Saturday, May 9, 2026
In 1972, a team of MIT researchers commissioned by the Club of Rome published "The Limits to Growth," using a computer model called World3 to simulate humanity's future on a finite planet.
The study examined five interconnected variables: population growth, industrial output, food production, nonrenewable resource depletion, and pollution.
Their "business as usual" scenario warned that unchecked exponential growth would lead to overshoot of Earth's carrying capacity, followed by a sharp decline in industrial capacity and population sometime in the mid-21st century, likely around 2040.
Recent analyses, including updates by Gaya Herrington in 2021 and recalibrations through 2023, show real-world data tracking this standard run closely. Resource extraction strains, environmental degradation, and economic pressures align with model predictions, indicating we remain on course for collapse unless systemic changes occur.
The report emphasized that technology alone cannot indefinitely overcome limits; deliberate shifts toward sustainability, reduced consumption, and equitable development are essential to stabilize society.
Without action, the coming decades risk cascading failures in supply chains, food systems, and social stability as growth reverses. This prescient work underscores the urgency of reimagining progress within planetary boundaries before tipping points become irreversible.
"Dear Justice Roberts,
"It has come to my attention through your various media appearances that your feelings are hurt — that people view you and your Court as political actors, which you insist is not an accurate understanding of what the Court does.
"So let me resolve the confusion: the misunderstanding is yours, not ours.
"People believe your Court is political because it is and acts so in plain view of the nation.
"You unleash unlimited corporate money into elections by inventing constitutional protections for concentrated wealth. You dismantle voting protections while dining with the very political movement that benefits from their destruction. You expand presidential immunity in ways conveniently favorable to a corrupt executive you have rewarded with extraordinary deference, 90% deference. And then you perform public astonishment when Americans recognize your pattern.
"Your Court did not merely 'interpret' the Constitution. It selectively hollowed it out whenever democratic participation threatened entrenched power.
"Citizens United accelerated America’s transformation into an oligarchy where billionaires and corporations wield more political influence than millions of citizens combined. Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act, after which states moved with remarkable speed to burden the very voters the Act was designed to protect. The immunity ruling signaled that sufficient power can place a president beyond meaningful accountability.
"Then you publicly mourn the collapse of trust. What exactly did you think would happen?
"Legitimacy is not something a court grants itself while issuing ideologically convenient outcomes wrapped in constitutional language — when the public is fortunate enough to even receive a full opinion instead of another consequential ruling buried in the shadow docket.
"Legitimacy is earned through restraint, consistency, ethical seriousness, and fidelity to principle even when principle is inconvenient to power.
"This is precisely the credibility your Court squandered. We understand perfectly well what we have been watching. We all see you and your court and its role in what our nation has become.
"And we are furious — not because we are too ignorant to understand constitutional law, but because we are capable of reading the Constitution you claim to defend- while watching this Court repeatedly twist it to serve its own ideological will.
"History will remember this era. And it will remember you and your Court- not as a guardian of constitutional democracy, but as a key institution that eroded it. That is already your legacy, so stop whining- you earned a nation's scorn."
The fight against AI datacenters isn’t just about tech – it’s about democracy
Claims of nimbyism are a misunderstanding: the movement is about whether regular people have a say in fundamental decisions
By Astra Taylor and Saul Levin
"Since the surreal scene at the 2024 presidential inauguration, when a row of big tech titans took their VIP seats and signaled their new alliance with Maga, the Trump administration has rolled out the red carpet for Silicon Valley’s AI ambitions and shareholder priorities.
Washington has doled out billions in lucrative federal subsidies and contracts to the cash-rich sector, bloating an AI bubble that experts warn may imperil the entire economy while prohibiting any guardrails on the fast-moving technology.
Fortunately for all of us, an unlikely and unruly coalition has emerged to resist the AI takeover by taking aim at the industry’s core infrastructure. In 2025, about 48 datacenter projects worth an estimated $156bn were blocked or stalled by local opposition. By all measures, 2026 is shaping up to be an even bigger year for the AI resistance.
