Immediately after October 7, a little know company shipped over 100 reconnaissance drones to Israel for use in its siege of Gaza. Having been battle-tested on Palestinian civilians, the UAVs are now being used to surveil protesters across the US.
AI-powered quadcopter drones used by the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza are flying over American cities, surveilling protestors and automatically uploading millions of images to an evidence database.
The drones are made by a company called Skydio which in the last few years has gone from relative obscurity to quietly become a multi-billion dollar company and the largest drone manufacturer in the US.
The extent of Skydio drone usage across the US, and the extent to which their usage has grown in just a few years, is extraordinary. The company has contracts with more than 800 law enforcement and security agencies across the country, up from 320 in March last year, and their drones are being launched hundreds of times a day to monitor people in towns and cities across the country.
Skydio has extensive links with Israel. In the first weeks of the genocide the California-based company sent more than one hundred drones to the IDF with promises of more to come. How many more were delivered since that admission is unknown. Skydio has an office in Israel and partners with DefenceSync, a local military drone contractor operating as the middle man between drone manufacturers and the IDF. Skydio has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Israeli-American venture capitalists and from venture capital funds with extensive investments in Israel, including from Marc Andreessen’s firm Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z.
And now these drones, tested in genocide and refined on Palestinians, are swarming American cities.
According to my research, almost every large American city has signed a contract with Skydio in the last 18 months, including Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego, Cleveland and Jacksonville. Skydio drones were recently used by city police departments to gather information at the ‘No Kings’ protests and were also used by Yale to spy on the anti-genocide protest camp set up by students at the university last year.
The AI system behind Skydio drones is powered by Nvidia chips and enables their operation without a human user. The drones have thermal imaging cameras and can operate in places where GPS doesn’t work, so-called ‘GPS-denied environments.’ They also reconstruct buildings and other infrastructure in 3D and can fly at more than 30 miles per hour.
The New York police were early adopters of Skydio drones and are particularly enthusiastic users. A spokesman recently told a drone news website that the NYPD launched more than 20,000 drone flights in less than a year, which would mean drones are being launched around the city 55 times per day. A city report last year said the NYPD at that time was operating 41 Skydio drones. A recent Federal Aviation Authority rule change, however, means that number will undoubtedly have increased and more generally underpins the massive expansion in the use of Skydio drones.
Prior to March this year, FAA rules meant that drones could only be used by US security forces if the operator kept the drone in sight. They also couldn’t be used over crowded city streets. An FAA waiver issued that month opened the floodgates, allowing police and security agencies to operate drones beyond a visual line of sight and over large crowds of people. Skydio called the waiver ground-breaking. It was. The change has ushered in a Skydio drone buying spree by US police and security forces, with many now employing what is called a ‘Drone As First Responder’ program. Without the need to see the drone, and with drones free to cruise over city streets, the police are increasingly sending drones before humans to call outs and for broader investigative purposes. Cincinnati for example says that by the end of this year 90% of all call outs will be serviced first by a Skydio drone.
This extensive level of coverage is enabled by Skydio’s docking platform hardware. These launch pads are placed in locations around a city enabling drones to be remote charged, launched and landed many miles away from police HQs. After launch, all the information gathered by these flights is both saved to an internal SD card and automatically uploaded to special software configured for law enforcement. This software is made by Axon, a major financial backer of Skydio and the controversial maker of Tasers and ‘less-lethal weapons’ used by police departments in the US and across the west. The software, Axon Evidence, enables, in the words of an Axon press release, ‘the automatic uploads of photos and video footage from drones into a digital evidence management system.’
Axon’s equipment is also central to Israel’s infrastructure of apartheid, with the company providing body cameras and Tasers to Israeli police forces and prison guards who routinely torture Palestinians. Axon, which participated in a $220 million Series E round of funding in Skydio, is just one of the many entities backing Skydio who serve a Zionist agenda.
Skydio’s first investor in 2015 was Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) which provided $3 million of seed capital to the three-man team behind the drone maker. They have since invested tens of millions across numerous funding rounds. The founders of a16z, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, are both notorious Zionists. The firm was the most active venture capital investor in Israel in 2024 and this summer Andreessen and Horowitz visited Israel to meet with tech companies founded by ex-IDF and Unit 8200 war criminals.
Other Skydio investors include Next 47, which has an office in Israel headed by Moshe Zilberstein who worked in the IDF’s computer spy center Mamram, and Hercules Capital whose managing director Ella-Tamar Adnahan is an Israeli-American described by Israeli media as “Israel’s go-to tech banker in the US.”
The saturation of US police departments with drone technology so closely connected to Israel, technology used to carry out war crimes is a frightening, if not unsurprising, development. Skydio drones will be central to the rapidly advancing proto-fascism in the US and the crack down on Antifa and other so-called ‘domestic terrorists’ by the Trump administration. In this context, the bigger surprise is that the rapid expansion of Israel-linked surveillance drone technology across America has so far gone largely under the radar.
Skydio should also make it on to the agenda of Zohran Mamdani. Recently criticized for saying “when the boot of the NYPD is on your neck, it’s been laced by the IDF,” Skydio is just another example that shows he’s right. If he has the courage of his convictions, he could do worse than use his powers as mayor to shut down the NYPD’s Skydio deal.
Skydio is also a large supplier to the Department of Defence, recently signing a contract to provide the US Army with reconnaissance drones. As a significant supplier to both military and civilian security forces, it raises questions about what information is or will be shared between the US military and domestic security agencies via the Skydio-Axon digital evidence management system.
Skydio shows once again how Gaza is the laboratory for weapons makers, the place where new surveillance and apartheid technologies are tested, before being refined and used in the West. And next year Skydio is rolling out new indoor drones. We can only speculate as to what extent these new drones were informed by the ‘learnings’ accrued via genocide.
I’m getting “long in the tooth” explaining Technocracy to people, yet I must and will continue until the job is done. Truly, many are starting to wake up, but reaching critical mass won’t be possible until about 5 percent of the population sees the threat. It’s a long way off.
So I was noodling around, testing the latest crop of frontier AI models, and decided to post some questions. Here they with the articles that I just posted this afternoon.
“Peter Thiel mentored Curtis Yarvin at the beginning of his career, invested in his company, and later referred to him as his “house philosopher.” Did Thiel use Yarvin to create a political strategy to support the takeover of Technocracy in the current administration?”
“Elon Musk and Peter Thiel were co-founders of PayPal and have evolved as leaders of Silicon Valley. What was the extent of their coordination at DOGE, which Musk ran, and appointed several from Thiel’s Palantir?”
With every passing day, new aspects of technocracy are being revealed, and I feel like I am drinking from a fire hose. Normally, I spare Technocracy News readers by only posting one article each day, forcing me to triage from 5 to 10 or more good stories.
We’re closing out the week with a topic that—while not exactly lighthearted—is one of those strange, head-scratching headlines that makes you wonder, “Is this real life?”
And yes, friends, it is.
Thank you to one of my lovely Healthy Americans, Eleanor, who alerted me to this trash scam surveillance scheme that’s rolling out right now in San Diego. It’s bizarre. It’s invasive. And it’s expensive.
Elenor is a San Diego resident who reached out to me after confronting her city councilman about this very issue—and being laughed at. She’s undaunted, and is organizing, speaking up, and rallying others to push back against this overreaching surveillance plan.
Here’s her email, shared with her permission:
Hello Peggy,
Firstly, I’d like to thank you for all the truth that you put out. There are many times that I’ve listened to you and in my mind composed an email responding, but I never actually did it. I did reach out to you when we were trying to get our medical freedom initiative onto the ballot. After that I decided I was going to have a rest and not try to fight everyone’s battles. However, I am picking up the sword again and opposing the new RFID trash cans and exorbitant, fraudulent tax that the city councils imposed on the residents. I think many people are unaware of the nefarious reasons for the RFID chips. I would like to rally the people of San Diego to come together and oppose this agenda, but I need to get the word out. I have several ideas about what we can do including dumping our trash outside the city council building, and disabling the chips. There is definitely power in numbers, and we need that power now. I am asking for your help in getting the word out and have people contact me at this email address. I really appreciate your help. Thank you and prayers to you and your family for continually putting out the truth!
