'Cookie stuffing': Did Bill Gates' daughter use an illegal trick that sent top tech execs to prison?



Bill Gates spent the 1990s acting like a corporate warlord, threatening any rival startup that dared to exist in the same ecosystem. Then, after nearly being torn apart by antitrust lawsuits, he hired a massive PR team to rebrand himself as the world's kindly, sweater-wearing grandfather who just wants to eradicate disease.

It was a shameless makeover, and many on the left eagerly bought in to it. Then came the stories about cozy dinners with Jeffrey Epstein long after his conviction for sex offenses. When asked about it, Gates gave answers so limp and evasive that they barely qualified as English.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence raises serious questions.

Now we turn to his daughter, Phoebe Gates. When it comes to deceptive tactics, the apple doesn’t appear to fall far from the tree.

The scandal at her shopping platform, Phia, is far from an isolated accident.

Phia is under scrutiny due to evidence suggesting that the platform allegedly utilized an illegal digital trick called cookie stuffing that sent top tech executives to federal prison over a decade ago. In a previous landmark federal fraud case involving deceptive tactics, eBay’s most lucrative marketing partners, Shawn Hogan and Brian Dunning, were convicted of federal wire fraud and landed behind bars after stealing over $33 million by secretly dropping tracking cookies onto millions of unsuspecting web users. Hogan alone pocketed tens of millions before federal prosecutors and the FBI dismantled the operation.

Phoebe Gates may ultimately face the exact same fate if found guilty in a court of law.

If misdeeds are proven, they may stand as the latest high-profile iteration of a multibillion-dollar digital scam that has preyed upon internet commerce for decades. Cookie stuffing involves sneaky companies secretly planting hidden tracking codes on your web browser to claim undeserved cash. Instead of creating tools that genuinely help consumers save money, these immoral operators hijack web traffic, diverting sales commissions from honest creators and straight into their own corporate bank accounts.

Understanding why this practice is so damaging and diabolical requires going a little deeper.

Stepping on the little guy

Niche bloggers, independent reviewers, and digital workers spend countless hours testing products, writing detailed advice, and guiding consumers to reliable goods. Yes, some are downright deceptive, but my focus here is on the decent ones.

When a reader clicks a link on a small creator's site and buys a product, that creator earns a modest commission. Digital tracking hijacking destroys that fair, free-market exchange. Software can secretly inject a tracking code into the customer's browser at checkout, as Phia is alleged to have done, overwriting the original creator's referral tag and snatching the payout. It functions as an invisible pickpocket standing at the store register, snatching commission payments right out of the hands of hardworking men and women.

The economic damage hits everyday consumers in their wallets. Major retail brands include affiliate commissions in their operating overhead costs. When millions of dollars are skimmed from the retail pipeline by parasitic browser extensions, store profit margins shrink. This forces companies to raise retail prices across the board to offset the losses. Think of a massive siphon system built to extract wealth from independent workers and concentrate it inside the portfolios of Silicon Valley’s privileged class.

That's hardly a fair marketplace.

RELATED: Mark Zuckerberg: No superintelligence, no liberal democracy

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When it comes to Phia, which did not respond to a request for comment, what renders the scenario even more disturbing is evidence that alleges to show there was early corporate awareness. According to a recent Bloomberg report, internal Slack messages seem to show that Phia’s leadership knew for months that its browser tool could claim commissions on sales it had not actually generated. This allowed Phia’s tracking code to attach itself to customer transactions after those shoppers had already been directed to merchant sites by outside sources.

The internal Slack records deal a blow to any hopes of a preemptive public defense strategy. They suggest this wasn’t a minor technical glitch discovered after launch, but a mechanism executives were discussing while aware of its effect on commission payouts.

Working the system

Unfortunately, the alleged strategy mirrors Gates' formal academic training at Stanford University. While enrolled on campus, she gained entry into "So You Think You Can Rule the World?" an exclusive, invitation-only seminar. According to investigative reports by the Stanford Daily, a select group of students met behind closed doors each week to analyze power structures. They studied institutional influence and how to work the system, lessons Ms. Gates could have learned from her father for free. The course focused on teaching students how to “hack” bureaucracies and navigate them to their own advantage. And people say elite universities don’t teach anything useful.

