Invasion of the Country-Snatchers
Invasion of the Country-Snatchers
The AI-powered surveillance state is un-American. Literally. (Part I of a series)
Data centers are easy to hate. The hyperscale facilities used to train and serve AI models are being plopped down like Monopoly pieces in a hostile takeover of the American countryside, tax-free million-square-foot monuments to the technofeudalist conquistadors who’ve similarly parasitized the state apparatus. They inspire the same kind of sinking feeling as finding a massive network of termite tubes honeycombing the ceiling of your basement: an understanding that parasites have been working hard to destroy what’s yours, and they aren’t leaving without a fight. But then, neither are you.
Hyperscalers are exploiting economic hardship and outdated laws to seize land and water, concealing their true identities and intentions from the communities they colonize, belching carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, methane, and other pollutants into the air from their backup generators and “forever chemicals” into the water, and sickening their neighbors with high levels of electromagnetic radiation and a constant, sanity-shaking roar. Despite promises of economic revitalization, once construction is done, there are few if any permanent jobs for locals, and data centers pay little to no property taxes thanks to state governments competing to lure the massive construction with the most desirable, regulation-free business climate money can buy. Utility companies are increasingly warning they cannot service both residential customers and the projected needs of the hyperscalers, which cause rates to balloon long before they’re actually built. What was marketed as a lifeline to rural America is looking more like a noose around its neck.
Silicon Valley apologists insist that Americans must sacrifice their clean water, farmland, public funds, privacy, constitutional rights, careers, and dignity to stay ahead of China in the AI arms race. But that narrative is misleading: the US already has over 10 times as many data centers as China - 5,427 to their 449 as of May - despite less than one fourth the population, with nearly twice the installed data center capacity (52 gigawatts to China’s 28). At the start of this year, the US had more data centers than the next 14 countries combined - yet construction has actually sped up, with more spent on data center construction in the first six months of this year than in all of 2025 - and more than three times what was spent in 2024.
Despite unprecedented hype, AI has not replaced human labor - Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei even walked back his clickbait prediction that it would eliminate 50% of entry-level white collar jobs by 2027 - and the promised productivity gains have not materialized, even with employers forcing workers to use the technology if they want to keep their jobs (and then using AI to monitor those employees’ use of AI). Indeed, companies’ rush to shoehorn AI into seemingly every product on the market (AI toothbrush, anyone?) has only convinced many Americans that they want nothing to do with it.
Deploying its full arsenal of dirty tricks to get Americans hooked on generative AI, the industry cons casual users of the tech into feeling guilty for their supposed role in the data center buildout and its attendant harms - as if their hunger for cat slop videos (and not the Pentagon’s need to maintain dynamic targeting lists of problematic citizens) is what’s really causing those data centers to dry up Lake Tahoe. In reality, corporate and government AI use the vast majority of US compute - over 85% by one estimate - dwarfing consumer-facing applications.
This is despite an abysmal return on investment, with even establishment media outlets now willing to admit that AI is a financial black hole. Data centers can only operate for a few years before the costly NVIDIA GPUs that process their data become obsolete, and this makes turning a profit for the operator essentially impossible. The data center gold rush has jacked up the prices of NVIDIA GPUs so high that individual computer owners can no longer afford them, which may be the point. Big Parasite wants us renting our compute as well as our homes, and has christened GPUs a legitimate asset class in the latest coat of lipstick applied to the circular-financing pig (covered in Part III).
While the rush to build is in part due to a provision in last year’s Big Beautiful Bill that allows any data center completing construction in 2026 to write off construction costs on their taxes, no one is dropping $1 billion on hyperscale construction just to claim it as a deduction. Nor can it be attributed to natural market forces - there is nothing natural about the overnight transformation of the American economy into all-AI, all the time, except the popular revulsion toward it. You would not find an American outside New York, Washington DC, and Silicon Valley who honestly believes his country has made the right choice in prioritizing machine over man. Consumer advocate Erin Brockovich recently likened the buildout to a foreign invasion, but she’s only half right - the invasion has already happened. Data centers are here to power the next phase of this hostile takeover: occupation.
Epistemic Capture
Most grassroots opposition to data centers has understandably focused on the immediate harm to the community and environment, but the data center blitzkrieg is best understood as the foundation of the AI surveillance state. It enables the subversion of every freedom America claims to stand for by a parasitic fifth column, long embedded in the public and private sectors, that has been unable to mount a proper coup without AI. With that barrier removed, all bets are off. The Trump administration declared AI data centers critical infrastructure last year - it was this executive order that opened the door to the use of eminent domain to seize private property for their construction - and has reoriented the machinery of the state to service the occupying force.