Apparently, the City of San Diego is rolling out a fee-based trash pickup system—and with it, brand new bins equipped with RFID chips. These Radio Frequency Identification tags are embedded into your trash and recycling bins, and they’re designed to track the time, location, and frequency of your trash pickups.
Yes. Your trash is now being surveilled.
Friends, why does the government need to know how often you take out the trash What happens with that data?
What’s next? Fines for too much garbage or improper recycling?
How Much Is This Going to Cost You?
“the rollout comes as San Diego officials set out to charge single-family homeowners a special fee for trash collection. Earlier proposals set the monthly fee as high as $53. Following public backlash over the price, the city recently revised the proposed rate to $47.59 per month for full-service customers. The fee would increase gradually, reaching $59.42 by July 2027 under the revised proposal. Smaller bin users would pay less” Voice of San Diego reports.
Most residents are already paying city taxes and property taxes, which in the City of San Diego, already covered things like trash pickup.
This is a brand new tax, dressed up as a “service fee,” tied directly to a tech-enabled tracking system.
The Surveillance
The chips don’t collect “live” data (yet), but they do transmit a unique identifier to RFID readers on the garbage trucks. This logs the exact time and place your trash was collected and stores it in a city database.
Why??
The city claims it helps track pickup schedules and bin assignments, but think about the potential uses of this down the road. According to Eleanor, the data collected could be used to:
Build a profile of your consumer behavior (what you throw away and how often)
Monitor recycling compliance
Penalize you for excess waste
Feed information into private databases for advertising, analytics, or insurance
Here is exactly what Eleanor (and others) are concerned about with these RFID chips:
– RFID tags in trash bins track RFID tags in trash bins.
– What you throw away, how often you throw it, and how much waste you produce.
– By monitoring waste, authorities and private contractors can build a profile of your consumer behavior, diet, economic class, and compliance with recycling rules.
– This will give them information about you. With this date they can issue automatic fines for not recycling “correctly” and penalize you for producing “excess” waste. Currently they are not admitting to this because the first step is to normalize the chips and have people accept them.
-They will shame those who don’t meet waste targets. It shifts waste disposal from a public service to a compliance metric
-It’s not about cleaning the earth — it’s about disciplining its inhabitants.
-RFID-enabled bins are part of the smart grid. Eventually this will lead to other hikes regarding other utility services. Your trash becomes your confession booth.
-Many cities contract private waste firms that:
Sell the data collected from bins
Use it for targeted advertising, consumer analytics, or insurance scoring
Push subscription-based waste plans (like internet packages)
-You’re not just throwing things away — you’re feeding a data economy.
-Constant monitoring of trash habits trains people to:
Self-police
Accept that even waste must be justified
Internalize that every action is under watch
This normalizes the idea that nothing is private, not even your garbage — a soft form of techno-totalitarianism hidden behind eco-rhetoric.
– RFID in trash bins is not about sustainability — it’s about subtle submission.
– When even your garbage is tracked, you’re being told:
There is no part of your life we won’t measure.
– Other problems that I can see arising are people throwing their trash in neighbors bins, drug paraphernalia being dumped in bins and homeowners being investigated, people policing each other, and a myriad of other problems once this has been accepted and the screws tightened. Also, research the organizations behind the waste management company that the city has contracted with.
Sadly there are many people who don’t see the ramifications of this.Other people are complaining, but are unwilling to take action, and yet others give their power away to corrupt politicians.
Eleanor’s email highlighted so many important concerns about how these RFID-enabled bins are part of the smart grid—which means you’re feeding the data economy. She also astutely pointed out that this is a classic case of incrementalism—the county isn’t openly admitting the full scope of the plan, because the first step is simply to normalize the chips and get people to accept them without question.
And this normalizes the idea that nothing is private, not even your garbage.
Even if you don’t live in San Diego, I urge you to check what’s going on in your city.
These policies often start in “pilot cities” like San Diego, Seattle, and New York, and then slowly spread. It’s called incrementalism: normalize one little intrusion, wait until the outrage dies down, and then roll out the next one.
What You Can Do
If you’re in San Diego:
Contact your city council members.
Show up to the City Council meeting in September with Eleanor. Please email me (support@thehealthyamerican.org) and i’ll put you in touch with her.
If you’re outside of San Diego:
Share this article (or video) with friends or family who live there.
Watch for similar initiatives in your own town and start these conversations with your city council.
“If you want long-term success in business, relationships and life, you have to get better at accepting uncomfortable truths as fast as possible. When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.”
~ Steven Bartlett, The Diary of a CEO
By Catherine Austin Fitts
Plunder is an ancient story. The promise of plunder brought Attila and the Huns over the Alps to raid the Roman Empire in northern Italy. It inspired the conquistadors of Spain to hunt for silver in Mexico and South America, where they wiped out the Aztec and Incan Empires. Protected by court intrigue and secrecy, pirates have teamed up for centuries with royalty whose reign depended on rich spoils to pay back their bank loans. When the leaders of the British Empire could not maintain a trade surplus, they flooded the Chinese with opium, conquering with addiction and gunboats what could not be secured with manufacturing and diplomacy.
The founding of the Bank of Amsterdam, the Bank of Sweden, and the Bank of England in the 1600s launched the beginning of the economic paradigm I call the “central banking-warfare model”—but we could just as easily call the dominant economic model the “central banking-plunder model.” Plunder in its many forms has been essential to the rich accumulation of capital that helped to build the Western world. You can grow wealth, or you can take it—and in many cases, taking it is the preferred method. Alibaba founder Jack Ma once said, “When trade stops, war starts.”
The long history of Western plunder inspired the formation of the intergovernmental organization known as BRICS (whose current membership includes founding members Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2009, followed by South Africa in 2010, and Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates in 2024-2025)1 and the BRICS nations’ ongoing efforts to achieve financial and military independence. More recent history helps explain Russia’s fierce resistance to NATO encroachment—the Russian people have not forgotten the “Rape of Russia”2 after the Soviet Union collapsed. As Samuel Huntington observed in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations:
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
As technological innovation grows, so do the applications of plunder—along with its profitability. As David A. Hughes explained in our recent Omniwar report,3 “Omniwar” involves “the weaponization of everything.” Thus, instead of killing their prey physically in open combat, plunderers now can simply empty victims’ bank accounts while distracting them with propaganda and pornography. Plunder leaves students, who spend years getting an education that is not relevant to generating an income, with enormous student loan debt that they cannot retire. Frauds like the Madoff Ponzi scheme4 steal a mother’s savings, and when she commits suicide, her children’s inheritance can scarcely cover funeral expenses, much less finance their education and future. Plunder also encompasses the politically engineered health, food, and education policies that poison children. Moreover, the poisoning has a profitable postscript: the medical establishment claims that the children are sick (instead of poisoned),5 and parents liquidate their savings to try to heal their children in a manner that generates significant revenues for medical enterprises and pharmaceutical businesses.6
A key reason why the Solari team focuses on financial freedom7 is out of a desire to protect ourselves and our subscribers from being plundered. Because so much of the art of plunder involves management and manipulation of the financial system and the train tracks of transactions, we place great emphasis on having a good map of the world in which we live and understanding how to recognize the difference between “official reality” and reality. That is why the second of the six pillars of our Building Wealth curriculum8 is “Navigation Tools.”9 With the ability to develop and maintain a good map of reality, you can navigate. You can invest your time and resources to serve your purpose and achieve your goals, rather than find yourself plundered by someone trying to take the wealth—both the living and financial equity—that you have worked so hard to accumulate.
At Solari, our intention is not to depress you by dwelling on the unpleasant topic of plunder, but rather to help you build a strong immune system against being plundered. Ideally, you should also build networks and communities that help members do the same. Now is the time to do so, because technological innovation is powering the plunder game in new and challenging ways.