In our view, that’s a good thing. But as the anti-datacenter movement has grown, it’s come under fire from all sides, including from liberal critics who dismiss it as another privileged form of nimby (not in my backyard) politics with naive demands. A New York Times op-ed, for example, called the fight against datacenters a “myopic” “distraction” from the “real fight”. In truth, anti-datacenter organizing is the real fight, one centered on an industry choke point that people can reach out and touch. This brewing populist resistance isn’t just about limiting local development – it represents a critical new front in the fight against tech-enabled authoritarianism. Where else can people push back on job-eating algorithms, distorting deep fakes, and autonomous drone strikes?
From rural North Carolina to suburban Virginia to the foothills and farmlands of New Mexico and Oregon, ordinary people are coming together across partisan divides to say no to a status quo that allows tech lobbyists to ram through datacenter deals at a breathtaking clip, often behind a veil of secrecy enforced by NDAs. In deep red Indiana, more than 10 counties have enacted moratoriums or temporary bans on new AI datacenters; the Seminole Nation in Oklahoma recently passed a moratorium for their territory; and across New Jersey, project after project has been cancelled due to local fury about the raw deals on offer.
And yet instead of lending their support to the cause, people who should be allies are using their platforms to issue misguided critiques.
Consider a recent piece in Jacobin by the academic Holly Buck, which painted the anti-datacenter movement as an elitist “dead end” that will only succeed in denying poor people the benefits of AI tools. Though published in a leading socialist magazine, Buck’s article sounded remarkably like a recent Washington Post op-ed by two executives from the Trump-aligned surveillance technology giant Palantir, which argued that slowing down or stopping datacenters would only hurt the working class: “The surest way to guarantee that artificial intelligence becomes a tool of the wealthy elite is to block the infrastructure that would make it cheap for everyone else.”
These kinds of arguments are becoming distressingly commonplace despite their shaky and condescending logic. Fundamentally, liberal criticisms of the anti-datacenter movement reflect a lack of understanding about how these fights are playing out and how grassroots organizing and power-building works. (Meanwhile, if Palantir’s leadership actually cared about economic justice, they wouldn’t be advocating for a technology their CEO believes will unleash “deep societal upheavals”.)
Buck, for one, says she wants to see the development of AI that is democratically governed, but it is not clear how she would achieve that laudable goal. Today, companies like Meta, xAI and Blackstone have the ability to make backroom deals while their executives have a direct line to Trump and the money to influence politicians. Organizing to block datacenter construction is a way for regular people to ensure their objections and preferences are heard; disruptive protest is a form of leverage for people who lack wealth and political connections. In the words of the antitrust expert Zephyr Teachout: “If you want democratic governance of AI, block datacenters. Google’s not coming to any democratic table, not listening to any rules, without people showing force.”
Datacenters offer a strategic target in other ways. Like the internet, AI is everywhere and nowhere. Datacenters provide a physical place and focal point where people can show up and directly confront out-of-control and otherwise impossible-to-reach tech billionaires.
As such, they also provide unique opportunities for people to meet in real life and come together across otherwise insurmountable political divides. For critics like Buck, the movement’s ideological diversity is a weakness, since it means not everyone shares the same ultimate goals. But what’s striking to us is how much the participants agree on. As we’ve both seen firsthand in our organizing and reporting, the anti-datacenter movement centers on an array of shared concerns: crushing utility bills, unsustainable energy and water consumption, noise and light pollution, soil degradation, the lack of good local jobs (not to mention the prospect of a society-wide job apocalypse), and unchecked corporate power – in addition to all of the socially problematic uses of generative AI, from the bots angling to undress teenagers to the slop choking our social media feeds.
This plethora of ills represent the downsides that aren’t communicated when developers come to town, and that too many politicians remain reluctant to face. Farmers turning down millions for their land is less surprising when you consider the threats posed to the places they call home.