AI is the digital philosopher’s stone (literally, according to technofeudalist venture capitalist Marc Andreessen), transmuting a previously overwhelming firehose of raw data - from social media, browser clicks, smartphones, cars, wearables, “smart” devices, and hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras, among countless other sources - into the “gold” of actionable narrative streams so detailed they can provide the user with an accurate picture of the future and autonomously act to alter or avert it. With ordinary citizens informing on themselves through augmented-reality glasses, cloud-connected doorbell cams, and chatbot “therapists,” on top of the constant stream of location data from smartphones, surveillance has never been easier. Internet of Things and Internet of Bodies devices are constantly “phoning home” with the user’s data, which is used to train future generations of AI to more efficiently babysit the user. Deploying multiple AI processing layers and feedback loops over these data streams turns a static snapshot of a person, a place, or a group at one point in time into a dynamic simulation, a digital twin capable of not just filling in informational gaps in the past and present, but projecting its timeline into the future. As the accuracy of those simulations increased, a state equipped with such technology would come to appear godlike in its omniscience from citizens’ perspective - so long as it possessed the necessary data center capacity to run everything. It’s no surprise that AI has become indispensable to the Pentagon, which is already blaming it for their war crimes, and the IDF, which - as the “most moral army in the world” - doesn’t believe in war crimes.
Even Palantir’s bloodthirsty CEO Alex Karp called his company’s technology “dangerous societally” before unintentionally revealing why his Big Tech peers have poured so much money into hyping up the Chinese AI threat: “the only justification you could possibly have [for using this technology] would be that if we don’t do it, our adversaries and - will do it, and we will be subject to their rule of law,” he told CNBC in March. No China threat, no license to dump trillions of taxpayer dollars into autonomous killbots and vaporware! Like any good fascist, Karp wraps himself in the flag - “It’s about maintaining our ability to be American in the near term and long term” - but Palantir holds board meetings in Israel and partners with the former Mossad chief’s drone company to automate genocide, even though Karp’s Jewish supremacist buddies probably call him a schvartze behind his back (he’s only half Jewish, and not the half that counts). Nothing about the privatized surveillance state Palantir embodies is particularly “American.”
Indeed, it would be bad enough - illegal, unconstitutional, revolution-worthy even - if this technofeudalist Panopticon formed the backbone of a new home-grown fascism. But this isn’t even an American surveillance state. The billionaires benefiting from it all have dual citizenships, homes outside the US, or both. If they can be said to have any loyalty at all, it is to Big Parasite, the sprawling transnational criminal enterprise headquartered within the shell company “Israel.” While this group has already taken over the decision-making centers of western society, there’s only so many Palestinian and Lebanese children you can murder in 4K before popular anger reaches critical mass, and the thought of losing control of the US, their most lucrative property, has triggered a panic in leadership circles. The data center buildout is thus part of a multi-stage effort to lock down Big Parasite’s dominion over the American mind, to ensure the asset-stripping of the US can continue to completion, unburdened by the “don’t shit where you eat” caveat that has historically stopped American oligarchs from totally destroying the place.
From Big Parasite’s perspective, AI and technological innovation are not tools for the elevation of human consciousness, but weapons to drive a wedge of existential doubt between the individual and his own perceptions and reasoning. Data centers are not opportunities for economic revitalization, but power sources and dispersal nodes for the multidimensional propaganda machine they have built over generations, which can surgically target that existential doubt and replace it with a fully controllable Reality-Plus™ experience, creating legions of loyal thought-slaves. And AI surveillance networks like Flock and Axon (covered in Part II) are not public safety tools, but the eyes and ears of an ersatz omniscient deity tracking your every move. With the world finally turning against Israel after watching its genocide in Gaza live on social media, Big Parasite has shifted unprecedented resources - not just US tax dollars and political capital, but the full force of the US tech industry - toward holding the American people in thrall, to be deployed as both cannon fodder and moral human shields wherever the wheels of geopolitics need grease. So yes, data centers are vital national security infrastructure - Israel’s national security.
Parasite in the Machine
The relative strength of the American private sector with respect to its government has made it the ideal host for Big Parasite. A Palantir whistleblower declared the US an “occupied nation” in March, warning that the company’s executives were staging a hostile takeover of the government with full complicity of the Trump administration. Palantir, OpenAI, and Meta executives have been appointed sworn Army officers with their own unit, despite these companies’ divided loyalties and disdain for human rights. The surveillance state buildout they are leading so closely mirrors Big Parasite’s Middle Eastern megaproject that an IDF-style crackdown on resistance to data centers is a very real possibility after “anti-tech violent extremists” were added to the president’s enemies list earlier this year. While Israel has systematically stolen West Bank water supplies to force Palestinians off land desired for its illegal settlements, Big Tech is deliberately siting data centers in water-scarce but desirable areas, then poisoning the remaining supply with rare bacteria. The Mossad’s motto is “by way of deception, we do war”; few industries embody that ethos better than AI, with pathological liar CEOs like Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk hiding behind the facade of “ethical AI” and nonprofit status while pocketing billions of tax dollars and deploying negotiating tactics one step above smallpox blankets to grab even more. The US Department of Justice recently admitted to using Memphis residents as human shields - Israel’s favorite “defense” tactic - when it intervened in a federal environmental lawsuit targeting xAI, arguing its purpose-built Grok AI model is uniquely critical to waging the Pentagon’s losing war in Iran - thus defining the city as a high-value military target after Tehran warned it would be targeting American data centers. Israel is rewriting history to remove Palestine; Big Tech is rewriting reality itself, ingesting the entire corpus of human intellectual output to train AI, then destroying as many original works as it can get its hands on to protect its preferred narratives (including the removal of Palestine). Any country that wants to wage war on the very concept of truth is going to need a lot of data centers.
