No kings, no data centers, no war.
Tycoons, tyranny, war, the tech industry, the fossil fuel industry, data centers, tech feudalism, and the network state, are all part of the same problem.
https://chloehumbert.substack.com/p/no-kings-no-data-centers-no-war
It’s all the same picture and it’s dangerous to downgrade it in your mind.
Larry Ellison once predicted ‘citizens will be on their best behavior’ amid constant recording. Now his company will pay a key role in social media Jason Ma September 28, 2025 FORTUNE A year ago, Oracle cofounder and chairman Larry Ellison described a future where everyone, including law enforcement, will face regular surveillance as daily life is documented seemingly nonstop. At Oracle’s financial analyst meeting last September, he predicted artificial intelligence will help process the vast amounts of footage recorded by cameras placed on everything from car dashboards and front doors to security systems and cops. “We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” (emphasis added)
All our data is being taken and then sold, right down to physical addresses matched to mental health diagnosis and sold hidden behind NDAs.
You’re Being Watched: The Company Behind America’s Mass Surveillance Takeover Jessica (Ka) Burbank Aug 11, 2025 (documentary) “Police officers know if you follow someone in a car for a couple of miles, the likelihood is you’ll be able to pull them over for something. What we’re doing here is we’re creating that database so that we can always do that for anyone. That you’re constantly tracking people’s movements. um you have that system in place so that you don’t need to articulate the suspicion before you’re gathering data on someone, before you’re actually trying to tag someone with wrongdoing. When you have that system there, all someone has to do is say, “I don’t like that person.” And then you’ve got that surveillance already established.” (...) “this is a real fear and the fact that we’re installing this stuff means that we’re extending that mechanism even if we think it will be used right that database is being fed and as we all know um database data escapes into the wild when you have hackers especially when it’s in private hands. These private institutions use the data for their own purposes which may not be parallel to what the government wants.” (emphasis added)
Mostly nobody likes the idea of living in a panopticon, much less one controlled by mistake-prone AI surveillance systems that facilitating hassling innocent people.
Futurism - 11.15.23, 12:05 PM EST by Victor Tangermann Sam Altman Seems to Imply That OpenAI Is Building God Is that what AGI is going to be? And Altman isn’t the only one invoking the language of a God-like AI in the sky. “We’re creating God,” an AI engineer working on large language models told Vanity Fair in September. “We’re creating conscious machines.” In April, Tesla CEO and OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk — who recently launched his own AI chatbot called Grok, despite warning about the possibility of an evil AI outsmarting humans and taking over the world for many years — told Fox News that Google founder Larry Page “wanted a sort of digital super-intelligence” which would eventually become “basically a digital god, if you will, as soon as possible.” (emphasis added)
These hyperscale data centers, which the people pushing these articulate that the industry players are looking for sizable properties… these data centers are not needed for your photoroll phone backups, or for all our online shopping, it’s not needed for streaming youtube or movies, and it’s not needed for the world’s banking systems. All of that could fit in much smaller facilities for internet connected computer servers that could be scattered around non-consolidated, and frankly more resilient. These big data centers they are for AI and the tech industry articulates that plainly, even if bought-in data center pilled politicians are trying to guilt you into thinking because you use the internet or have a smartphone, that you have to accept these data centers. It’s a BS PR talking point. Especially since many of these data centers sometimes only exist to print cryptocurrency to enrich the owners and their investors..
Pennsylvania Capital-Star Microsoft describes Three Mile Island plant as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity By: Peter Hall and John Cole - June 25, 2025 7:32 pm Bobby Hollis, vice president of energy for Microsoft, said the Crane center is a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring nuclear energy online with the speed needed to match the growth of artificial intelligence. (emphasis added)
It’s not just Three Mile Island, and all the dubious stuff involved in Pennsylvania politics, they were planning in secret, likely behind Nondisclosure Agreements, to put a nuclear reactor just outside of Scranton Pennsylvania.