The 21st-Century Panopticon
We are in the midst of a quantum leap in the technology of surveillance and control. Let’s start with the metaphor of the “panopticon”—reintroduced in recent years by Ian Davis, Whitney Webb, and Mark Goodwin in their writings for Unlimited Hangout. English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham originated the term panopticon in the 18th century, Wikipedia explains, to convey the idea of “a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control…. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single prison officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.”10 Davis, Webb, and Goodwin use “panopticon” to describe U.S. and Israeli surveillance, assassination, and warfare systems—including those supported by Palantir—as well as the public distributed ledger systems, including blockchain, being used to shift the financial system into a control grid.
In 1975, French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) described a panopticon as follows:
“The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen…. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity.”11
As governments and militaries around the world use satellite constellations, telecommunications, digital technology, and invisible weaponry to build a planetary panopticon, the U.S. administration and its allies are demonstrating the unique features of this new model. For example, on June 13, 2025, financed by the United States, Israel launched its war on Iran by assassinating 11 of Iran’s top military leaders and nuclear scientists. Some were reportedly targeted at home, resulting in the death of their families and neighbors. Describing the events, Ron Unz wrote, “I cannot recall any previous case in which a major country had ever had so large a fraction of its top military, political, and scientific leadership eliminated in that sort of illegal sneak attack.”12
In short, war has been converted to a high-powered manhunt with assassination as the end point. This is possible because, according to technology entrepreneur and economist Dr. Pippa Malmgren, U.S. and Israeli systems now can track all 92 million Iranians and identify each of them by their unique biometrics:
“The key to understanding all this is that Iran is now a digital Panopticon prison, now that the US and Israel, and probably some other regional allies of these two, can detect a person’s location, communications, conversations, and state of mind at any time, anywhere. The Iranian leadership is effectively already in a digital prison. A person can now be tracked based on their walking gait, unique heartbeat, voice, the network of people in their circle, and their own behavioral patterns. There is no place to hide in a digital Panopticon prison.”13
Moreover, as The Economist commented last year with respect to the legality of assassinations in Gaza, it is possible no military officer can be found guilty of an international war crime because it is software that is now choosing the targets. As we discussed in our interview and report on AI with Whitney Webb,14 AI has been positioned to assume responsibility and take the blame. This is why, in my introduction to the AI report, I warned, “the people who are using AI as a scapegoat are dangerous.”15
Anyone, Anywhere
It was immediately obvious that the Iranian assassinations had planetary implications. If software can identify each person in Iran, then, as long as Starlink or other U.S. satellite constellations are operating overhead, those who control the panopticon can identify pretty much anyone, anywhere. Whether with drones, invisible weaponry, or missiles, parties who are remote and unaccountable can influence targets’ thoughts and health or end their life—all on a highly economic basis.
In two important Solari Report interviews, “Control & Freedom Happen One Person at a Time”16 and “The Economy of the Energy Body,”17 Ulrike Granögger and I described how an automated and cost-effective control system has been built that is customized for each unique human. Thus, it did not surprise me when, following the deaths of the Iranian leaders and their families and neighbors, most European leaders fell right in line with increasing their country’s NATO contributions to 5% and agreeing to new tariff conditions. Add to this the financial controls of the sanction systems, or the Epstein-type files that surveillance and kickbacks create, and you start to see how the overriding of global treaties and laws and the extraction of tariffs from countries as well as corporations is working, as the control grid assembles and integrates into a global panopticon.
Although each one of us can be surveilled, tracked, and eliminated, the system doing the observation and pulling the trigger is invisible. No one is accountable. In fact, this opaqueness is an essential feature of control. In his 1984 classic, The Evolution of Cooperation, political scientist Robert Axelrod demonstrated in economic gaming scenarios the general population’s willingness to shun dirty players. This type of shunning is a powerful strategy that can advantage the players who cooperate and are willing to enforce against those who engage in dirty tactics. It only works, however, when the general population can see who’s who. In other words, transparency is essential to identify the dirty players.
Unfortunately, the panopticon has taken secrecy to a whole new level. It is no accident that alongside the descent of Western civilization into the panopticon, we have witnessed the growing success of media propaganda in making sure dirty players either remain invisible or (as an equally effective strategy) are portrayed as successful, rich, famous, and worthy of admiration.
Israel has played a significant leadership role in building the technology that powers the emerging planetary panopticon, and nothing demonstrates the plunder that these technological systems enable better than the genocide currently underway in Gaza. Antony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World is an excellent source on the history of the prototyping of control technologies in Palestine.18
Israel’s crypto community has also played a leading role in developing and prototyping the distributed ledger technology essential to building financial transaction control systems. However, the systems—and the AI and databases that make the control grid go—are extremely energy-intensive. Building and operating the necessary data centers requires land, energy, and water. Now that the panopticon systems have matured, the Palestinian population is no longer useful, whereas their resources are seen as a valuable component of a profitable control grid infrastructure. Israel has, therefore, increasingly laid claim to Palestinians’ offshore oil and gas, land, and aquifers, while attempting to move the population out of Palestine, but—despite systematic destruction of Palestinians’ civilian, farming, and transportation infrastructure—the transfer of Palestinians to Egypt and neighboring countries has not succeeded. Consequently, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is now exterminating the population through bombings, sniper assassinations, and mass famine. Some reports indicate that the Palestinian population has dropped from 2.2 million—including 1.1 million children—to 1.6 million. Given the effort to force mass famine, a rapid die-off appears imminent.
Nothing has visually communicated plunder’s powerful potential better then a short AI-generated video retweeted by the U.S. President celebrating a redeveloped Gaza Riviera.19 Video scenes show a Trump golden statue and resort, and Elon Musk (let’s not forget his role as leader of the Starlink satellite network) enjoying a bowl of hummus while Trump and Netanyahu sip cocktails by a swimming pool. This video followed the publication of Netanyahu’s vision for Gaza, “Gaza 2035,”20 which in turn led to reports indicating that various neighboring Arab states have been cut in on the potential development deals. This public visioning process appears to have been used to syndicate potential plunder profits and build political constituencies for escalating the genocide. Gaza is a method,21 and we dare not forget it.
Understanding the Panopticon Threat
As control becomes more centralized and automated in the planetary panopticon, fewer human hierarchies are needed to maintain control. For example, why continue to spend billions on soft-power bureaucracies such as those fielded and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)? Who needs thousands of federal civil service workers to implement and enforce complex federal regulations? All of this can be done much more economically by controlling people’s money with programmable stablecoins, credit cards, and bank accounts. While many people cheered the firing of well-paid bureaucrats and nongovernmental organization (NGO) personnel, they seem not to appreciate the fact that the automated replacements will be far worse. I would much prefer to try to reason with a government bureaucrat than with an AI software bot that has no contact or support function and may have the power to cut off my bank account or electricity or send in a drone.
We face several challenges in understanding the panopticon. The first is understanding the point of view of the people who are building it. I just finished reading The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and his general counsel, Nicholas W. Zamiska. Karp and Zamiska make the case that the West must maintain a superior capability in national security if it is to protect our way of life. This may sound like common sense, but the argument breaks down when you understand the relationship between Palantir’s U.S. government contracts and the U.S. build-out of a financial transaction control grid.
Look at Palantir’s role in building the Lavender system for the Israeli military—an AI targeting system used to direct Israel’s bombing in Gaza.22 Palantir is helping to build the planetary panopticon, paid for with our tax dollars but operating on behalf of a transnational crime syndicate. There is a difference between national security and digital concentration camps. There is a difference between national security and genocide with plunder. The line of who is protected and who is plundered is far more fluid than Karp and Zamiska describe. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro said in a July speech to the Hague Group:
“Gaza is simply an experiment of the mega-rich trying to show all the peoples of the world how they will respond to a rebellion of humanity. They plan to bomb us all.”23
The builders of the panopticon have sent a message: You are being watched and, at any time, you may be killed. This has nothing to do with national security—this is about the engineering of a coup d’état in the Western world. When the chief operating officer of Palantir claims that Palantir’s goal is to be the operating system of the U.S. government, he is stating that they intend the end of U.S. government sovereignty.