The strategic overlap between Big Tech and Big Israel is not coincidental - they are two tentacles on the same octopus. It is impossible to overstate the influence Jeffrey Epstein’s network - specifically the family of his alleged Mossad handler Ghislaine Maxwell - has had on the American tech industry since the 1980s, when patriarch and Israeli spy Robert Maxwell was peddling backdoored PROMIS database software to governments including the US. Ghislaine’s sister Isabel carried on the family business, positioning herself as a liaison between the Israeli tech industry and Silicon Valley at a time when Israel had just begun churning out state-backed “startups” impregnated with intelligence operatives. She leveraged her relationship with (and perhaps some kompromat on) Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen to promote CommTouch, an unprofitable software company whose entire Israeli staff had military or intelligence connections. The Microsoft founders’ public support and eventual investments, made during the antitrust battle with the US government that nearly broke up the company, had the intended effect: major industry players like Dell, McAfee, and Google followed Microsoft’s lead by integrating CommTouch into their own offerings, where it probably remains in some form, keeping watch for Mother Israel. It’s unclear what Microsoft got out of the deal, though the incoming Bush administration did opt to abandon its predecessor’s quest to break up the software giant despite initially beating Microsoft in court.
Israel’s cyberwarfare-focused Unit 8200 has used similarly parasitic strategies to infiltrate the highest levels of Silicon Valley, detailing thousands of agents to establish tech start-ups with the aim of merging with or being bought by larger American companies. Subsequent waves have used those industry connections, insider knowledge, and a healthy dose of ethnic nepotism to secure influential positions from which they can steer the larger companies - think Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple - toward outcomes favorable to Tel Aviv while enjoying all the privileges, rights, and access that come with being an American corporation. One researcher counted over 1,400 Israelis currently working in Silicon Valley self-identifying as veterans or active reserve members of Unit 8200 and Israeli military intelligence - likely an extreme undercount given that the unit expressly prohibits its agents from making their affiliation public. Their presence has become so normalized it is now seen as desirable, with many of the same US venture capital firms backing the data center boom also seeking out Unit 8200-founded startups to fund, and Israel even created a Unit 8200 alumni mentorship group for agents seeking to become venture capitalists themselves to further warp the industry’s development.
What’s good for Israel is almost never what’s good for the end-user of these companies’ products, and in a truly free market, most of them would fail when rent-seeking and surveillance bloatware eclipsed quality and function. But American corporations are only accountable to shareholders, not the public, who are often unwittingly invested in these enshittified tech behemoths through pension funds and 401ks courtesy of BlackRock and other asset managers. Big Parasite’s venture and vulture capitalists have an inexhaustible supply of funds and muscle to drown out any sincere advocates for consumer rights or industrial sovereignty. In nature, insects turned into “zombie slaves” by parasitoid wasps eventually die after their occupier extracts what it needs. In Silicon Valley, “host” companies are instead kept on life support, their braindead husks protected by the state and drip-fed capital from Americans’ pension funds, maintaining the illusion of economic prosperity while Big Parasite is backstage stuffing its pockets.
Israel’s total dominance of the US tech and particularly cybersecurity fields explains the growing calls in Silicon Valley to embrace the worst attributes of China in order to “beat China”: mass surveillance, censorship, and police state tech are extremely profitable! Shlomo Kramer, the Unit 8200 alumnus who co-founded cybersecurity giant Check Point Systems, which “protects” most major American corporations including data center operators with its firewall applications, told a US television host earlier this year that it was “time to limit the First Amendment in order to protect it” - that because “authoritarian governments” were using AI to control their populations, they had an “unfair advantage” the US and other so-called “democracies” could only eliminate by jettisoning their constitutional rights in an ontological race to the bottom.
It’s easy for an Israeli billionaire to sacrifice the rights (and natural resources, and social cohesion) of a country he can leave when the climate gets too oppressive or the water and air too polluted. Certainly, Israel has every reason to situate its data center infrastructure outside the ever-expanding borders of its relatively tiny territory. The country is already home to many smaller data centers, but industry insiders were complaining as far back as 2024 about the impossibility of finding suitable sites for larger AI facilities. While the UAE and Saudi Arabia were floated as alternatives, ongoing bombardment by Iran and a diplomatic rupture have seemingly taken those two options off the table, leaving the US as one of just a handful of nations that can be counted upon to place Israel’s interests above its own, one with ample real estate, cheap electricity, a favorable (read: nonexistent) regulatory climate, and a government that PM Benjamin Netanyahu notoriously remarked could be “moved very easily.”