AI companies are trying to build god. Shouldn’t they get our permission first? The public did not consent to artificial general intelligence. by Sigal Samuel Oct 11, 2024, 8:30 AM EDT Vox Some claim that this simple fact — we’re using the AI! — proves that people consent to what the major companies are doing. This is a common claim, but I think it’s very misleading. Our use of an AI system is not tantamount to consent. By “consent” we typically mean informed consent, not consent born of ignorance or coercion. Much of the public is not informed about the true costs and benefits of these systems. How many people are aware, for instance, that generative AI sucks up so much energy that companies like Google and Microsoft are reneging on their climate pledges as a result? Plus, we all live in choice environments that coerce us into using technologies we’d rather avoid. Sometimes we “consent” to tech because we fear we’ll be at a professional disadvantage if we don’t use it. Think about social media. I would personally not be on X (formerly known as Twitter) if not for the fact that it’s seen as important for my job as a journalist. In a recent survey, many young people said they wish social media platforms were never invented, but given that these platforms do exist, they feel pressure to be on them. (emphasis added)
My grandma grew up in a coal patch settlement - a name for what’s otherwise known as a company town that the coal mine industry companies owned and operated and controlled the entire village where the employees and their families lived. People typically had no other real choices.
Network State Unveils Push for Corporate Dystopia Cities Gil Duran 08 Mar 2025 The Nerd Reich From Caroline Haskins and Vittoria Elliott at Wired: “Several groups representing “startup nations”—tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located—are drafting Congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the US that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, WIRED has learned. According to interviews and presentations viewed by WIRED, the goal of these cities would be to have places where anti-aging clinical trials, nuclear reactor startups, and building construction can proceed without having to get prior approval from agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.” Though the story makes no mention of the Network State movement, this push for legislation aligns fully with the Network State goal of creating “startup nations” or “charter cities” ruled by tech corporations. Trey Goff, chief of staff for Próspera – a Network State city in Honduras backed by Sam Altman, Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel – is featured prominently in the piece. (emphasis added)
These network state tech tycoons want power to rule everything and everyone. But also need lots of electricity power to create these automated systems, like their vision of “AGI” as a god, that they believe they can make with more and more clusters to make the LLMs bigger and bigger with more data.
Because they want to control everything, but they don’t actually want to do the hard work of governance, they just don’t want us ordinary people governing ourselves because that might mean regulations that might interfere with them doing whatever they want.
Eric Schmidt Full Controversial Interview on AI Revolution (Former Google CEO) Financial Wise Aug 18, 2024 Eric Schmidt: “I talked Sam Altman is a close friend he believes that it’s going to take about 300 billion maybe more I pointed out to him that I done the calculation on the amount of energy acquired and I and I then in the spirit of full disclosure went to the White House on Friday and told them that we need to become best friends with Canada because Canada has really nice people helped invent AI and lots of Hydra power because we as a country do not have enough power to do this the alternative is to have the Arabs fund it and I like the Arabs personally uh spent lots of time there right but they’re not going to adhere to our national security rules whereas Canada and the US are part of a triumvirate it where we all agree.” Erik Brynjolfsson: “so these 300 billion data centers, electricity starts becoming the scarce resource.” (emphasis added)
Those comments on annexing Canada.