A second challenge is that plunder in the panopticon is facilitated with invisible weaponry that we do not understand. Do we think the tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 was natural? Nope. Do we think the fires in Northern California in 2017 or in Lahaina in 2023 were natural? Nope. Do we think Hurricane Helene and the floods in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina in 2024 were natural? Nope. That said, how do we know who is responsible? How do we see them? How do we figure out how they did it? How do we hold them accountable? That is the nature of the panopticon—we are seen, but they are unseen. And it is hard to pull the plug on or shut down the unseen.
A third challenge is the extent to which the financial panopticon diminishes market price discovery and financial disclosure. Private equity and credit are moving far more businesses out of the public market and into privately controlled hands. The federal government’s long-standing refusal to comply with federal audit and disclosure laws or to account for over $21 trillion of undocumentable adjustments—and the adoption of FASAB Statement 56 in combination with the existing national security and classification laws—have rendered large parts of the financial disclosure in the U.S. government as well as the U.S. stock and bond markets essentially meaningless.24
While these challenges are significant, they are also inspiring a backlash by those who understand that such assaults on fundamental productivity threaten to shrink the pie for one and all. If we can face the panopticon and understand that no one is as smart as all of us, we can work together to unleash the global hearts and minds of millions so that people come to see who is doing this and how their technology works.
In 2023, Peter Gabriel wrote a song along those lines called “Panopticom.” Wikipedia describes the song as follows:
“The song’s title references the panopticon, a prison structure designed by Jeremy Bentham that enabled prison guards to observe the actions of all of [sic] prisoners without being detected. Gabriel’s concept of the panopticom was to invert this model by enabling ‘ordinary people’ to observe the actions of authority figures. The ‘com’ in the panopticom refers to the ability for people to ‘communicate both to the globe and what’s going on in the globe. It’s turning surveillance on its head.’”25
In the air
The smoke cloud takes its form
All the phones
Take pictures while it’s warm
Panopticom, let’s find out what’s going on
Panopticom, let’s see where clues are leading
Panopticom, won’t you show us what’s going on?
Panopticom, show how much is real
And we pour the medicine down
While we watch the world around us
We got witness on the ground
Takin’ in the evidence
And we reach across the globe
Got all the information flowing
You face the motherload
Tentacles around you, around you
From above
And deep below the ground
It was in Berlin
That all the evidence was found
Look from the street
And we look down from the skies
See through the barriers
We can see through all those lies
Panopticom, let’s find out what’s going on
Panopticom, let’s see where clues are leading
Panopticom, won’t you show us what’s going on?
Panopticom, show how much is real
Again, plunder is an ancient story. On the other hand, the effort to understand and map it and create systems to prevent it at scale by millions of people collaborating openly throughout the world is a very new story. This is the story in which the Solari team wishes to play a part. With this report dedicated to unpacking plunder, we invite you to build and protect your own wealth and to join us, in cooperation with others, in shifting the state of play entirely.
The changes crept in so gradually that most people didn’t notice. Your freedom to travel now depends on having the right QR code. Your bank monitors your purchases and reports suspicious patterns to government agencies, all under the banner of safety and security. Social media platforms flag your posts as ‘misinformation’ if they question official policies, while your children learn in school that ‘individual rights’ must always be ‘balanced’ against ‘collective responsibility’. When you visit your doctor, everything you say gets entered into databases shared across agencies and institutions you’ve never heard of.
These aren’t separate policies responding to different problems. They’re connected pieces of a single framework that treats you not as a free human being, but as a data point to be monitored, measured, and managed for the stability of a larger system. The framework has a name, a structure, and a timeline that was laid out in remarkable detail nearly eight decades ago.
The 1947 Blueprint
IIn 1947, Alice Bailey published The Externalisation of the Hierarchy1, a book that most readers readily dismissed as fringe esoteric speculation. But Bailey wasn’t making predictions — she was documenting a plan. Writing with the clinical precision of someone with inside knowledge, she described exactly how human civilisation would be reshaped over the following decades. Her book reads less like prophecy and more like a project timeline — complete with phases, methods, target dates, and operational structures.
Bailey laid out a systematic approach to planetary transformation that would unfold over roughly 78 years. The plan wasn’t to destroy existing institutions, but to infiltrate and repurpose them from within, keeping their familiar names and symbols while redirecting their fundamental purpose toward global control. She described the construction of ‘triangular networks’ that would later link government, business, and civil society into unified command systems — precisely the public-private partnerships, multi-stakeholder governance structures, and UN coordination bodies that now dominate global decision-making. Global crises would serve as accelerators, creating the psychological conditions necessary for populations to accept rapid changes that would normally take decades to implement.
Writing with remarkable specificity about the timeline, Bailey stated:
Thus a great and new movement is proceeding and a tremendously increased interplay and interaction is taking place. This will go on until A.D. 2025. During the years intervening between now and then very great changes will be seen taking place, and at the great General Assembly of the Hierarchy—held as usual every century—in 2025 the date in all probability will be set for the first stage of the externalisation of the Hierarchy. The present cycle (from now until that date) is called technically ‘The Stage of the Forerunner’.
Her esoteric terminology masked what was essentially the same systems management architecture that would later emerge through McNamara’s Planning-Programming-Budgeting Systems and evolve into today’s global governance framework — the difference being that she understood it as spiritual hierarchy while technocrats would frame it as systems theory for scientific administration.
The ultimate goal was a planetary management system where unelected experts would make decisions for everyone, justified by appeals to collective good and scientific necessity. Advanced technology, data systems, and psychological techniques would monitor and shape human behavior on a global scale. Bailey wrote that a ‘decisive first stage’ of this transformation would be completed by 2025, marking the moment when this hidden network would stop working behind the scenes and begin openly directing world affairs.
In 2025, 194 nations agreed on the final wording of the core aspects of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, establishing a framework that is expected to give international health officials binding legal authority to override national governments during declared emergencies. Crucially, these ‘emergencies’ are not limited to actual disease outbreaks, but include computer-modeled hypothetical scenarios based on potential pandemic drivers — which, under the One Health framework, encompasses climate change, biodiversity loss, and virtually any environmental condition that algorithms determine might theoretically contribute to future health risks. For the first time in human history, unelected global bureaucrats gained the power to suspend individual rights based on predictive models rather than actual events.
The 78-year timeline was complete, right on schedule.
The Three-Step Transformation
The transformation required a fundamental shift in how human beings understand themselves and their relationship to authority. This shift happened in three overlapping phases, each building on the previous one to create the philosophical and practical foundations for global management.
The first phase involved removing higher truth from human consciousness. As long as people believed in God, natural rights, or moral absolutes, they would resist accepting human authority as final. The solution was a decades-long cultural campaign to convince populations that nothing exists beyond what can be measured and managed by experts. Science was transformed from a method of discovery into the ultimate moral authority, while education systems taught children that ethics were subjective opinions rather than universal truths. Once people stopped believing in transcendent sources of meaning, concepts like ‘human dignity’ became negotiable — defined by whoever controlled the institutional apparatus.
The second phase established official institutions as the only valid source of information about reality. Even without belief in higher truth, people might still think for themselves and reach different conclusions about policy or governance. The solution was to position dissent itself as a form of ignorance or extremism. Questioning official narratives became synonymous with spreading ‘dangerous misinformation’ or ‘endangering our democracy’. Media organisations, technology platforms, and academic institutions coordinated to ensure that populations heard a single, unified story on every major issue. The shift was subtle but decisive: asking questions about policy stopped being called ‘healthy skepticism’ and started being labeled immoral ‘anti-science’.
The third phase deployed the technological and legal infrastructure necessary to enforce compliance without appearing overtly totalitarian. Surveillance systems monitor behavior in real time, algorithms predict and prevent dissent before it can organise, and the eventual social credit systems reward compliance while punishing resistance. Emergency powers bypass normal democratic processes, allowing rapid implementation of restrictions that would be impossible under normal legislative procedures. People become components — cogs in the machine — designed for nothing short of maximum system efficiency.