While some dismiss this as nimbyism, local fights help create conditions that are far more conducive to broader reforms, including basic AI controls. Most people aren’t enthusiastic about the bot-filled privacy-invading world Silicon Valley seems hellbent on building, and poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans want the industry to be regulated. Right now, there are more rules on opening a salon or a burrito shop than an AI startup.
The anti-datacenter movement, which has popularized the call for pauses or moratoriums on datacenter development, is essential to amassing the political leverage required to implement popular and sensible safety measures. It’s a demand that plays hardball with an industry accustomed to steamrolling the public. The national moratorium bill recently introduced by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is explicitly designed to force AI regulation – the ban would lift as soon as laws were put in place that actually constrain datacenter harms.
Last month, Maine was the first state to pass a statewide moratorium on hyperscale datacenters. When one of us interviewed Representative Melanie Sachs, who introduced the legislation, she called it a “thoughtful, pragmatic approach to a very complicated issue” with “tentacles” that extend far beyond the communities targeted for development. The 18-month pause was intended to allow people to deliberate and make more informed decisions: “It’s saying, let’s get together, make sure our framework meets the moment and addresses all the things we care about.”
But before the pioneering bill became law, Governor Janet Mills issued a veto. Days later, Mills suspended her Senate primary campaign, in effect conceding the race to the populist Graham Platner, who supported the ban while calling it a “Band-Aid” and demanding stronger federal intervention.
Mills’s misstep should serve as a warning. Anyone paying attention to the political winds can see that AI is shaping up to be a key fault line in this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential race. Yet most politicians remain mealy-mouthed on the issue. Too many Democrats are afraid to alienate the tech industry, and the party lacks a clear moral vision capable of countering billionaire hype about “innovation” and fearmongering about competition with China.
As usual, ordinary people are ahead of their leaders. The remarkable organic growth of the datacenter resistance movement across geographies, economic interests and ideology reflects the myriad harms that come with AI infrastructure and growing anger at the tech elite. The tremendous energy unleashed by these fights, and their sensible and unifying demands, have the potential to form the foundations of a new and powerful populist coalition, one poised to help define a working-class agenda that meets this moment and resonates with disaffected voters. This excellent organizing should be cultivated rather than dismissed.
Given the movement’s rapid growth and early successes, it’s hardly surprising that the tech sector is fighting back, whether through concerted PR efforts, flooding elections with dark money, or even shadier tactics. At a 2025 datacenter industry conference, according to an attender’s report, panelists suggested a range of methods to suppress local dissent including using shell companies to prevent scrutiny, buying off neighbors near proposed sites, collaborating with local officials to “relegate protesters in out-of-sight staging areas”, and providing youth programming “to normalize datacenters in adjacent communities”. One speaker, the attender wrote, even “described applying counterinsurgency tactics he learned in active duty military service, like going undercover in bars and churches to gauge a community’s potential for resistance to a data center development”.
With enemies like this, it’s galling to see liberals and leftists piling on with takes about how directly affected people should engage (through supposedly proper and effective political channels that always remain undefined). The anti-datacenter movement offers progressives who want to move the political needle an unprecedented opportunity to meet people where they are, listen to what people really want and need, and help nurture a grassroots alternative to the tech-fascist alliance. It’s an opportunity to support up-and-coming organizers as they grow their fights to resist runaway AI and the broader corporate stranglehold on our economy. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to win the goodwill of communities that have understandably lost faith in politics and don’t trust either party, especially on AI.
The anti-datacenter movement, in other words, isn’t just about the future of a novel technology. It’s about the future of democracy. It’s about who controls the economy and whether regular people have a say in the decisions that affect them. Given how we’ve all been denied a voice in this technological upheaval, everyone should be cheering the movement on. Or better yet, joining the fight.