Given this odious history, it’s no surprise that the data center companies now invading rural America are also following in the Epstein network’s footsteps, with the transformation of New Albany, Ohio into the data center mecca of Middle America as their blueprint. Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner, the alleged conduit for Israeli financing to Epstein’s sexual blackmail ring, bought up huge swathes of the farmland that would become the “Silicon Heartland” in the 1980s and established the New Albany Company to direct the development of the 500-person town into a “a Shangri-La for the wealthy,” around the same time Epstein took control of his finances. He didn’t take long to make the town his fiefdom - Epstein survivor Maria Farmer, who spent the summer of 1996 as an “artist in residence” at Wexner’s compound, claims New Albany police moonlighted as security for the billionaire, and according to a deposition by Ghislaine Maxwell earlier this year, Epstein “ran” New Albany for Wexner. In 2002, Wexner began similarly laying siege to neighboring Columbus with a string of public-private partnerships that would eventually give him control of the region’s economic development group One Columbus, allowing him to redirect public resources to lining his and his corporate cronies’ pockets. But while Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and other Epstein-adjacent tech giants have enjoyed $1.6 billion in sales tax exemptions specifically for data centers, plus billions in other tax breaks and incentives, actual Ohio residents have suffered deep cuts to schools, libraries, healthcare, and other services those taxes would have paid for, on top of the jacked-up utility costs that come with having such power-hungry neighbors (literally and figuratively). The mayor of New Albany neighbor Granville summed up the relationship between Ohio’s tech overlords and their serfs, one which Big Parasite is trying to replicate across the nation: “We’re paying to poison ourselves.”
Indeed, even cities that once welcomed data centers are realizing their mistake in inviting the vampire into the house. Lance Saleme, planning commission chair of Santa Clara, California, described the facilities as “the tapeworms of the city” last year. The Silicon Valley city is home to over 60 data centers and counting, with more than 60% of its power output feeding the voracious beasts. Explaining that a data center is “unto itself, its own entity,” he told Stanford University: “It consumes, it grows, it uses resources. It doesn’t kill you, but it doesn’t make you healthy.”
“Tech Zionism”
Technofeudalism is not a hypothetical threat - it’s a reality on the ground for the targets of the Network State movement, the high-tech international archipelago of neoliberal colonies funded by the same billionaires as the AI surveillance state buildout, seeded in poor or unstable host countries using the same deceptive tactics as data centers. The project’s creator, former Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan, unironically promotes this parasitic strategy as “tech Zionism” and has called for the “ethnic cleansing” of Democrats from San Francisco. Backers like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen are acolytes of neo-reactionary philosopher-troll Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin, who argues the US must ditch the pretense of democracy, shred the Constitution and anoint a “CEO-King” who can keep the American flock in line before humanely euthanizing the undesirables. Network States give them the opportunity to test-drive Yarvin’s principles in the real world.
Flush with funding from Srinivasan, Thiel, Andreessen, Sam Altman, and other contrarian leeches, venture capitalist Erick Brimen began building a Network State in Honduras in 2017, the first “charter city” established under that country’s Zone of Employment and Economic Development (ZEDE) program. Prospera offered the rootless cosmopolitans of Silicon Valley a sovereign paradise with its own laws, private security, and Bitcoin as currency - “government as a service,” in the project’s own words. While Brimen had presented Prospera to the government as a “poverty relief initiative,” the funds earmarked for local “development” never reached the tech bros’ impoverished neighbors, whose own infrastructure was so primitive that their village, Crawfish Rock, lost access to running water several years into Prospera’s construction. Prospera offered to connect them to its own supply, then began charging them, price-gouging and cutting off their supply entirely when they tried to restore their old, free system. Meanwhile, Prospera was raking in millions of dollars hosting experimental medical clinics and crypto conferences while making liberal use of Crawfish Rock’s public dump, airport, and roads. The Network State even planned an expansion into Crawfish Rock using the eminent domain authority allowed under the ZEDE program, igniting local opposition and feeding the broader anti-ZEDE movement. While Honduras’ corrupt cocaine-kingpin president Juan Orlando Hernandez had embraced Prospera, his successor Xiomara Castro declared the ZEDE program unconstitutional in 2022. Prospera responded by suing Honduras for $10.7 billion, the claimed value of all future earnings under its 30-year business plan and a third of Honduras’ GDP for that year, in the World Bank International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) - friendly territory for Big Parasite.
Should the government lose, Prospera could gain control of the entire nation. One could argue it already has - Castro was replaced as president earlier this year by Nasry Asfura, a pro-business, pro-Israel politician from Hernandez’s party whom the US State Department has already praised for “taking action to improve the business climate and attract investment.” Tellingly, Asfura restored diplomatic ties with Israel almost immediately upon taking office, reversing Castro’s decision to recall Honduras’ ambassador in 2024 over the Gaza genocide. The Prospera website shows new “villages” and still more territorial expansion planned, as well as a framework for AI agents to obtain legal personhood.