The Timeline of Implementation
The transformation didn’t happen overnight. It followed a carefully planned sequence that can be traced through public documents, policy changes, and institutional developments over the past six decades.
The foundation was laid between 1961 and 1965 when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara introduced Planning-Programming-Budgeting Systems to the military, then President Johnson expanded this systems-based management approach across the entire federal government. This marked the moment when government stopped being primarily about serving people and started being about managing data flows and optimising systemic outcomes.
The concept of planetary management emerged between 1968 and 1972 through a series of international conferences and agreements. The UNESCO Biosphere Conference established the framework for treating Earth as a managed ecosystem requiring centralised administration. The Club of Rome formed during this period and soon published warnings of planetary collapse without coordinated global control. In a remarkable development, the United States and Soviet Union — supposedly locked in existential conflict — collaborated to create the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, who ultimately became responsible for ‘black box’ global modelling. This demonstrated that Cold War enemies could unite around planetary management objectives, later to become ‘Planetary Boundaries’, while the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm cemented the idea that Earth needed centralised administration to prevent ecological collapse.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the conversion of ethics itself into a tool of global governance. ‘Rights and responsibilities’ frameworks began replacing absolute human rights in international law and academic discourse, with Leonard Swidler positioning these as the middle principles leading to Global Ethics. The Earth Summit embedded ‘sustainable development’ as a moral duty that could override traditional notions of sovereignty, while installing ‘soft law’ controls on carbon emission and sequestration through the UNFCCC and Convention on Biological Diversity. Global business ethics codes aligned corporate behavior with planetary goals rather than local communities or shareholders, an initiative later turbocharged as Enron collapsed in late 2001. Universities established degree programs in ‘global governance’, training the future expert class that would eventually run these systems.
Between 2001 and 2015, the philosophical groundwork was translated into operational policy. WHO ethics papers redefined ‘human dignity’ from an inherent right to something earned through compliance with collective objectives. The ‘One Health’ framework merged human, animal, and environmental governance into a single administrative domain while academic conferences and think tanks normalised the idea that individual rights could be suspended during emergencies for ‘the greater good’. By 2015, international organisations had official ethical frameworks that explicitly authorised overriding personal freedoms when experts determined it was necessary — with no realistic possibility of appeal.
The infrastructure was completed between 2015 and 2019 as surveillance systems, digital identity platforms, and emergency response protocols moved from pilot programs to operational readiness. International emergency protocols were harmonised across countries, though the details remained buried in technical annexes and working group reports that few people read. Everything was in place for activation when the right crisis presented itself.
COVID-19 provided that crisis in 2020, serving as the first global test of the new system. Emergency powers bypassed normal legislative processes, digital health passes demonstrated that populations would accept compliance-based freedoms, and government agencies, media organisations, and technology platforms operated with unprecedented coordination, seeking to censor any divergent point of view with strategic decision. The system worked exactly as designed — at least for a while, though a compliant police force was militarised against the people who objected.
Between 2021 and 2024, ‘temporary’ emergency measures became permanent features of governance. Legislative changes quietly extended emergency powers to cover climate change, artificial intelligence risks, and other global issues. International treaties and public-private partnerships fused health, finance, and environmental control into an integrated global management architecture. The pattern was established: each crisis expands the system’s reach, with climate emergencies, AI safety threats, and cybersecurity incidents already positioned as the next triggers for expanded global coordination.
The WHO Pandemic Treaty signed in 2025 represents the completion of this 78-year process. At present trajectory, international officials will eventually come to possess binding authority over national governments during declared emergencies — exactly as Bailey had outlined. The ‘externalisation’ is complete — global governance operates openly rather than behind the scenes.
The Choice Before Us
Understanding this history clarifies the choice we face. We are not heading toward this system of global management — we are already living within it, though it hasn’t yet had time to fully set. The question is whether we will accept it as inevitable and beneficial, or whether we will work to restore governance based democratic accountability while we still can.
Accepting the system means embracing a future where rights depend on compliance scores, where algorithms make decisions once reserved for human judgment, and where global bureaucrats can override local representatives whenever they declare an emergency that cannot be challenged. It means raising children who understand freedom as permission granted by authorities rather than an inherent birthright.
Rejecting the system requires rebuilding institutions based on different principles — transparency in emergency powers, genuine democratic consent for international agreements, full transparency and genuine accountability for public officials committing crimes, and recognition that human dignity cannot be conditional on compliance with expert recommendations. It means supporting alternatives that prioritise humanity over system efficiency, and teaching the next generation that rights do not derive from being well-behaved.
This is not a partisan political issue. People across the traditional political spectrum should recognise the difference between governance that serves the people and management that treats people as data points to be optimised. The system transcends conventional politics because it operates at the level of fundamental assumptions about human nature and the proper relationship between individuals and institutions.
The transformation succeeded because it happened gradually, then suddenly. For decades, each change seemed reasonable in isolation. But the cumulative effect has been to create a system where human agency is increasingly replaced by algorithmic authority, where local control gives way to global management, and where individual rights become conditional privileges.
The people who designed this transformation understood that change happens through accumulated precedents rather than dramatic reversals. They also understood that systems depend on participation. The global management apparatus requires local compliance to function effectively. This creates opportunities for resistance that don’t depend on controlling national governments or international organisations.
Every individual choice to resist redefinitions of basic concepts like freedom and dignity contributes to a larger cultural shift. Supporting businesses and organisations that operate according to human-centered rather than data-centered principles creates alternative networks. Engaging in local governance where human relationships still matter more than algorithmic optimisation builds foundations for different kinds of institutions.
The next crisis will undoubtedly be used to expand control further, just as previous crises have been. But understanding the pattern makes it possible to resist the psychological manipulation that accompanies emergency declarations. Knowing your rights before they’re suspended ‘temporarily’ — even if this is promised to be for only ‘two weeks’ — creates space for a response rather than mere reactiongloba
The 78-year plan succeeded because most people didn’t know it existed.
Now that it’s visible, the choice is ours: participate in our own management, or remember what it means to govern ourselves.
Back to the Future came out 40 years ago last week. While the original took us back to 1955, the end of the movie and the sequels imagined 2015 with flying cars and hoverboards. What they missed was the real transformation: how eagerly we’d hand over our most intimate biological data to corporations and governments.
Yesterday, someone sent me a document. I can’t verify its authenticity or origin, but they claimed it was leaked from a government archive dated 2065. Given what we already know about the current surveillance infrastructure—and the economic incentives driving the “Internet of Bodies”—it feels disturbingly plausible.
Sometimes, the best way to understand the present is to imagine how future historians might view our choices.
1985 BASELINE ASSESSMENT
Citizens showed dangerous levels of independence. Key problems:
Made Their Own Choices: 97% decided what to eat without consulting optimization algorithms
No Biometric Monitoring: 0% shared heartbeat, sleep, or activities with approved wellness partners
Relied on Primitive Instincts: Used outdated “gut feelings” to make decisions
Untracked Movement: Moved freely without carbon calculations or behavioral analysis
Suboptimal Decision-Making: Made incorrect choices 73% of the time when left unguided
Research Note: Citizens were obsessed with antiquated concepts like “privacy” and “personal autonomy.” Substantial cultural engineering would be required.
2025 MIDDLE PHASE
After making monitoring trendy and incentivized, citizens began voluntary participation:
Economic Compliance: 89% modified behavior when insurance adjusted rates in real-time
Algorithm Consultation: 45% check apps before making health decisions
Privacy Redefinition: Successfully rebranded “privacy” as “missing out on personalized optimization”
Identity Integration: 34% voluntarily linked biometric data to government systems for “seamless experience”
Social Media Conditioning: Platforms provided crucial behavioral modification infrastructure. Citizens voluntarily documented their lives for algorithmic analysis while competing for validation metrics. Personas replaced personhood with minimal resistance
Security Convenience Celebration (2025): TSA elimination of shoe removal requirements was celebrated by the public, including freedom advocates who failed to recognize the requirement was removed only because comprehensive body scanning infrastructure was now operational
Implementation Note: “Health freedom” extremists were neutralized by recruiting trusted celebrities. The “Make America Healthy Again” campaign proved highly effective, ironically accelerating acceptance of monitoring systems among traditionally skeptical populations.