Astra Taylor is a writer, organizer and documentary maker and a co-founder of the Debt Collective. Saul Levin is a community organizer and the host of The Hum podcast"
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Recent months have witnessed a sharp escalation in violent incidents targeting technology leaders, AI infrastructure, and policymakers who support these industries. These attacks have raised urgent questions about the underlying tensions driving such violence.
In April 2026, multiple high-profile incidents occurred. A man threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's San Francisco home, leading to attempted murder charges. Separately, two individuals were arrested for firing shots at Altman's residence. An Indianapolis city council member supporting a data center project had his home shot at, with more than a dozen bullets fired. A warehouse fire at a Kimberly-Clark distribution center in Ontario, California caused hundreds of millions in damages, with an employee arrested for arson after publicly citing low wages and poor working conditions.
Research from George Washington University documents how data centers and AI infrastructure have become targets for individuals motivated by anti-tech, anti-government, and pro-environment narratives. While these acts of violence are criminal and indefensible, they coincide with genuine public concerns about economic inequality, rising living costs, and housing affordability that affect millions of Americans.
The incidents reflect deeper societal tensions. Many people experience stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, and limited economic mobility. Generation Z reports entering what they describe as a "starter economy" with scarce job opportunities and prohibitive housing prices. Inflation remains elevated while consumer confidence declines. These structural challenges create an environment where frustration and resentment can intensify.
Condemning violence unequivocally is essential—it cannot be justified regardless of underlying grievances. Simultaneously, addressing the root causes of economic hardship, inequality, and instability is crucial to preventing further escalation. A functioning democracy requires both the rule of law and responsive policies that address legitimate public concerns.
Source: Washington Post. (2026). Suspect charged in attack on OpenAI CEO's home. CBS News. (2026). Shots fired into Indianapolis city-county councilor's home. FOX News. (2026). Warehouse arson suspect pleads not guilty in $500M Kimberly-Clark fire.
Friday, May 8, 2026
Europe’s Debate Over Lab-Grown Meat Intensifies 
A major food and policy debate has emerged in Europe after Italy and Hungary officially moved to ban the production and sale of lab-grown meat within their countries. 
The decision has attracted worldwide attention because cultured meat technology has been supported and invested in by several global business figures and technology-focused organizations, including ventures linked to Bill Gates. 
The bans have now reignited broader discussions about food security, agriculture, public health, environmental sustainability, and the future of farming in modern societies. 
The decision has attracted worldwide attention because cultured meat technology has been supported and invested in by several global business figures and technology-focused organizations, including ventures linked to Bill Gates. The bans have now reignited broader discussions about food security, agriculture, public health, environmental sustainability, and the future of farming in modern societies. Supporters of the bans argue that traditional agriculture, livestock farming, and natural food production are deeply connected to national culture, rural economies, and food identity. 
Leaders in Italy and Hungary have emphasized protecting farmers, local food traditions, and conventional agricultural industries from what they describe as artificial or highly industrialized food systems. Many supporters also express concerns about long-term health effects, regulatory oversight, and the growing influence of multinational corporations in food production. 
Leaders in Italy and Hungary have emphasized protecting farmers, local food traditions, and conventional agricultural industries from what they describe as artificial or highly industrialized food systems. Many supporters also express concerns about long-term health effects, regulatory oversight, and the growing influence of multinational corporations in food production. At the same time, supporters of lab-grown meat believe the technology could help address major global challenges such as climate change, animal welfare, land use, and rising food demand. 
Scientists and food technology experts argue that cultured meat may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower pressure on natural resources, and provide alternative protein sources for future populations. Some environmental groups therefore view restrictions on lab-grown meat as resistance to innovation and sustainable food research. 