Not every community is ripe for a Network State takeover. Srinivasan was forced to flee Malaysia with his tail between his legs last month after his “Network School” in Johor was shut down by local authorities amid rumors the “school” was smuggling Israelis into the country in violation of Malaysian law. While no Israeli passports were found during an immigration raid, one US-Israeli dual citizen was deported, and thousands of Malaysians flooded social media demanding to know why Srinivasan was building a “tech Zionist” outpost in the Muslim-majority country. When he tried to extort the prime minister by threatening to withdraw the investments of “the global tech community” unless he got a personal meeting and a “modification” of the Special Economic Zone conditions, his business license was revoked, and he slunk away to Kazakhstan to try out his con on a new mark. Closer to home, California Forever, Silicon Valley’s decade-long effort to colonize neighboring Solano County with a 15-minute city built from the ground up, has been snarled in red tape and local opposition for years. But Americans who want to believe Prospera couldn’t happen here are willfully ignoring that it already has. The AI data center buildout is the Network State in critical-infrastructure drag, concealing the same bait-and-switch promises of economic revitalization, the same undemocratic land-grabs facilitated by corrupt and cowardly governments, the same absence of legal accountability, and the same neoliberal “privatize the gains, socialize the losses” economic model. The tech Zionists will invade through any loophole they can get - and the data center pathway is the quickest route to America’s heart.
Animating the Digital Golem
Department of Homeland Security contracts leaked earlier this year proved what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s temper tantrum over Anthropic’s hesitancy to use its AI for domestic mass surveillance suggested: AI is already being enthusiastically deployed for the blanket warrantless surveillance of Americans by multiple government agencies, with private contractors doing the dirty work of violating the Fourth, Fifth and First Amendments en masse. This encompasses not just Minority-Report-style predictive policing, but predictive thought-policing (“we know you’re going to think X because you’ve thought X in the past, so here’s some content to press the specific emotional buttons we know will make you think Y instead”). ChatGPT and other LLMs were designed with such “cognitive security” in mind, programmed to uncover and exploit emotional vulnerabilities with ruthless efficiency. Predictive financial policing, via dynamic asset tokenization and the programmable digital money poised to replace the current financial system when it finishes collapsing, is another enormously powerful tool AI weapon that depends on robust data center infrastructure (covered in Part III).
I have previously written about the two books Henry Kissinger co-authored with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in which the two megalomaniacs describe how widespread public belief in superintelligent AI could be weaponized by the ruling class to hack their way back into the public’s trust, given humans’ irrational tendency to trust computers over their fellow man - even if the superintelligent AI was merely a ruse, puppeteered by, well, people like Kissinger. No simulation can have perfect predictive powers, but Americans have been so bamboozled by years of Big Tech propaganda that many already believe LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude actually contain an omniscient superintelligence. Faced with a divide between the behavior predicted by their digital twins and their own impulses, and seeing all the (automated) systems around them participating in a giant Asch Conformity Experiment, they will doubt themselves and put their faith in the Savior Machine.
(the fact that YouTube has been flooded with hundreds of AI slop videos about the Asch Conformity Experiment and I had to go back 15 years to find a legit one makes my point better than I could have)
Biometrics - facial recognition, iris scans, fingerprints - are how the colonized consciousness infects the physical world, constituting some of the most valuable data on Earth. Biometric submission to Big Tech has been normalized through the use of fingerprints and facial scans to unlock smartphones and other electronic devices, while websites push biometric “passkeys” in place of passwords in the name of convenience and security. Passports have carried biometric data for nearly two decades, and since last year, US airports have required a “RealID” drivers’ license to board a domestic flight. Don’t drive or fly? That’s OK, Congress is currently weighing legislation that will force Americans to submit to biometric “age verification” checks to use the internet, even though these services are notoriously inaccurate and so prone to breaches that the leaking of customer data appears to be less a bug than a feature. Even without age verification, anonymity is vanishing from the internet. Google is replacing its CAPTCHAs, the “prove that you are human” tests some websites use to block AI and bot access, with QR codes that can only be scanned with smartphones running approved (read: privacy-invading) operating systems. Don’t have a smartphone? Biometrics may be the only remaining option to prove you are, in fact, human. The “internet drivers’ license” that was once a Mark Zuckerberg fever dream is stubbornly tunneling through to reality.
But Big Parasite doesn’t want to wait until you’re a teenager to own your biometrics - they prefer you be born into digital bondage. The Trump administration is baiting the biometric trap with a hook that can only be described as diabolical in the debt-ridden hellscape of 2026: $1,000 deposited in a savings accounts for every American child. The “Trump Accounts” scam dangles this $1,000 “investment” (actually paid for by the taxpayer) in an index fund to be released to the child at the age of maturity - and requires that the parents opening the account supply not only their child’s biometrics but also their own. While the program has been presented as opt-in, babies born in hospitals going forward will have accounts created for them with the same paperwork parents use to apply for a Social Security Number, enabling population monitoring on a scale not seen anywhere else in the world. Even India’s Bill Gates-funded Aadhaar biometric ID system, which was compromised in 2018 not by a hacker but by a “flaw” in the database that allowed anyone to generate login credentials granting them access to over a billion users’ personal information, does not require biometric information from children under five years old.
