James Li explains that Flock cameras utilize automated licenses plate readers (ALPR) and the information is gathered to a database. There is evidence that Flock has expanded into facial recognition. Americans are being tracked without warrants, laws or their consent.
Silicon Valley giants have invested in Flock while Wall Street, bankers and Trump back Axon. The companies are competing to control mass surveillance. Americans must resist the surveillance and tracking. of all cameras, not just a single brand.
The Real Reason They Are Destroying Flock Cameras
James Li explains that Flock cameras utilize automated licenses plate readers (ALPR) and the information is gathered to a database. There is evidence that Flock has expanded into facial recognition. Americans are being tracked without consent or a warrant. There are 110,000 Flock cameras across the nation. Axon is a competitor to Flock that may be replacing the Flock cameras.
The Truth about Anti-Flock Outrage: The Hidden Epstein Connection
James breaks down a potential astroturfed psyop unfolding in real time — exposing how a viral wave of anti-Flock camera backlash is distracting the public from a sneaky city council bait-and-switch, and how corporate rivalries between Silicon Valley elites that have invested in Flock are competing with Wall Street bankers and Trump, who have invested in Axon.
Li warns against falling for the removal of Flock cameras that are replaced with Axon. The goal is to remove all surveillance cameras used for tracking that impose on privacy.
Li says that Epstein was involved in the origin of one of these companies.
Loveable Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg called his first few thousand users “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data, published IM transcripts show. Facebook hasn’t disputed the authenticity of the transcript.
Zuckerberg was chatting with an unnamed friend, apparently in early 2004. Business Insider, which has a series of quite juicy anecdotes about Facebook’s early days, takes the credit for this one.
The exchange apparently ran like this:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend’s Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don’t know why.
Zuck: They “trust me”
Zuck: Dumb fucks
The founder was then 19, and he may have been joking. But humour tells you a lot. Some might say that this exchange shows Zuckerberg was not particularly aware of the trust issue in all its depth and complexity.
Facebook is currently in the spotlight for its relentlessly increasing exposure of data its users assumed was private. This is nicely illustrated in the interactive graphic you can find here or by clicking the piccie to the right.
In turn, its fall from grace has made backers of the ‘social media’ bubble quite nervous. Many new white collar nonjobs created since the mid-Noughties depend on the commercial value of your output, and personal information. (Both are invariably donated for free).
But there’s a problem.
Much of the data created by Web2.0rrhea is turning out to be quite useless for advertisers – or anyone else. Marketeers are having a harder time justifying the expenditure in sifting through the Web 2.0 septic tank for the odd useful nugget of information.
Facebook’s data stash is regarded as something quite special. It’s authenticated against a real person, and the users tend to be over 35 and middle class – the ideal demographic for selling high value goods and services. In addition, users have so far been ‘sticky’ to Facebook, something quite exceptional since social networks fall out of fashion (Friends Reunited, Friendster) as quickly as they attract users.
Facebook also has something else going for it – ordinary users regard it as the natural upgrade to Hotmail. In fact, once the crap has been peeled away, there may not be much more to Facebook than the Yahoo! or Hotmail Address Book with knobs on: the contact book is nicely integrated, uploading photos to share easier, while everything else is gravy. Unlike tech-savvy users, many people remain loyal to these for years. ®
A leak from Peter Thiel’s private Dialog society offers a rare look at how America’s political, military, financial, and technology elites gather when they believe the public is not watching.
The result is not just embarrassing. It is revealing.
According to records reviewed by WIRED, Dialog is a private, invitation-only organization co-founded in 2006 by Thiel. Per the report:
It convenes US officials, foreign government figures, and Silicon Valley executives at off-the-record annual retreats. Dialog has spent two decades declining to disclose its members.
Now, internal records exposed online show who was invited, what they discussed, and what kind of world this circle is imagining.
Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining and surveillance company seeded by the CIA’s venture arm and now deeply embedded in government contracting across multiple administrations. He is also one of President Donald Trump’s most important Silicon Valley patrons and a Republican megadonor. And his name has surfaced in the Jeffrey Epstein orbit, with records and reporting describing meetings, correspondence, and Epstein’s own references to Thiel as a “great friend.”
Notably, WIRED also pointed to a Dialog connection in the Epstein files. In 2012, according to Department of Justice records, Harvard physicist Lisa Randall forwarded Epstein an invitation to a Dialog retreat and asked whether it was “worthwhile” to attend.
In that invite, the club’s ambitions were spelled out clearly: They wanted to “change the world.” The invitation says it brings together only a limited number of participants of “global” and “emerging” leaders “who can help implement the plans we develop.”
The Attendees
The leak shows Dialog as more than a networking retreat. It is a private forum that brings together power brokers from government, finance, technology, intelligence, surveillance, and politics.