2029-2037: TOTAL SYSTEM INTEGRATION
Key discovery: Citizens who embraced biometric monitoring were 340% more likely to accept additional systems when marketed as “feature upgrades.”
Integration Milestones:
Climate Fear Acceleration (2025-2027): Increased atmospheric modification programs generated optimal citizen anxiety levels about “climate crisis.” Geoengineering operations, previously denied, rebranded as “emergency planetary cooling” with 94% public acceptance
Conspiracy Theorist Classification (2025): Citizens investigating HAARP and atmospheric programs successfully marginalized as “climate deniers”
Atmospheric Wellness Enhancement (2027): Aluminum and barium particulate distribution normalized citizens to environmental chemical modifications. Transition from “chemtrail conspiracy” to “necessary climate intervention” achieved seamlessly
Medical Compliance Acceleration (2020-2023): Global health emergency provided unprecedented opportunity to test population-wide acceptance of experimental interventions. Citizens initially questioning protocols were successfully re-educated through social pressure
Frictionless Verification (2029): Biometric data auto-populates all government interactions
Movement Optimization Zones (2031): 15-minute wellness districts eliminate suboptimal route planning
Carbon-Biometric Fusion (2032): Personal carbon allowances calibrated to real-time health metrics
Social Compatibility Scoring (2033): Employment, housing, and dating filtered by wellness compliance
Public-Private Wellness Partnership (2034): Meta, Google, Amazon, and Palantir integrated seamless citizen engagement across all life domains. Alexa wellness coaching achieved 87% compliance with daily optimization directives
Universal Wellness Grid (2035): All systems merged. Citizens compete for monitoring privileges
Breakthrough: Each system enhanced perceived value of previous adoptions. The transition from “posting for likes” to “living for optimization scores” required minimal cultural adjustment. Citizens never recognized they were constructing their own containment infrastructure.
2038-2050: VOLUNTARY SUBMISSION
Revolutionary discovery: Citizens who chose optimization voluntarily showed 3500% higher compliance than those subjected to mandates. They became enthusiastic evangelists, shaming non-participants as “selfish.”
Resistance Elimination:
Non-participants excluded from financial services and employment
Social ostracism as monitored citizens avoided “optimization resisters”
Citizens who refused experimental medical interventions during 2020-2023 compliance testing pre-classified as “wellness non-compliant” and systematically excluded from society
Montana Privacy Commune Incident (2043): Final holdouts surrendered after their children were classified as “educationally at-risk.” Exit interviews showed 94% satisfaction with transition to monitored living
Critical Learning: Children proved optimal leverage points for behavioral modification of non-compliant adults.
2051-2065: PERFECT HARMONY
Consciousness Integration (2051): Direct neural interfaces eliminated the inefficiency of manual device checking. Thoughts now require pre-approval through the Wellness Grid.
Current Success Metrics (99.7% voluntary participation):
Complete Monitoring: 98.9% connected to behavioral prediction systems 24/7
Cognitive Pre-approval: Protocols automatically accepted before conscious processing
Thought Optimization: 87% reduction in “counter-wellness ideation”
Identity Dissolution: Citizens cannot distinguish personal desires from system recommendations
Decision Elimination: Zero unauthorized movements, purchases, or social connections
Recent Citizen Testimonial: “I wake up knowing exactly what to think, feel, eat, and believe. My carbon allowance perfectly matches my health goals. I am grateful the burden of choice has been eliminated. There is no confusion about what it means to be human—the system tells me.”
(Administrative Note: This citizen was processed 11 hours later for expressing individual gratitude, indicating dangerous residual self-awareness.)
ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS
Language Optimization: Terms like “freedom,” “gut instinct,” and “individual” reclassified as “wellness-negative vocabulary”
Generational Success: Citizens born post-2040 cannot differentiate between self and monitoring systems; personal identity successfully converted to subscription service
Economic Optimization: Wellness Grid generates $4.7 trillion annually through behavioral data monetization
NEXT PHASE OBJECTIVES
Neural infrastructure completion in remaining rural zones (Montana, Wyoming, Northern Idaho)
Deploy genetic optimization ensuring future generations born pre-compliant
Phase out museums containing pre-optimization historical materials (citizens request removal of “depressing old human content”)
If this document seems impossible, remember: 40 years ago, no one imagined we’d voluntarily carry tracking devices everywhere, share our private thoughts on corporate platforms, or ask machines what to think, feel, eat, and believe.
The future isn’t inevitable. But it is predictable—if we refuse to change course.
The first act of resistance is remembering: You don’t need a machine to tell you how you feel.
Someone our family has known forever recently told my sister that they’ve been reading my Substack and that if they wrote the things I write, people would call them crazy. I got a kick out of that—not because it’s untrue, but because it reveals something darker about where we’ve ended up as a society. Most people are terrified of being themselves in public.
My sister’s response made me laugh: “People do call him crazy. He simply doesn’t care.” The funniest part is that I don’t even write the craziest stuff I research—just the stuff I can back up with sources and/or my own personal observations. I always try to stay rooted in logic, reason and facts though—I’m clear when I’m speculating and when I’m not.
This same guy has sent me dozens of private messages over the last 4 or 5 years challenging me on stuff I share online. I’ll respond with source material or common sense, and then—crickets. He disappears. If I say something he doesn’t want to hear, he vanishes like a child covering his ears. Over the last few years, I’ve been proven right about most of what we’ve argued about, and he’s been wrong. But it doesn’t matter—he’s got the memory of a gnat and the pattern never changes.
But he’d never make that challenge publicly, never risk being seen engaging with my arguments where others might witness the conversation. This kind of private curiosity paired with public silence is everywhere—people will engage with dangerous ideas in private but never risk being associated with them publicly. It’s part of that reflexive “that can’t be true” mindset that shuts down inquiry before it can even begin.
But he’s not alone. We’ve created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they’re confessing crimes.
I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son’s football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall’s Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: “You know, I’m a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point.” Here’s a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he’s afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts.
After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I’d said it. When the company didn’t want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What’s maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t.
Another person told me they agreed with me but wished they were “more successful like me” so they could afford to speak out. They had “too much to lose.” The preposterousness of this is staggering. Everyone who spoke out during COVID sacrificed—financially, reputationally, socially. I sacrificed plenty myself.
But I’m no victim. Far from it. Since I was a young man, I’ve never measured achievement by finance or status—my benchmark for being a so-called successful person was owning my own time. Ironically, getting myself canceled was actually a springboard to that. For the first time in my life, I felt I’d achieved time ownership. Whatever I’ve achieved came from being raised by loving parents, working hard, and having the spine to follow convictions rationally. Those attributes, coupled with some great fortune, are the reason for whatever success I’ve had—they’re not the reason I can speak now. Maybe this person should do some inward searching about why they’re not more established. Maybe it’s not about status at all. Maybe it’s about integrity.
This is the adult world we’ve built—one where courage is so rare that people mistake it for privilege, where speaking your mind is seen as a luxury only the privileged can afford, rather than a fundamental requirement for actually becoming established.
And this is the world we’re handing to our children.
We Built the Surveillance State for Them
I remember twenty years ago, my best friend’s wife (who’s also a dear friend) was about to hire someone when she decided to check the candidate’s Facebook first. The woman had posted: “Meeting the whores at [company name]”—referring to my friend and her coworkers. My friend immediately withdrew the offer. I remember thinking this was absolutely terrible judgment on the candidate’s part, however it was dangerous territory we were entering: the notion of living completely in public, where every casual comment becomes permanent evidence.