Scientists and food technology experts argue that cultured meat may reduce greenhouse gas emissions, lower pressure on natural resources, and provide alternative protein sources for future populations. Some environmental groups therefore view restrictions on lab-grown meat as resistance to innovation and sustainable food research. The issue has quickly evolved into more than just a debate about food. It now reflects larger global conversations involving technology, tradition, environmental policy, consumer choice, and the future direction of agriculture. Across Europe and beyond, governments continue to face difficult questions about how to balance scientific innovation with cultural values and public trust.
Across Europe and beyond, governments continue to face difficult questions about how to balance scientific innovation with cultural values and public trust.Whether people support or oppose lab-grown meat, the debate clearly shows how rapidly changing technology is reshaping discussions around food, farming, and the future of global society. 
THEY BROKE YOUR TRUST ON PURPOSE. NOW THEY’RE COUNTING ON IT.
By Lumbee News Network
We know it’s long. We know your thumb wants to scroll. Read every word anyway. The dots only connect if you let them._____________________________________________
COVID didn’t just “kill” people.
It killed the public’s ability to respond to the next one.
And that may have been the point.
Think about what five years of institutional lying actually produced. Masks don’t work — wait, masks are mandatory. Two weeks to flatten the curve — wait, two years. Vaccines prevent transmission — wait, no they don’t, but you’re fired if you don’t take one.
Lab leak is a conspiracy theory — wait, the CIA now says it probably wasn’t.
They didn’t just get it wrong. They punished people for asking the right questions. They suppressed data.
They changed definitions mid-pandemic. They called dissent dangerous while the dangerous ones were running the models.
The result: a population so exhausted and so burned by institutional manipulation that millions of
Americans now cannot tell the difference between a genuine warning and the next round of fear-based control.
That is not an accident. That is an outcome.
_____________________________________________
Now. Let’s talk about the men who built it and where they are today.
Anthony Fauci — the face of the American pandemic response, the man who told the Senate under oath that U.S. taxpayer money did not fund gain-of-function research in Wuhan — walks free. His aide, David Morens, was just indicted for conspiring to conceal communications about COVID’s origins and destroy federal records. Fauci himself was preemptively pardoned by Joe Biden before leaving office. You don’t pardon innocent men.
Trump campaigned on prosecuting Fauci. The DOJ got his aide.
Fauci got brunch.
And here is where it gets uncomfortable for everyone.
The man who campaigned hardest on COVID accountability — on Fauci, on mandates, on the deep state — is the same man who personally launched Operation Warp Speed. The fastest vaccine deployment in human history. Authorized under his signature. Celebrated at his podiums. Bill Gates himself credited Trump’s leadership for getting it out quickly.
Trump ran against the outcome he created. And it worked.
But here’s what nobody is talking about this week, as hantavirus spreads from the South Atlantic to Georgia:
Pfizer’s own confidential document — Document 5.3.6, submitted to the FDA, released only after a federal court ordered it — contains an official list of Adverse Events of Special Interest that the company committed to actively monitor after Emergency Use Authorization. Conditions plausible enough to require ongoing surveillance.
Hantavirus pulmonary infection is on that list.
Page 33. Appendix 1. Their document. Their words. Federal case number FDA-CBER-2021-5683.
And United States Patent 5,614,193 — filed 1994, granted 1997 — is a hantavirus vaccine. The assignee is The United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Army.
The military has held a patent on a hantavirus vaccine for thirty years.
We are not telling you what any of this means. We are telling you it all exists — simultaneously — in the same week a hantavirus outbreak is crossing continents.
The full documented analysis — every connection, every contract, every date — is on Substack.
Because some stories are too important to fit in a Facebook post.
Bill Gates — who has publicly warned, on record, that the next pandemic “could be far more severe” than COVID and that the world is “absolutely not” ready for it — has visited the Trump White House multiple times since the election. He sat next to Melania at a September 2025 tech dinner and praised Trump for his “incredible leadership.” This is the same man who donated $50 million to Kamala Harris. The same man who co-architected global COVID vaccine policy. Dining with the president who said he’d dismantle everything Gates helped build.