80,000 Hours - #55 – Mark Lutter on trying to end poverty by founding well-governed ‘charter’ cities, ft Tamara Winter By Robert Wiblin and Keiran Harris · Published March 31st, 2019 So in Zambia, it’s a new city development. We are in early conversations with the largest urban developer in Africa, and they’ve expressed interest in turning some of their projects into a charter city. And so hopefully they decide to start taking meaningful steps at some point this year. And then we’re putting out a white paper looking at Venezuela with the assumption being that, okay, assuming this transfer of power does go through, they’re basically looking at what is a wholesale development plan, like rejuvenation plan for Venezuela. And they’d be willing to adopt ideas that otherwise they might not be willing to adopt. And if you can get charter cities to be part of the conversation, there’s about 3 million Venezuelan refugees, and most of them are going to move back to their previous residences, but some of them will not. So that offers the opportunity there. We have interests in a specific profile of a country, but the more definitive criteria is who is on the ground and how can they do that? Yeah, so I’m surprised you bring up Venezuela because I guess I was thinking, given the experience in these other countries, you might want to go to a country where there’s kind of a bipartisan consensus or bipartisan interest in pursuing this. And I’m guessing that So if you get, yeah, if Maduro gets removed and then someone else comes in who might be interested in this, that’s like a very fragile situation where easily you could like the reverse could happen and then you get kicked out. I actually don’t think that Venezuela is that fragile. I mean, now it obviously is. But my guess is, right, like if they form a new government, then I think there will be a reasonably rapid shift where within two years that government, so long as it can provide like some semblance of stability and economic prosperity. Right. Like Venezuela is pretty close to the bottom. So like, all right, no more hyperinflation. You don’t even need wage growth, just like money that depreciates 50 percent per year rather than like 500,000 percent. And my guess is that if you’re able to deliver that over a year, two years, you’ll basically have a new political consensus. So I think that that is at an inflection point where you could see that shift very substantially in terms of the outcomes. I mean, it’s still obviously risky. One, Maduro might stay in power, in which case our efforts are not going to go anywhere. (emphasis added)
Did somebody say Venezuela?
When people point out that big tech is in the war industry, this is literal and much more granular than most people seem to realize. And that’s because we have been trained to think social media is communication, when it only works to a certain extent. We need to spread the word individually to people we know, directly. And that’s because these connections are obscured by the media landscape which is of course all controlled and or manipulated by tyrannical industry interests and their automated algorithms are deliberately set up in particular ways that benefit them and not actual communication.
Gray Mirror - A conversation about monarchy “Now and for the foreseeable future, any election is either plenary or nugatory.” Mar 12, 2024 By Curtis Yarvin At most a week of Covid-style lockdown should be enough to secure the new regime—not only are the Americans of today, especially the blue-state ones, no Minutemen, but unlike most historical urban populations they do not even know how to be a mob. Today, civilian numbers are as irrelevant to contests of force as in the 13th century. 21st-century Americans are a civilized people. We do not chimp. Let’s go through some critical steps in a real 21st-century regime change. Here is what a real “unitary executive” would do if he was a real “dictator on the first day.” (emphasis added)
I’m pretty sure almost nobody voted for a lot of this stuff. Certainly a lot of people didn’t vote for more forever wars. But lots of people vote for things without fully understanding the implications.
This was written about the connection between democracy and AI 2 years ago:
Can Democracy Survive Artificial General Intelligence? Seth Lazar, Alex Pascal / Feb 13, 2024 Tech Policy Press From decades of work on automation, we know that in every domain, from manufacturing to algorithmic trading, automating a task and then relying on humans for oversight at critical moments is a doomed project. The goal of making future AGI systems ‘controllable’ cannot be achieved through technology design alone. For anything to be controllable, we have to presuppose something or someone doing the controlling. It is not enough to design systems that could in principle be controlled, but where we can reliably predict, based on past experience, that humans will fail to use the controls that we have designed for them. Nor is having some AGIs control others an adequate answer. For AGI to be safe for democracy, democratic institutions run by people must be able and expected to exercise meaningful control. This may well require rethinking the aging institutions of constitutional democracy itself—something that only we, the People, can legitimately do. Setting AI entirely aside, this year will prove for many democracies their sternest test yet, and may see more voters than ever before choose candidates who have explicitly promised an anti-democratic agenda. These developments show that we cannot take the value of democracy for granted—we can’t treat it as such a sacrosanct and shared ideal that nobody could ever credibly make an argument against it. Some might embrace the idea of replacing our messy, disputatious political systems with “efficient,” “impartial,” “optimizing” technocratic AGI rule. We do not. But let’s have that debate, and not underestimate the gravity of the choice we’re now making passively, by default. Otherwise in 2024 we might save democracy from the would-be autocrats, only to pave the way for AGI to deliver it an even more decisive blow. (emphasis added)
All of this stuff is connected.