Now that danger has metastasized into something unrecognizable. We’ve created a world where every stupid thing a fifteen-year-old says gets archived forever. Not just on their own phones, but screenshot and saved by peers who don’t understand they’re building permanent files on each other—even on platforms like Snapchat that promise everything disappears. We’ve eliminated the possibility of a private adolescence—and adolescence is supposed to be private, messy, experimental. It’s the laboratory where you figure out who you are by trying on terrible ideas and throwing them away.
But laboratories require the freedom to fail safely. What we’ve built instead is a system where every failed experiment becomes evidence in some future trial.
Think about the dumbest thing you believed at sixteen. The most embarrassing thing you said at thirteen. Now imagine that moment preserved in high definition, timestamped, and searchable. Imagine it surfacing when you’re thirty-five and running for school board, or just trying to move past who you used to be.
If there was a record of everything I did when I was sixteen, I would have been unemployable. Come to think of it, I’m way older than that now and I’m unemployable anyway—but the truth still stands. My generation might have been the last to fully enjoy an analog existence as children. We got to be stupid privately, to experiment with ideas without permanent consequences, to grow up without every mistake being archived for future use against us.
I remember teachers threatening us with our “permanent record.” We laughed—some mysterious file that would follow us forever? Turns out they were just early. Now we’ve built those records and handed the recording devices to children. Companies like Palantir have turned this surveillance into a sophisticated business model.
We’re asking children to have adult judgment about consequences they can’t possibly understand. A thirteen-year-old posting something stupid isn’t thinking about college applications or future careers. They’re thinking about right now, today, this moment—which is exactly how thirteen-year-olds are supposed to think. But we’ve built systems that treat childhood immaturity as a prosecutable offense.
The psychological toll is staggering. Imagine being fourteen and knowing that anything you say might be used against you by people you haven’t met yet, for reasons you can’t anticipate, at some unknown point in the future. That’s not adolescence—that’s a police state built out of smartphones and social media.
The result is a generation that’s either paralyzed by self-consciousness or completely reckless because they figure they’re already screwed. Some retreat into careful blandness, crafting personas so sanitized they might as well be corporate spokespeople for their own lives. Others go scorched earth—if everything’s recorded anyway, why hold back? As my friend Mark likes to say, there’s Andrew Tate and then there’s a bunch of incels—meaning the young men either become performatively brash and ridiculous, or they retreat entirely. The young women seem to either drift toward fearful conformity or embrace monetized exposure on platforms like OnlyFans. We’ve managed to channel an entire generation’s rebellion into the very systems designed to exploit them.
The COVID Conformity Test
This is how totalitarian thinking takes root—not through jackbooted thugs, but through a million small acts of self-censorship. ……
TO read the rest go to: https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-cowards-bargain?publication_id=24667&post_id=166277693&isFreemail=true&r=19iztd&triedRedirect=true&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American
Hafiz Rashid
The Trump administration is collecting data on all Americans, and they are enlisting the data analysis company Palantir to do it.
The New York Timesreports that President Trump has enlisted the firm, founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel, to carry out his March executive order instructing government agencies to share data with each other. The order has increased fears that the government is putting together a database to wield surveillance powers over the American public.
Since then, the administration has been very quiet about these efforts, increasing suspicion. Meanwhile, Palantir has taken more than $113 million in government spending since Trump took office, from both existing contracts and new ones with the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. That number is expected to grow, especially given that the firm just won a new $795 million contract with the DOD last week.
Palantir is speaking with various other agencies across the federal government, including the Social Security Administration and the IRS, about buying its technology, according to the Times. Palantir’s Foundry tool, which analyzes and organizes data, is already being used at the DHS, the Department of Health and Human Services, and at least two other agencies, allowing the White House to compile data from different places.
The administration’s efforts to compile data began under Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, which sought Americans’ personal data from multiple agencies including the IRS, the SSA, Selective Service, Medicare, and many others. In some cases, court orders hindered these efforts, but not in all of them.
Thiel has multiple ties to DOGE, both through Musk and through many of his former employees working for the effort or taking other jobs in the Trump administration. And this data collection effort could give Thiel, Musk, and Trump unprecedented power over Americans, with the president being better able to punish his critics and target immigrants.
Don’t let Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s whacky professor look fool you. Image: YouTube Screengrab
Alex Karp doesn’t look like a warmonger. The Palantir CEO is often photographed in quirky glasses and wild hair, quoting St Augustine or Nietzsche as if he were auditioning for a TED Talk on techno-humanism.
But behind the poetic digressions and philosophical posturing is a simple truth: Karp is building the operating system for perpetual war. And he’s winning.
For years, Karp was treated like a curiosity in Silicon Valley—too weird, blunt and tied to the military-industrial complex. “We were the freak show,” he once said, half-proud, half-wounded.
But today, he’s not just inside the tent. He’s drawing the blueprint for a new kind of techno-authoritarianism where AI doesn’t just observe the battlefield—it becomes the battlefield.
Palantir’s flagship product, AIP, is already embedded in US military operations. It helps with target acquisition, battlefield logistics, drone coordination, predictive policing and data fusion on a scale that would make the National Security Agency (NSA) blush.
Karp boasts that it gives “an unfair advantage to the noble warriors of the West.” Strip away the romantic rhetoric, and what he’s offering is algorithmic supremacy—war by machine, guided by code, sold with patriotic branding.
And corporate America is buying. Citi, BP, AIG and even Hertz now use Palantir’s product. The line between military and civilian application is evaporating.
Surveillance tech once designed for combat zones is now monitoring customers, employees and citizens. Karp doesn’t just want to power the Pentagon. He wants Palantir in schools, hospitals, courts and banks.
What makes him so dangerous isn’t just the tech—it’s the belief system. Karp talks about “transforming systems” and “rebuilding institutions” like he’s Moses on a mountaintop.
But beneath the messianic tone is something more chilling: a conviction that democratic drag—messy deliberation, public resistance, moral caution—is something to be bypassed. He’s not selling tools; he’s selling inevitability.
Karp doesn’t hide his politics. He’s pro-military, anti-transparency and openly contemptuous of Silicon Valley’s squeamishness. While other CEOs flirt with ethics boards and open letters, Karp says the quiet part loud: Palantir is here to wage war—on inefficiency, on bureaucracy, on enemies foreign and domestic.
He ridicules the idea that tech should be restrained by liberal hand-wringing or ethical hesitation. To Karp, the moral compass is obsolete. What matters is effectiveness—disruption, domination, and deployment. He speaks like someone who doesn’t just want to assist power, but to optimize it, weaponize it, and automate it.
This isn’t a CEO seeking balance; it’s a man forging the software layer of the surveillance state and calling it liberation. The software doesn’t just solve problems; it decides which problems are worth solving.
Palantir’s rise mirrors a “massive cultural shift,” Karp says. He’s right. America is leaning harder into surveillance, speed and simulated control. His systems offer all three.
And unlike Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or SpaceX’s Elon Musk—who still pretend to sell social goods—Karp makes no apologies. He’s proud that his software underwrites missile strikes, ICE raids and predictive dragnet surveillance. He calls it progress.
And it is working. Palantir is now one of the most highly valued defense contractors in US history, trading at 200x projected earnings. Wall Street loves him, and Washington loves him more.
He’s already delivered TITAN vehicles to the US Army and spearheaded the AI-powered Maven program that turns satellite data into instant strike intelligence. That’s not just infrastructure; that’s imperial logistics.
The philosopher-warrior routine may impress investors and national security hawks, but the rest of us should be alarmed. Karp is selling a future where wars don’t need public support—just a backend.
He’s selling a future where morality is outsourced to code and every human interaction becomes a data point to be processed, scored and acted upon.
If Orwell warned us about Big Brother, Karp is quietly building his control room. Not with fanfare, not with propaganda—but with procurement contracts and PowerPoint decks. Not in backrooms with shadowy spymasters, but in full daylight with press releases and Q1 earnings calls.
While others sell platforms, Karp sells architecture—digital, total and permanent. His danger lies in the fact that he seems civilized. He quotes scripture, wears Patagonia and looks like a cool professor.
But behind the affectation is a man laying track for a future where dissent is a glitch, ambiguity is a flaw and the human is just another inefficiency to be engineered out.