As WIRED put it, “the documents show an extraordinary convergence of power.” It continues:
The registration records list General Alexus Grynkewich, NATO’s supreme allied commander of Europe and the head of U.S. European Command…. The website directory names sitting Trump administration officials, two U.S. senators, six members of the Paypal Mafia, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States, along with the founders and directors of many of the country’s largest surveillance, data-broker, and advertising-data companies.
The report further points to prominent decision-makers in public finance and commerce. Among the attendees are
Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, whose department writes the rules on financial data, and Senator Ted Cruz, chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, which oversees the Federal Trade Commission and its data-privacy authority.
There are others:
Randy Kroszner, a former governor of the Federal Reserve who now serves on the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee; Hallie Hoffman, a former general counsel and acting chief of staff of the Drug Enforcement Administration; Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League; Peter Goettler, the president of the Cato Institute; Ryan Stowers, the executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation; and Roger Myerson, a Nobel laureate economist at the University of Chicago.
In other words, “just” an intimate private retreat where the people who write the rules meet the people who profit from them. As they say, “nothing to see here.”
The Names
Beyond the names already mentioned, the roster includes others who need little introduction:
Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.)
Peter Goettler, president of the Cato Institute
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)
Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.)
Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy
Tom Lue, general counsel and head of governance at Google DeepMind
Souad Mekhennet, former Washington Post reporter
Wes Moore, governor of Maryland
Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube
Jared Polis, governor of Colorado
Rick Warren, evangelical pastor
Ezra Klein, political commentator
The oligarchic class is well represented. The leak names the following billionaires (and one trillionaire):
John Arnold, Centaurus Advisors and Arnold Ventures; $2.8 billion
Nicolas Berggruen, Berggruen Holdings and Berggruen Institute; $2.9 billion
Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian; $7.7 billion
Scott Cook, Intuit; $4.4 billion
Marcos Galperin, MercadoLibre; $6.8 billion
Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn and Greylock Partners; $2.7 billion
Henry Kravis, KKR; $12.2 billion
Joe Lonsdale, Palantir, 8VC, and OpenGov; estimated $2.8 billion
Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, X, and xAI; $1.3 trillion
Eric Schmidt, Google and Schmidt Futures; $40.1 billion
Barry Sternlicht, Starwood Capital Group; $3.1 billion
Peter Thiel, Palantir, Founders Fund, and PayPal; $27.8 billion
“Off-the-record”
WIRED reported that the leaked materials include a registration list for Dialog’s 2026 retreat near Dublin, Ireland. The list names 222 registrants. Some are marked as “active member” or “guest.” Others are first-time attendees. Many appear to have registered with personal or corporate emails rather than government accounts.
That detail is not minor. If public officials attend sensitive gatherings through private channels, their participation can fall outside the normal paper trail of government accountability. The issue is not whether every conversation is improper. The issue is that the public cannot know what its “public servants” are discussing with the wealthy industries they oversee.
Dialog’s structure appears designed for precisely that kind of discretion. One internal moderator guide reportedly tells participants that everything is “off-the-record.” It also urges comments to be concise and “nonobvious.” That raises the obvious question: If senators, generals, government officials, investors, and executives are discussing matters that could shape the public’s future, why is the public the one party not allowed in the room?
The Agenda
The retreat agenda is striking because it includes sessions that sound almost like parody. Per the report:
The program of off-the-record sessions includes “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and “How’s Your Sex Life?” Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.
Those titles matter because they show the worldview of the gathering. This is not a civic conference about ordinary public problems. It is a private space where powerful people appear to discuss war, technology, sex, religion, political organization, and social control in the same breath.
The “Build-a-Cult” session is especially striking. America’s Founders built a constitutional system around distrust of concentrated power, personal rule, and political worship. They would have recognized the danger immediately. Ordinarily, the word “cult” is a glaring warning. In this setting, it appears as a workshop topic, particularly chilling against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s controversial blurring of the line between church and state, its misuse of Christian messaging and symbols in war propaganda and political communications, and its reliance on megachurch networks.
The “Battlefield Technologies” and “Navigating WWIII” sessions raise a different concern. Defense technology is no longer a narrow military subject. It is now intertwined with artificial intelligence, surveillance, drones, data systems, and private contractors. When senior officials and nominally private companies discuss those themes “off-the-record,” the public has reason to ask who benefits, and what it means for future conflicts.
The Data-state Nexus
The most troubling part of the report, however, is not the eccentric agenda. It is the overlap between nominally private data companies and public power.
Dialog’s chairman, Auren Hoffman, is not just a conference organizer. He is a data-industry operator and investor: the founder of SafeGraph and LiveRamp, companies tied to location data and identity resolution, and a general partner at Flex Capital, a seed-stage venture firm with a broad portfolio across the digital economy. That makes him a connector as much as an entrepreneur, someone whose network sits at the intersection of data infrastructure, venture capital, and political access.