And Donald Trump — the self-described destroyer of the deep state — signed an executive order on Day One of his second term authorizing government access to every unclassified federal agency database in existence. DOGE — staffed heavily by former employees of Palantir and companies funded by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel — proceeded to merge IRS data, Social Security data, immigration records, and voter data into a consolidated surveillance infrastructure. Palantir’s federal contracts nearly doubled in 2025, hitting $970 million. Their stock surged over 200% from the day before Trump was elected.
The swamp didn’t get drained. It got digitized. And Palantir holds the contract.
_____________________________________________
Now enter a cruise ship called the MV Hondius. A confirmed hantavirus outbreak. A rare strain that transmits between humans. Three dead before the public was told anything. Forty passengers quietly let off at a remote Atlantic island before the outbreak was even declared — scattering to Georgia, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands. Surveillance aircraft, hazmat suits, international contact tracing across multiple continents.
And the WHO Director-General steps to a microphone to tell you the risk is low.
The Rockefeller Foundation published a document in 2010 — a real one, not a meme — describing a scenario called Lock Step: a world in which pandemic response becomes the justification for permanent authoritarian infrastructure. The document’s own words described top-down control intensifying after the crisis faded, not before.
We are not telling you what the MV Hondius is. We are telling you what was built before it arrived. A surveillance system controlled by a private company. A population conditioned to distrust every warning. A president dining with the people he promised to stop. And a man who has been predicting the next pandemic for a decade now on his third visit to the White House.
You were trained to stop listening. Someone was counting on that.
Follow Lumbee News Network — the full documented analysis is on Substack. The architecture existed before the outbreak. We mapped it.
© 2026 Lumbee News Network — Independent. Documented. Awake.
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The civil trial, taking place in San Francisco, pits two of tech’s most powerful egos against each other in a duel for control over the broader AI ecosystem. That being the case, it’s already devolved into a circus just days into the case, with the erratic Musk emerging as a key liability in his own proceedings.
During day three of the trial, Elon Musk struggled to present a confident front, which led to a number of unforced errors. One of his major blunders came when the billionaire claimed that “Tesla is not pursuing AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, the north star for American AI developers broadly defined as the point at which AI reaches human-level intelligence.
That might seem like a no-brainer — Tesla is an electric vehicle company, after all — but it stands in direct contradiction to Musk’s own comments not even two months earlier.
~
Futurism
THE BILLIONAIRE WHO DIVIDES THE WORLD
For decades, one name has repeatedly appeared behind political upheavals, media influence, financial speculation, and ideological movements across the globe.
George Soros.
To some, he is a philanthropist shaping modern society.
To others…
he represents the invisible hand of elite influence operating above governments themselves.
Under the surface emerges a disturbing pattern:
massive funding networks tied to political campaigns, activist organizations, migration policies, economic interventions, and global narratives capable of reshaping entire nations.
The public sees humanitarian language.
But critics argue the real objective is control through destabilization.
Economic pressure.
Social division.
Cultural conflict.
Financial dependency.
Because modern power no longer needs tanks in the streets.
It operates through foundations, NGOs, media systems, and market influence invisible to the average citizen.
The deeper people investigate global financial networks…
the more they realize the world may not be controlled only by presidents and parliaments…
but by individuals wealthy enough to influence reality itself from the shadows.
And perhaps the most unsettling part is this:
most people will never know who truly funds the narratives shaping their perception of the world.
The Identity of the Perpetual Debtor 
By Anna Von Reitz
The British Crown Corporation(s) have been acting as the Perpetual Creditors and the Holy Roman Empire's Municipal Corporations have been acting as the Perpetual Debtors within the so-called Federal Reserve System.
This is convenient, because the British Monarch gets 40% of the profit from all the profiteering, graft, identity theft and commercial crime promoted by these organizations, and the Pope gets 60%.
This guarantees that the King gets his bit, plus operational expenses, and the Lion's share goes to the Holy Roman Empire.
