
  • You can protect yourself from surveillance pricing by clearing cookies and browsing incognito.
  • Consider using a virtual private network, or VPN.

Key Findings on Surveillance Pricing

The initial report from the FTC on surveillance pricing reveals that online retailers frequently use personal data, such as browsing history and location, to target consumers with different pricing for the same products.

Based on documents from firms like Mastercard and Accenture, the FTC showed how intermediaries adjust prices by tracking various consumer behaviors. This can include the type of product, mouse movements, and unpurchased items left in shopping carts.1

This ongoing study underscores the potential widespread, data-driven pricing practices used to reshape how products are sold and how much consumers pay for them.

How Consumers Are Affected by Surveillance Pricing

Instead of having fixed prices for products, surveillance pricing allows retailers to adjust the price or promotion of a product based on individual data and consumer behaviors. If the data suggests that the consumer is willing to pay more, the price will be higher.

“Surveillance pricing means consumers lose the ability to compare prices accurately because what they see may be tailored to their behavior, location, income level, or even browsing history. Should someone be charged a higher price just because they live in a certain zip code, or because they made a bad online purchase last year? Thanks to surveillance pricing, that’s the world we’re living in,” said Michael Mezzatesta, economics and climate educator, and founder of Better Future Media.

Who’s Paying the Price?

About 273 million Americans, or 80.4%, now shop online, according to a survey by Capital One. Collectively, they spent about $1.36 trillion online in 2024.2

“Since surveillance pricing happens mostly online, most people will have no idea they’re being shown different prices based on hidden algorithms, making it nearly impossible to make informed purchasing decisions. In the worst cases, this practice erodes trust in markets, where fairness should be a given, not a privilege reserved for those with the best data protection habits,” Mezzatesta said.

How to Protect Yourself

Consumers can not easily recognize when they are victims of surveillance pricing because it’s designed to be invisible. But there are clues to be seen by those who are wary.

“There are clues consumers can use to tell when surveillance pricing might be at play. For example, if consumers notice fluctuating prices after repeated visits to a site, or different prices across different devices–or their peers are seeing different prices–those are all signs they are likely experiencing surveillance pricing influenced by personal or device data,” said Mezzatesta.

Proactive Steps to Take

To protect themselves from surveillance, consumers can take several proactive steps to safeguard their personal information and ensure fair pricing.

  • Use a VPN: A virtual private network, or VPN, masks your location and browsing activity to prevent targeted pricing. There are free VPNs while a subscription service costs about $10 per month.3
  • Clear Browser Cookies Regularly: Clearing the cookies from your device regularly limits the ability to track your online behavior because the data has been deleted.
  • Browse in Incognito Mode: Your browsing history and personal data aren’t saved when browsing in Incognito mode.
  • Compare Prices Across Devices: Check prices on different devices to spot potential price differences.

“The bigger issue is that individuals shouldn’t have to outsmart an opaque system just to get fair treatment and transparent pricing. This is where regulation needs to step in,” Mezzatesta said.

Current regulations, such as the FTC Act and the California Consumer Privacy ACT (CCPA), aim to protect consumers by promoting transparency and control over personal data.45 However, these laws do not fully address surveillance pricing, leaving gaps in consumer protection.

Is This Price-Fixing?

The FTC defines price fixing as “an agreement (written, verbal, or inferred from conduct) among competitors to raise, lower, maintain, or stabilize prices or price levels.”6 Basically, companies can’t set prices or terms after setting up an agreement with their competition because consumers expect the basic laws of supply and demand to apply. But then the question becomes, is surveillance pricing “price fixing”?

“The simplest solution is to make algorithmic price fixing illegal. And there is a legal precedent for this: Under US antitrust laws, price fixing due to corporate collusion is illegal.7 The issue is that the development of automated price-setting algorithms has created loopholes in existing law,” Mezzatesta said.

Mezzatesta asserts that corporations will need new rules regarding collecting and using personal data because of the rise of big data algorithms. He claims that’s how we ensure the algorithms don’t discriminate against specific sets of consumers.

“Additionally, enforcement mechanisms should be in place to prevent predatory pricing that exploits consumer data to extract maximum profit from the public. At a minimum, companies should be required to disclose when prices are being personalized, and on what basis.”89

The Bottom Line

Online shopping offers unmatched convenience, making it a preferred choice for many consumers. However, shoppers want to feel comfortable purchasing online without worrying about unfair pricing.

Unless stronger consumer protections are passed into law, you will need to stay vigilant and take steps to ensure your data is not exploited.

from:    https://www.investopedia.com/surveillance-pricing-11701007

What’s in Your Pasta?

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Prego is selling a surveillance device that records your family dinner conversations and sends them to the Library of Congress. It sold out immediately.

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Mister Retrops
PASTABIG BROTHER IS WATCHINGSPYING
Image for article: Prego is selling a surveillance device that records your family dinner conversations and sends them to the Library of Congress. It sold out immediately.

Prego Pasta Sauce announced they were teaming up with StoryCorps to create a device that would store pasta while also eavesdropping on, recording, and, according to some reports, uploading your family’s dinner conversations to the Library of Congress.

 

It gets even crazier.

The devices sold out almost instantly!

(Probably picked up by some guys in an unmarked van).

 

To be fair, though, Prego promised the devices won’t upload your conversations without permission. And it seems pretty innocent.

The Prego x StoryCorps Connection Keeper is a simple, AI-free, screen-free device designed to help families create an audio scrapbook of the moments that matter most. It captures the everyday conversations you wish to preserve — your kids’ voices, the ‘how was your day’ chats, the laughter and stories shared around the table — so you can revisit them for years to come. With just the press of a button, families can record meaningful moments in real time. The device is not connected to the internet and does not use Wi-Fi or AI, allowing you to capture memories without phones, screens, or distractions getting in the way.

But seriously, despite their best assurances, I’ve got enough to worry about with my AI-infested phone.

The last thing I need is to have to wonder whether there are spies in my pasta.

from:    https://notthebee.com/article/somehow-this-prego-pasta-sauce-surveillance-device-sold-out-immediately?from_social=twitter