Alongside Thiel, another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is also listed in the report. Lonsdale is another Trump donor. He helped fund Trump’s 2024 campaign through Elon Musk’s America PAC. He then advised the administration on “government spending and efficiency” through the now-infamous DOGE.
Buried beneath the loud political theater of long-promised government efficiency, DOGE’s true mission had been spelled out early: to “modernize government software” in line with an “AI First Agenda.” The result was not so much the exposure and cutting of government “waste, fraud and abuse” as the digitization of government itself. That is what DOGE appears to have successfully achieved.
Once that happened, the Trump administration contracted Palantir to fuse datasets on every American, potentially creating detailed profiles on every citizen.
At the same time, Palantir’s software is used across immigration enforcement, healthcare, defense, and intelligence systems.
The Tech Future
The leaked materials also show a group preoccupied with “artificial intelligence, longevity, and the near future.”
On that future, the Dialog elites are not optimistic. WIRED reports:
Asked on a sign-up form to predict what comes next, registrants returned again and again to the same theme: AI will reorder work, war, education and belief within a few years. Several foresee mass labor displacement and a swing back toward unions and government programs. Others predict an “AI winter,” domestic terrorism targeting data centers, criminal defendants choosing AI lawyers over public defenders, or religious revival provoked by the disruption.
“Societal degeneration,” one person predicted, “will continue to accelerate.”
That last phrase captures the mood. Dialog appears to be a place where elites debate societal collapse while remaining insulated from the people who would live through it. Thiel himself recently made news after “temporarily” moving his family to Buenos Aires, part of what wealth advisors now call “sovereign diversification,” a polite phrase for the billionaire search for backup jurisdictions, tax shelters, and places to ride out the crises they help create.
There is a long tradition of powerful people gathering privately to discuss the future. One example is the Bilderberg Group, hosted this year in Washington, D.C. Notably, Thiel is a member of its steering committee. But the AI era raises the stakes. A small set of companies and investors now control tools that could drastically transform labor markets, policing, warfare, education, media, and political persuasion. At the same time, those same people are finding ways to “penetrate government” itself, to borrow the infamous maxim, through lobbying, political spending, advisory roles, and the revolving door. Obviously, their private conversations with public officials should not be treated as harmless salon culture.
Republic vs. Oligarchy
The deeper irony of the Dialog leak is not that a private club failed to protect its own secrets. It is that the ultra-wealthy and well-connected people exposed in the leak are helping build a world where privacy increasingly belongs only to them.
Dialog reportedly collected political leanings, matchmaking answers, and private access tokens, then promised discretion. When the data spilled out, the lesson was obvious: The powerful value privacy when it is their own.
Everyone else is pushed into a different bargain.
It includes digital IDs, digital money, tokenized assets, biometric checkpoints, travel databases, location tracking, identity graphs, AI risk-scoring, and mass-data collection, all dressed up as convenience, safety, and modernization.
But what emerges is not a republic. A republic requires visible, accountable power and private, responsible citizens. An oligarchy reverses the order.
Dialog shows that reversal in miniature. Billionaires, data brokers, defense contractors, political donors, and public servants gather privately to “change the world.” The public is not invited into the room. It is forced to simply accept this new world and comply with its rules.
So the question is no longer whether powerful people are meeting in private. They always have. The question is whether a Republic can survive when those private clubs are building the instruments through which everyone else will be watched, measured, scored, and governed.
Now, as situations stand today, there is a powder keg with the fuse lit and burning.The question is when it will erupt or whether there is something in the work what can stop the eruption.
Yes there are those from other,,, persuasions shall we say, people or entities that cannot be considered completely human who are working to control the outcome, but what you as a human must remember is that the strength of a human being is greater than that of any other (negative entity? Life form?)as long as the human being will allow it to be focused on a goal.There is so much of your own Nature of which you are not aware.There are miracles that you can do on all levels—-physical, mental, even spiritual, and most of it relies on the emotional.For in many ways, the emotions are the engines that can move you and keep you going.You have been conditioned through the way control has been exercised always to keep your emotions in check —- the very nature of the depression drugs is to keep one from feeling emotions.The other entities are deathly,yes, deathly, afraid of your emotions, so it is time to get angry, to get e-motivatedand to act.
The human race …Well, let us say, that there are those of the human race who have given up their humanity for a price.What price is worth one’s integrity, one’ being, one’s person, one’s emotions?Think of that.Are you willing to give up WHO you are in its totality for some promise of physical reward?Why do you think they are so desperate to surveil?. Is it not because by doing so they can strip from humans – real humans- their own sense of emotion, to beat them down into fearful bits that are easily controlled.Think on this, then everything makes more sense.
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.
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.