And together, they control the bookkeeping.
As a result, the credit and the assets actually owed to the living people of this planet are never brought forward and balanced against the debt ledger.
This guarantees that the debt appears to grow exponentially and gives the Perps an excuse to charge interest on a non-existent debt, in addition to everything else they are chiseling out of the hapless victims of this fraud.
These thieves have been illegally, unlawfully, immorally soaking the American Public for $4.7 Trillion dollars worth of phony income taxes per year. And harassing, jailing, fining, and levying bank accounts of people and businesses that never owed these thugs a dime.
They've had lots of other concessions, too.
Property taxes. "Home" mortgages. Purloined copyrights to Proper Names. Child labor bonds. Securitization of living flesh (slavery).
Undisclosed enfranchisement (peonage). Utility charges. Licensing of occupations of common right. Marriage licensing. Land titles and descriptions. PKI bundling of individual intellectual property interests. All the "National Debts" and the interest on all the National Debts.
And it's all phony.
This does not count hidden income streams and slush funding hidden in "government" programs and investments and encumbrances.
This does not count a fiat currency system based on a debt note that is passed around endlessly, but only accounted for once.
This does not count a legalized rigged betting system based on court cases bonded as assets providing commissions to crooked judges.
This doesn't count a rigged commodity market.
This doesn't count a rigged bond market.
This doesn't count a rigged stock market.
The Perpetual Debtor was never competent to justify the credit extended to it, never owned what it claimed to own. And the Perpetual Creditor never paid for what the Debtor owed.
It was all phony, all based on identity theft and identity substitution.
Donald Trump represents the British Crown Corporation(s) -- the phony Perpetual Creditors who never paid for a thing, just soaked their Employers to pay for everything, then falsely claimed to be the Creditors themselves.
This is a story of identity theft, identity substitution frauds, and corporate wrong-doing on a vast scale.
But one thing is abundantly clear --- all the assets came from and belong to the living people of this planet, and all the credit, too.
We are not the debtors. We are the ultimate creditors.
~ Granna
Despite a massive campaign by some of the wealthiest companies in the world to push AI as the cure-all for society’s problems, regular working-class people remain resentful of the technology at best, and downright petrified at worst.
At a contentious county commission meeting in Box Elder, Utah, for example, sheriff’s deputies held irate community members back after three county commissioners rammed through a hyperscale data center backed by Canadian billionaire Kevin O’Leary. A growing number of younger workers, fearing life in a market economy in which their labor is made obsolete, are actively sabotaging AI in the workplace. A not insignificant number of concerned citizens have started ripping AI surveillance cameras out of their mountings.
Tech executives and AI experts, meanwhile, are stoked about the new technology. Corporate consultants no longer bite their tongues when they talk about devastating workplace austerity regimes, while tech executives like OpenAI’s Sam Altman brag that AI is upending the basic foundations of liberal democracy.
On the outside, it may seem obvious that the people building AI and the people simply living with it would see it from different angles. What’s less obvious, however, is the sheer scale of the disconnect. As a new report by Stanford University’s AI center argues, this perception gulf between everyday people worried about the future and giddy industry insiders is massive.
According to the study, nearly two-thirds of US adults expect AI to reduce the number of available jobs over the next two decades, while a huge number report concerns about AI’s effects on society’s cognitive abilities.
Academic researchers, tech industry insiders, and analysts, meanwhile, “report more optimism than the US public,” the report found. For example, a whopping 84 percent of “AI experts” surveyed expect positive impacts on medical care, compared to just 44 percent of regular US adults. For the economic impacts, 69 percent of experts expressed optimism, compared to just 21 percent of normal folks. (Intriguingly, there are a few things that the public and the AI insiders are collectively cynical about, like news media, personal relationships, and elections.)