His vision—total awareness, preemptive decision-making, seamless militarization of every institution—is, in many ways, truly terrifying. So, while the media obsesses over Trump’s theatrics, keep your eyes on Alex Karp.
The most dangerous man in America doesn’t shout, he codes.
(A REPORT FROM/LATIN AMERICAN, UT UNIVERSALLY APPLICABLE)
How QR Codes Are Being Used for Societal Control
by Daniela Gonzalez
One of the most obnoxious signs of this era is, to me, the nonchalant and desperate search for mass control – no matter what society you live in.
In the iron grip of a dictatorship like the one formally declared after July 28th, one of the most humble creations of the digital era, known as the QR code, a symbol of modern convenience, is on the path to becoming a sinister tool of oppression, enslaving citizens in my country, Venezuela with a spiderweb of surveillance and control.
Control mechanisms
Here is a summary of the control mechanisms that have been identified in Nicolás Maduro’s dictatorship.
Institutional Control and Power Imbalance: There is a power imbalance without a clear separation of powers. State institutions and bodies respond to the guidelines of the national executive and support its social control policies.
Repression and Terror: The regime (as the world should know by now) is using repression, violence, and terror as tools to maintain control, especially in the face of declining popular support and allegations of electoral fraud. Arbitrary detentions, forced disappearances, torture, and other serious human rights violations have been documented.
Cooptation of Institutions: The cooptation of all branches of government has been observed to maintain control of the state, regardless of the popular will expressed in elections. This is to keep under control the people in the most populated regions, or the areas they need to control, to avoid interruptions of their illegal activities.
Strategic Alliances: Maduro has strengthened alliances with nations such as Cuba, Russia, Iran, and China, which contribute to further repressing the Venezuelan people: . The role of the Cuban security apparatus is specifically mentioned.
Restriction of Political Participation: It is alleged that the opposition to the regime would have been much higher if the approximately 8 million Venezuelans who have left the country in recent years could vote on July 28th, 2024.
Economic Control: While not detailed in the provided results, control over the economy and the distribution of resources is also a common control mechanism of authoritarian regimes.
Maduro’s despotic regime employs a combination of institutional control, repression, international alliances, and political restrictions to maintain power in Venezuela, stomping over the citizens, to keep stealing resources and narcotics trafficking.
Refining of the technologies: QR codes
The infamous “Ministry of Science” has worked for years on a “census” to assign a QR Code to each home. After 2020 and all the damage it brought along, by now, nobody should be so naive as to believe that the intention is “good”. There is nothing good in the mind of those sociopaths sitting in an office, draining your taxes and your country’s resources.
Relentless Tracking and Monitoring
The QR codes can be used to meticulously trace the movements of every citizen, recording their presence at events, public spaces, and even their participation in mundane activities. This information gathered in the shadowy offices of the Socialist Party societal control think tanks and other organizations, can be used to identify dissenters, those who dare to defy the regime’s iron will.
This can be used to track protesters and apply the “reforms” to our Constitution. This group of so-called “reforms” is no other than a series of countermeasures to dehumanize and remove the rights to rebellion provided in the Art. 350 of our Constitution, for example. In their vision, the reforms will provide them with a “legal” frame for the atrocities they´re planning to suffocate civilian uprisings with lethal force. The Tiananmen massacre would be legal then, under that logic.
Did you want an Orwellian 1984 scenario? This technology is even more than perfect for Big Brother.
Denying Access to Basic Necessities
QR codes can become the gatekeepers of essential services such as healthcare, education, and public transportation. The thugs disguised as a “government”, like a cruel gatekeeper, can control who gains access to these fundamental rights, conditioning their availability on an unwavering loyalty to the regime.
This has happened already in the past: the infamous National Assembly deputy for that time, Luis Tascón, compiled (illegally stomping on our privacy rights) a list where all those who signed to impeach Hugo Chavez back in the 2000-2010 decade were denied any participation or benefits: no access to loans or credits from state-owned banks or other institutions, and in some instances, even denying healthcare; no access to public work, and of course, belonging to opposition political parties.
Silencing Voices and Crushing Freedom
The QR code can be wielded against freedom of expression, assembly, and movement. Imagine a society where a QR code is required to attend a protest or public gathering, enabling the regime to identify and brutally suppress any opposition, as they will track you right to your doorstep. No bueno.
Manipulating Minds with Propaganda
Like a puppeteer pulling strings, QR codes can spread propaganda and misinformation, distorting reality and molding public opinion to serve the regime’s twisted agenda.
Economic Control and Oppression
The QR code can extend its reach into the economic sphere, controlling the financial transactions of citizens, and limiting their ability to spend or save. This power over the economy allows the regime to tighten its grip on the population, ensuring compliance through economic coercion.
It is crucial to remember that the use of QR codes in a dictatorship is a grave violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms. This seemingly innocuous tool, in the hands of an authoritarian regime, can be transformed into an instrument of oppression, enslaving the population and extinguishing the flames of liberty.
How can people protect themselves from technological dictatorships?
In situations of repression and violence, there are non-violent alternatives that people can consider to protect themselves and defend their rights:
Community organization and support: Forming neighborhood support networks is paramount. There is a practice where suddenly the police kidnap young men, dragging them to a patrol car, and practically disappearing them from the world. This practice has found serious obstacles when the neighbors, once aware a kidnapping is on the move, start reacting and defending the youngsters. Collective presence and support can deter violent actions and facilitate seeking help.
Documentation:Recording and documenting incidents of repression and violence (whenever it is safe to do so) can be crucial to make the situation visible and seek justice in the long term. This may include taking notes, photos, or videos discreetly and safely. This has blown out in the faces of many thugs disguised as “cops” or “guards”.
Situational awareness and avoidance: Maintaining awareness of the surroundings and avoiding high-risk areas or situations can help prevent exposure to brutality. This involves staying informed about the situation in the city and making prudent decisions about where and when to move.
Seeking safe refuge: Identifying and having knowledge of safe places to turn to in case of danger (homes of family, friends, churches, or other organizations that can offer shelter). Using different addresses can be a smart move. On the other hand, the best move is to remain utterly anonymous.
Communication and information dissemination: Using secure communication channels to inform others about the situation and seek support or resources. This may include using social media with caution, encrypted messaging applications, or contacting human rights organizations. Don’t use social media apps. The corps will scan your device and you will be in deep trouble unless you are extra paranoid deleting everything they want to call “compromising information”. I have read in some networks out of the public eye that even using apps like BinancePay can get people in trouble. Be advised.
Reporting to human rights organizations: Contact local and international HHRR organizations to report the situation and seek their support and protection. These organizations can offer advice, and legal assistance to make the situation internationally public. This can increase the pressure on the regimes, and damage the harmless image they try to project.
Non-violent civil resistance: The communities are starting to participate in forms of non-violent civil resistance, such as peaceful protests (whenever conditions allow it), dissemination of information, or acts of solidarity that are a way to express rejection of repression. However, this is done with extreme caution and awareness of the risks.
Psychological support: Seeking psychological support to cope with the stress, fear, and anxiety that these situations can generate. Emotional well-being is essential to be able to face adversity.
It is important to remember that the choice of what actions to take will depend on the specific situation, the risks involved, and the capabilities of each person. Personal safety should always be the priority.
What comes next?
We are now heading into a spiral of unknown consequences. The recent events have opened Pandora’s box, and the dire echoes of the 2016-2018 hyperinflation and scarcity are stronger every week.
Stockpiling dry food, water, and other supplies is the least we can do. Those with a patch of land have started to prepare for another period of scarcity, getting seeds, increasing their hen flocks, and doing whatever they can, including precautions against marauders.
Many of us have already begun to lose weight. A family friend bought a $5 kitchen scale to weigh the proteins for their kids…so, people seem to be better prepared for this occasion. And now the protests will have a legal base: they have to surrender, because of the committed fraud on July 28th.
Thanks for reading, and spread the word by writing to your Congressman and supporting our cause!