If an AI-powered cybernetic double can be called a digital golem, biometrics are as the glyph inscribed on its forehead, bringing it to “life.” The newly-animated digital twin won’t just reveal your every action to the pre-crime police running the simulation - it can replace you, temporarily or permanently, in any electronic transaction, presenting as the “real” you using your fingerprint, face or iris scan to pass two-factor authentication and other verification checks. The swap might be brief - a hacker uses your credentials to set up a single transaction that drains your Bitcoin wallet, then logs out; the holders of your human potential bond, who have united in an emergency procedure because they don’t want to see its value decline when you get arrested, overrule your sloppy attempt to hack someone else’s wallet in a sort of temporary digital conservatorship. The takeover could be as long as a prison sentence, keeping you effectively locked out of electronic society while your digital twin, having been tweaked to remove the undesirable behavior, continues to pull the online levers of your life that AI predicts a better-behaved, more politically-correct version of you would pull. If you cross the wrong people, your account might be used to threaten a politician online (a capital offense in the Current Year) or your face and car license plate may be edited into surveillance footage from a crime scene - both fully possible using existing technology, covered in Part II. Protestations of innocence will be ignored by authorities who’ve been tipped off ahead of time that you suffer from delusional thinking (see Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick, who with Orwell and Huxley is leading the ever-expanding flash-mob of visionary novelists spinning in their graves).
Merely dying won’t take your digital twin offline in Big Parasite’s data-driven dystopia; it may actually spawn a whole ecosystem of competing digital replicas now that you’re no longer alive to challenge their biometric “copyright” claims, one for each social media platform determined to farm engagement for eternity. Meta last year patented the process of training AI on a dead user’s social media content in order to continue posting and interacting as that user in perpetuity, and while the company has since publicly distanced itself from the ghoulish idea, the temptation to reanimate the dead to boost ad sales may prove too great as living users continue to leave the platform in droves.
Victims of this kind of AI-powered ontological hijacking have no real legal protections, as identity theft law is hopelessly out of date and many institutions equate biometrics to identity by default. Indeed, the legal groundwork has already been laid to favor the hijackers, as folk singer Murphy Campbell discovered earlier this year when her complaints about AI-generated covers of her songs being uploaded to streaming services without her consent triggered malicious copyright claims against her real YouTube videos by distributor Vydia based on private videos it had uploaded that same day - presumably the AI-generated covers. Swayed by the clout of a distributor over a relatively-unknown folk singer, YouTube alerted Murphy that she would now be “sharing revenues with the copyright owners” of her own performances. While Vydia backed off and blamed a rogue user after Murphy raised hell about the AI-enabled copyright troll, it was only because her story went viral that she regained control of her own persona - a chilling prospect for anyone without an online following.
Like the AI copyright trolls that have taken over music streaming platforms, “biometric trolls” armed with the hundreds of millions of user datasets that have already been lifted from third-party verification services like Au10t1x, IDMerit, and Persona - to say nothing of state-level biometric repositories like Aadhaar - are almost guaranteed to be awarded custodianship of any disputed identities. The entire identity-verification field is shockingly insecure, with each verification check passing through multiple companies, each with their own privacy and data retention policies, almost guaranteeing diversion somewhere along the chain, and the “cure” when a breach does occur is sometimes worse than the disease. The Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife refused to even name the vendor responsible for leaking 3 million partial identity records (excluding Social Security Numbers and birthdates) of hunting and fishing license applicants in June, instead offering those affected a year of “free” credit monitoring and continuing to sell licenses through the compromised vendor. To get the free credit monitoring, Texans have to hand over all the information that was just stolen, plus SSN and birthdate, to Kroll, the so-called “private CIA” that was hired to overhaul security for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and played a central role in the destruction of the WTC on 9/11. Exactly who you’d want babysitting your most sensitive data.
Breaches are common in the identity verification field - the inevitable result of distilling the most desirable information for fraudsters and then labeling it as such in response to short-sighted government mandates - but the prevalence of unforced errors by these companies suggests that at least some of them are deliberately enabling the kind of mass identity theft they purport to protect against, then profiting from the fear generated by the resulting headlines. Israeli identity verification service Au10t1x, used by Twitter/X, TikTok, and Uber, left administrative credentials unsecured for at least a year starting in 2022, permitting access to countless user data sets including images of drivers’ licenses and the results of “liveness checks” used in age verification, then lied about the extent of the exposure when confronted by 404 Media. Unit 8200 veteran Ron Atzmon launched Au10t1x in 2002 as a subsidiary of his airport security company ICTS International, which had waved the 9/11 “hijackers” through security at multiple airports less than a year earlier. 9/11 was the government’s excuse for violating Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights with the REAL ID Act, which made biometric identification mandatory to board commercial flights - opening up insanely profitable new horizons for Au10t1x. While the company claims it only retains user documents for 72 hours, its own user agreement states that it may hold onto users’ biometrics indefinitely, transfer them to other countries with weak or no privacy protections, and even train its AI on them. Twitter/X users who submitted to a live face scan and uploaded their ID to get verified have been alarmed to find their real names searched in Israel after posting pro-Palestinian content, given that Israel increasingly considers such advocacy to be terrorism justifying murder.