The contrast between classroom theory and real-world execution would be amusing if the stakes weren’t so serious. On one side was an academic course focused on understanding how power moves through institutions and how to manipulate them to get ahead. On the other side sit corporate chat logs that seem to capture Phia operators exploiting digital retail systems to claim revenue for sales the software never earned. This sort of privilege, merged with absolute arrogance, creates a predatory threat to ordinary Americans. Federal prosecutors must apply the law without bias and ensure that tech royalty faces the exact same justice system as everyone else.

Gates is innocent until proven guilty, but the evidence described above raises serious questions that are difficult to dismiss. If prosecutors ultimately establish knowing participation, real prison time is a serious possibility.

I’m a gamer and a parent. The KIDS Act makes my kids less safe.



I was lucky to grow up during the adolescence of the tech age. Sleepovers meant Super Smash Bros. with friends. The 2000s meant building free personal websites and poking around whatever new technology had just appeared. A lot of my formative experiences came from discovering what these tools could do.

Now I’m a young father, and I want my kids to have the same chance to enjoy technology’s creativity and connectivity.

The KIDS Act risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Of course, security was always part of the bargain. As technology has evolved, so have the vulnerabilities. But the KIDS Act approaches those risks with a sledgehammer — and may make children less safe in the process.

A basic cybersecurity principle is that services should collect as little data as possible — certainly no more than they can reasonably protect. The KIDS Act pushes in the opposite direction.

If gaming services and social media platforms must make legally consequential decisions based on a user’s age, more of them will need some way to verify it. That means more companies asking children and parents for sensitive information — and more databases that can be breached.

The risk is not merely that more data could leak. The data itself could become more sensitive. Liability concerns may be enough to incentivize some services to demand government-issued IDs, biometric information, or similarly intrusive identifiers.

We have already seen the danger of age-verification systems creating new troves of information. In the United Kingdom, a similar law helped drive broader age-checking requirements, and a later Discord data breach exposed identity documents held by a third-party verification provider. The point is not that every age check will produce a breach. It is that collecting information that was never needed before creates something new to steal.

The KIDS Act also sweeps very different online experiences into a one-size-fits-all framework. App-based games, console games, PC games, and social platforms do not expose children to the same kinds of interactions or risks.

Parents should be vigilant about how their children use all of them. But parents are better positioned than Congress to decide which spaces are appropriate for a particular child. When we hand that judgment to a clumsy legal framework, kids may either lose access to genuine social interaction or start bypassing the safeguards altogether — often ending up in less safe corners of the internet.

That matters because online connection is not fake connection.

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The lockdowns made this obvious. When governments shut down schools, workplaces, churches, and ordinary social life in 2020, millions of people turned to the internet because they had nowhere else to go. Friends used Zoom to play Dungeons and Dragons. Families bonded over Animal Crossing. For many, online spaces were not a replacement for real life so much as the only part of real life still available.

The lockdowns are over, but the lesson remains. Online communities can be frivolous, toxic, educational, creative, supportive, or all of those things at once — just like offline communities.

The harms of youth overexposure to social media are real. So are the benefits lawmakers risk sweeping away. People have used online communities to find life-changing information about rare medical conditions and to build what amounts to one of the largest educational ecosystems in the world.

The problem with the KIDS Act is not that Congress wants to protect children. Parents want that too. The problem is that the law treats more data collection and centralized rules as if they were synonymous with safety.

They are not.

As a parent who grew up online, I want my kids to have access to creativity, connection, and fun without turning their identities over to every service they use. My wife and I do not even post photos of our children online. Privacy is not an abstraction in our house.

Parents already have tools. Nintendo offers parental controls, and services such as Bark and Aura can help families manage devices and online activity without requiring the government to redesign the internet around age verification.

The KIDS Act pushes in the wrong direction. It risks placing more sensitive information in more places while flattening the very different ways children use technology.

Those of us fortunate enough to grow up with the opportunities the internet created should be careful about raising the digital ladder behind us — especially when the safety measure at the top may make the fall worse.

Water, watts, and workers: 3 persistent myths about AI and data centers



Artificial intelligence has become a national political issue and increasingly a local one. Communities across the country are fighting over the massive data centers needed to power the AI boom. Environmental groups warn about water consumption. Ratepayers worry about electricity bills. Workers fear the technology will undermine their livelihoods.

The backlash crosses ideological lines, and many of the concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But too often, the debate begins and ends with a terrifying number stripped of the context needed to understand it.