While the Stanford study doesn’t try to explain the rift, there is a plausible explanation: the success of AI necessarily hinges on the creation of a permanent underclass, a massive social shift which tech insiders are all too aware of — indeed, some even publicly boast about it. And make no mistake, the tech bros understand the math: a bunch of unemployed peons with nothing means a tiny handful of people will get everything.
Whether we actually end up in this hellscape is hard to say. Currently, there’s little evidence that AI is actually capable of disenfranchising the world’s workers en masse — if there was, tech billionaires would certainly have thrown the switch by now.
Still, be very suspicious of anyone telling you the real battle lines are elsewhere. More than likely, they’ve got an AI startup they’re trying to sell you on.
~
Futurism
Since those salad days, its trajectory has never been quite the same. Sure, it’s maintained market share with a series of cynical acquisitions of would-be competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp, but Facebook’s feeds have been inexorably taken over by industrial-scale engagement bait and sleazy ads as users failed to stick around.
By 2026, after a failed pivot to the Metaverse — oh yeah, it changed its name to Meta back in 2021 — scrolling Facebook feels like an infinite timeline of AI slop, ads, and lazy misinformation, none of which the company seems to have an iota of interest in cleaning up.
Add it all up, and you start to wonder whether the behemoth venture has entered the long decline that eventually killed other former stars of the web like Yahoo and AOL. That’s the case that acclaimed investigative journalist Julia Angwin made today in the New York Times:
Meta’s earnings are starting to show the strain from years of growing consumer disaffection and reckless spending. The latest earnings, released on April 29, revealed a dip in user numbers for the first time since it started reporting these figures. And the slumping stock confirms what we have all known in our guts for a while: This is a company entering its zombie era.
Death is different on the internet. Lifeless companies like AOL and Yahoo are still technically with us. You can visit their websites. They have customers. They may even be profitable, as they cut staff and monetize their last remnants of traffic. But they are, as the kids say, peak cringe. Many teens wouldn’t be caught dead with an AOL account, a Yahoo email address — or a Facebook profile.
If she’s right, it’s hard to imagine that this death spiral will cause any human on Earth quite as much suffering as Zuckerberg, who got a little taste of true cultural clout during those golden years after he dropped out of Harvard and, for the one stretch in his life, was the head of something genuinely cool.
He’s trying, of course. Ever since his pivot to VR failed, he’s been practically setting money on fire to try to establish dominance in the red-hot AI space — but so far his efforts have lagged far behind the competition and the only real tangible effects are that Facebook’s feeds are more clogged with garbage than ever before.
~
Futurism
Ted Cruz just handed Democrats a gift, standing in front of a room full of billionaires, he admitted on camera that Trump Accounts are a backdoor scheme to dismantle Social Security.
At the Milken Institute conference in Beverly Hills this week, Cruz called Trump Accounts, the baby savings accounts created under last year's GOP budget law, "Social Security personal accounts," then added: "Here's the dirty little secret: Trump accounts are Social Security personal accounts."
This wasn't a slip.
Cruz spelled out the endgame: once kids grow up with these accounts, Republicans pitch parents on diverting their payroll taxes, the money that funds YOUR current Social Security into private Wall Street investment accounts instead.
His prediction: within five years, that becomes a "really compelling constituency."
Cruz isn't the first to brag about it. At a Breitbart forum last summer, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent described the accounts as "a back door for privatizing Social Security."
And while Republicans were telling the public these were just cute little baby bonds, Axios reports the idea of replacing or augmenting Social Security with Trump Accounts has been discussed behind closed doors with lawmakers for some time, they just didn't want to "touch the third rail" publicly.
Now they're not bothering to hide it.
The strategy is two-pronged: build up Trump Accounts with one hand, and gut the Social Security Administration with the other, so when the agency collapses under DOGE cuts, they can point at the wreckage and say "look how broken it is."
Polling shows just 15% of Americans support privatizing Social Security. The other 85% better start paying attention.
They've been plotting this for 50 years. Cruz just told you exactly how they plan to finally pull it off.
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