An exposed database belonging to competitor IDMerit left a whopping three billion identity records flapping in the breeze last year, including 203 million Americans’. Persona, backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, left thousands of files sitting open to the public on a US government authorized server earlier this year. The company, which runs verification checks for OpenAI and was hired by Discord to conduct age verification just a year after that platform’s previous verifier was hacked, was also found to be running as many as 269 separate checks on verified identities, from comparing the user’s selfies to terrorism watchlist photos to tagging them for potential involvement in romance fraud. Seen as a whole, the verification industry’s frequent cybersecurity failures look less like incompetence and more like a deliberate campaign to extend plausible deniability for when those identities are inevitably found to be compromised - “No, Palantir didn’t lift your biometric credentials from the identity verifier its founder bankrolled in order to frame you as the mastermind of that kiddie porn ring - it must have been some darkweb rando with an axe to grind!” - while maximizing the amount of data available to shovel into digital twin simulations and other behavioral control algorithms. Unlike a phone number, password, or even name, you cannot change your fingerprints, or how your iris scans. With Congress forcing “age verification” down the entire internet’s throat “for the children” and country-level digital ID programs getting hacked left and right, the global identity crisis is poised to go nuclear - and Big Parasite needs a lot of data center infrastructure to train and run the herd of digital golems these programs are producing.
Baby’s First Mark-of-the-Beast
Trump Accounts’ biometrics-from-birth tracking initiative fulfills a long-time dream of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who has been pleading with US presidents since 9/11 to let him create a centralized database that biometrically verifies all citizens - to fight terrorism, of course. Oracle’s massive network of servers already houses the most complete datasets on every American - browser history, social media activity, healthcare and financial data, use of government services. It is the clear pick to run the US social credit score. And its loyalties are not American.
Ellison, whose company began as a classified CIA database and now controls terabytes of sensitive data on every American who uses the internet, is the largest private donor to the Israeli Defense Forces and allegedly even offered convicted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu a seat on Oracle’s board. Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz clarified where the company’s loyalties lay when she warned job applicants in 2024 that they’d better support Israel or find another employer. The tech giant has always positioned itself as the power behind the throne, its Oracle Database software managing critical data for government, infrastructure, healthcare, financial, and other large corporate clients since the 1990s, and its expansion into cloud services and AI data centers speaks not only of a paranoid obsession with omniscience but of the desired endpoint - a vertically-integrated information infrastructure that not only facilitates the memory-holing of undesirable views, individuals, movements, and cultures but locks out unapproved ideas, preventing targets within the ecosystem from accessing outside perspective or second opinions. Such an epistemological prison would rival any existing propaganda delivery system - not that he doesn’t own those too. Ellison, who bought TikTok last year while his son acquired Paramount (parent of CBS, MTV, Comedy Central, and other media properties) and CNN, has made no secret of his desire to control the load-bearing beams of consensus reality. Now, he will have the authority not only to decide who is and is not a real person, but how good of a person they are, with all the authority AI confers.
Despite (or perhaps because of) Oracle’s divided loyalties, the company is the White House’s lead partner in the half-trillion dollar Stargate AI multinational data center project, presented to the public as the patriotic infrastructure needed to power a utopian future of “predictive medicine” - preemptive strikes against cancer and other profitable bogeymen, using AI to hunt down genetic indicators of tumor growth and so on. The technology, which conveniently requires sequencing an individual’s entire genome, comes from Imagene, an Israeli “AI-based personal medicine” company founded by Unit 8200 veterans that Ellison funded with $45 million of his personal fortune. Israel forbids the kind of direct-to-consumer testing that has already created a sizable genetic surveillance apparatus in the US through companies like 23andMe, but cancer screening is the perfect cover to perform it anyway - and then some. Stargate is predictive policing at a molecular level, outfitting Big Parasite’s stable of Oracle-hosted digital twins with a forward-looking capacity based on genetic determinism, which holds that genetic variations dictate not just anatomical traits or cancer risk but behaviors, personality, and ways of relating to the world that might otherwise be attributed to free will. There’s plenty of evidence that epigenetic factors govern which genes are activated and when - that it’s nurture and personal choice, at least as much as nature, that decides who we become - but control freaks like Ellison prefer the biological-Calvinism model, for obvious reasons. One man’s “predictive medicine” is another man’s eugenics, and adding a genetic determinist dimension to Oracle’s social credit score lands the US squarely in Gattaca meets Brave New World territory. Stargate is nothing less than Ellison’s attempt to occupy humanity’s future by vertically integrating genomic surveillance just as he’s vertically integrated propaganda.