As AI advances, America will face difficult choices. The only way to make them intelligently is to start with the facts rather than with numbers selected for maximum panic.

There are genuine questions surrounding AI — privacy, surveillance, censorship, individual autonomy, and concentrated power among them. But three of the most common criticisms of AI and data centers are often overstated.

Claim 1: Data centers are consuming all our water

Stories about data-center water use often begin with numbers designed to shock. One project may use millions of gallons a day. Another state may be projected to consume billions of gallons annually. In a water-stressed community, those figures can absolutely matter.

But scale matters too. A 2026 analysis published by the Florida Water and Pollution Control Operators Association estimated that all U.S. data centers combined accounted for roughly 0.3% to 0.4% of total daily U.S. water withdrawals, based on 2021 figures.

Cooling methods also vary dramatically. Some facilities rely heavily on evaporative cooling. Closed-loop and air-cooled systems can use far less water. Location, water source, cooling design, and the condition of the surrounding system matter enormously.

Industrial comparisons help restore perspective. Data centers are hardly unique in consuming large volumes of water. U.S. golf courses use roughly 30 times as much water annually, while California almond production alone has been estimated at well over 100 times as much.

That does not mean a poorly located data center cannot strain a local supply. It means “millions of gallons” is not an argument by itself. The relevant question is whether a particular facility imposes a meaningful burden on a particular water system.

Claim 2: Data centers are consuming all our power

The electricity numbers are enormous too. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that U.S. data centers consumed about 200 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2025, roughly 4.7% of total national electricity consumption.

From there, critics often assume that more data-center demand must translate directly into higher household bills. The evidence is less straightforward. Some research suggests that recent data-center growth has had only a limited effect on retail rates, while broader inflation and energy-policy choices may explain more of the increase consumers have seen.

That does not mean new data centers are costless to the grid. Poor rate design can shift infrastructure costs onto ordinary customers, and badly planned projects can strain local capacity. But the obvious answer to rising demand is not simply to suppress demand. It is to build more abundant, reliable power.

RELATED: AI is coming for your job, your voice ... and your worldview

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The AI boom may be creating exactly that incentive. Amazon recently acquired an 8,000-acre site in Texas for a data-center project that could include up to 7.65 gigawatts of on-site natural-gas generation. Microsoft, meanwhile, signed a deal tied to the restart of Three Mile Island to supply roughly 835 megawatts of nuclear power.

America spent decades making it harder to build reliable energy. If AI demand helps reverse that habit, that is not obviously a national disaster. It may be the pressure needed to start building again.

Claim 3: AI is going to displace all our jobs

Of the three claims, job displacement deserves the most caution. I have written before about the real possibility that AI could eliminate certain jobs, especially entry-level positions. Long-term forecasts are difficult because nobody knows how capable these systems will become. Still, history gives us reason to distrust the most apocalyptic predictions.

In 2016, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton argued that people should stop training to become radiologists because machines would soon outperform humans at reading medical images. A decade later, radiology is hardly disappearing. Research shows the number of active U.S. radiologists rose over the past decade, salaries increased, and workloads expanded along with the use of medical imaging.

That may be an example of “Jevons paradox”: When technology makes a resource or service cheaper and more efficient, total demand can rise. A recent medical paper applied the idea directly to AI and physicians.

The same possibility applies beyond medicine. If AI makes a programmer five times more productive, it is tempting to assume the economy will need one-fifth as many programmers. But economies are not static. If software becomes dramatically cheaper to produce, businesses that could never afford custom software may suddenly buy it. New applications become economical. Entirely new product categories can emerge.

None of that guarantees that every displaced worker will land comfortably in a new job, or that every profession will grow. Technological change creates winners and losers. The point is narrower: Productivity gains do not translate mechanically into equivalent job losses.

RELATED: The next fight over freedom will run through AI models

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The concerns we should consider

None of this means AI is safe or harmless. The strongest concerns may simply be different from the ones dominating the headlines.

As AI becomes embedded throughout society, these systems could shape what information people see, how institutions make decisions, and how individuals interact with government and business. Massive data collection could strengthen surveillance. Ideological biases could be embedded in algorithms. Dependence on AI could weaken personal autonomy and concentrate decision-making power in governments and corporations.