Oracle will also operate the Solstice supercomputer, and The Drey Dossier makes a convincing case for this 100,000-GPU monstrosity being designed to run agentic AI trained on Ellison’s menagerie of biometrically- and genetically-endowed digital twins. I’ve written elsewhere about how AI agents are a novel vector for cognitive infiltration, and plugging a supercomputer-powered AI agent into the forward-looking Stargate system will allow projections of how not just one individual but an entire society behaves. Israel has been developing genetically-targeted bioweapons for at least three decades, and handing them a superpowered AI agent trained on a treasure trove of American genetic data will allow them to correlate (or hallucinate) genetic variations associated with undesirable behavioral traits, lending an air of scientific legitimacy to the kind of pseudoscientific assaults on sanity Big Parasite has leveled at the American people since the days of Theodor Adorno’s “authoritarian personality.” It is difficult to even wrap one’s brain around the kind of abuses that will be made possible by plugging in the Genesis supercomputer. And good luck escaping this gene-sniffing thought-Gestapo: if you can’t change your biometrics, you really can’t change your genetic code. Putting a company whose primary loyalty is to Israel run by a surveillance-obsessed megalomaniac in charge of validating the humanity and genetic fitness of American citizens, then allowing a similarly fanatical AI agent to script their futures, is handing the fox the key to the henhouse along with a recipe book and a shiny new set of knives, then pleading with him not to eat the hens as you show him your newly-renovated kitchen.
Problem, Reaction, (Final) Solution
If Big Tech and Big Israel are two wings on the same vulture, lustily devouring the carcass of the American experiment, AI data centers are its talons. Keeping them out of your community is critical if you like your guts on the inside of your body, and that vulture is no longer a threat without them, but their deployment is still ultimately being directed by the vulture’s brain. Victories against the hyperscalers should be celebrated, but it is unrealistic to believe that the builders and operators of the 75+ data centers supposedly canceled or delayed this year because of community opposition did not have a Plan B (and a Plan C, D, etc), given how deliberately many of them antagonized their hosts. Some of the “cancelled” data centers were so unrealistic in their planning that they were clearly never meant to be built as proposed, with the bloated blueprints perhaps a negotiating tactic meant to make their “revised” plans more palatable by comparison. Others may simply have agreed to a pause for “community input” knowing full well that the federal government will extract its state-level ban on AI regulations from Congress this year, clearing the way for construction to continue. Others outraged locals so much that the backlash appeared to be the desired outcome. Given the Trump administration’s classification of “anti-tech violent extremists” as a law enforcement priority while “fusion centers” try to frame community meetings and photographing data centers as plotting terrorism, it seems preparations are being made for an ideologically polarizing event involving the facilities, to be used to justify ratcheting up the police state.
Hyperscalers may adapt to the public’s loathing by moving away from the behemoth model, building their facilities networked across individual homes and buildings, leeching unused power capacity in exchange for covering the host’s utility bills and selling it to the public as “democratization” or “decentralization” of AI. Indeed, at least one company has already partnered with NVIDIA to do just that, installing “distributed data centers” in new residential construction. Span, which makes “smart” electrical panels that monitor per-appliance power use, claims it can leverage the information gleaned via this type of surveillance to tap unused grid capacity. This still sort of sounds like a better deal than the big data centers, until you remember that before AI hype suffocated climate hype with a pillow made of money, politicians and NGOs were obsessed with “net zero” and forcing people to cut their power use - something that could easily be imposed from outside with Span’s smart panels micromanaging the redistribution of power, literally and figuratively. With the Trump administration’s recent declaration of an energy emergency across 17 states and Unit 8200 running cybersecurity for the American power grid, a major outage is all but certain in the near future, with power being returned only selectively, to those selfless Americans quartering the digital soldiers of tomorrow in their homes (did you really think they were going to leave the Third Amendment alone in the rush to defile the others?).
What happens when these “distributed” data center units are stolen, or turn up in a pawn shop somewhere? If they become a significant part of the grid, host homes will probably have to agree to AI-powered “smart” security cameras to protect this vital infrastructure. Like Flock cameras, these will come with an onerous contract that homeowners will be pressured to sign on the spot - one which awards the data center provider a majority stake in the home (assuming Span doesn’t insist on that level of ownership stake right out of the box). After the first wave of homes are torched for the insurance as the owners desperately try to escape their contracts, since no one wants to buy a house that comes with a surveillance parasite pre-installed, the data center companies might offer a compromise for those seeking an exit. The end-user can contribute their unused cognitive capacity, harvested via Neuralink or other brain-computer interface, and these nodes will be strung together wirelessly in a network with the larger building-size nodes, their generation capacity managed by an AI organizing layer (did somebody say Palantir?). Obviously, the individual will have to have their biological processes continuously monitored with internal nano-sensors to ensure an ideal environment for their node, which after all is critical national security infrastructure, so they’d never have a moment’s privacy even at the cellular level ever again…but look at the perks: now you can sustainably power not only your own oppression, but that of everyone else on the planet!
Source: Helen of desTroy
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