Those questions deserve more attention than sensationalized claims about water, watts, and workers.

As AI advances, America will face difficult choices. The only way to make them intelligently is to start with the facts rather than with numbers selected for maximum panic.

The goal should be to preserve individual liberty, privacy, transparency, personal autonomy, and constitutional principles while allowing innovation to flourish. Exaggerating the easy concerns only makes the difficult ones harder to confront.

The Perils of Pausing AI

The biggest supporters and critics of artificial intelligence seem to have reached a consensus: AI companies need to stop pushing the technology's frontier until they understand how it will develop.

The post The Perils of Pausing AI appeared first on .

Google forced new restrictions onto Android. Big government wants even more.



Age verification legislation has been a hot topic lately, with many states and even federal lawmakers eyeing restrictions that would force users to turn over their IDs to access their smart devices. In an attempt to beat big government to the punch, Google just announced new age limits coming to Android.

Despite the hype, the measure doesn't have the protective powers its advocates claim.

On the other hand, Google's approach could be worse.

The worst news is, it won't satisfy big government, which will likely push for tighter restrictions still.

This isn’t a complete solution for people hoping their digital rights won’t be arbitrarily locked.

Age verification is coming to Android

In late July, Google announced that it is rolling out a way to provide “age-appropriate experiences” for Android users through the Google Play Age Signals API. The feature empowers app developers to add age-based restrictions to their applications. Then parents can go into their child’s phone and mark their child’s age in the device. If the child is a minor, apps that support the API will enable content restrictions accordingly.

The best part is that this solution doesn’t require an identification or biometric authorization from users. Instead, it relies on parental judgement, putting the power in parents’ hands to decide when to restrict their children’s devices instead of relying on government mandates and overreach. It’s exactly what we asked for back in May when we ripped apart the ironically named Parents Decide Act.

But is it enough to appease lawmakers?

Google’s saving grace won’t be enough for big government

Of course it isn’t, but there are some valid reasons why this isn’t a complete solution for people hoping their digital rights won’t be arbitrarily locked behind their state ID.

  • Fragmented support: The Google Play Age Signals API is optional for developers to add to their apps. As a result, there will be inevitable fragmentation, where some apps support the API while others do not. Without a consistent age-restricted experience across the entire Android platform, lawmakers will declare it to be insufficient and move forward with legislation.
  • Legal proof: Lawmakers have already expressed that self-declared age verification isn’t enough, as parents would effectively do with Google’s API. They need users to legally show proof of age, and right now, that is only possible through IDs.
  • Too little, too late: Age verification bills are already set in motion, with many of them being debated, refined, and set up for votes. Some have already gone into effect, leaving less wiggle room to pull the plug.

Google’s efforts to stop age verification legislation by giving power back to the people is a noble one, and it is worth commending. Unfortunately, the entire bill process is a bullet train barreling down the tracks with no way to stop.

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It is already in motion, and only lawmakers can stand in the way. That’s why it is important to know which bills are on the table in your area and contact your representatives to let them know what you think. If you value online freedom, privacy, and security, the choice is clear. Contrary to what you have been told, age verification bills do not make users safer.

When will the API be available?

The Google Play Age Signals API is currently being tested in Brazil. Next, it will come to Australia and Canada in mid-August. After that, it will roll out globally by the end of the year. Once available, it will appear in the Google Family Link app for Android, where parents can set it once and let the API control the apps that support it.

The Google Family Link app is compatible with devices running Android 7.0 and up, so older Android phones will inevitably be left out. However, since we’re currently on Android 17, all flagship phones, mid-tier handsets, and even low-end models released within the last decade will have access, making Android an easier platform for parents to control what their kids can see online without the need for heavy-handed legislation from the government up top.

Mark Zuckerberg wants AI to save America from itself



It hasn’t been an easy path for Mark Zuckerberg. However you keep score on his performance as a major figure in American life, he has survived attacks from the highest levels of government against his business, reputation, and livelihood. Few major figures in tech, with the possible exception of his longtime mentor, investor, and friend Peter Thiel, have endured quite the same treatment. Simply put, Zuck won’t quit.

That indestructible attitude has carried straight into AI. Amid criticism, naysaying, and ridicule, Zuckerberg has refused to concede the race to the leading hyperscalers. Now, as those frontier companies hit their own buzz saw of criticism, Zuck has dropped a long manifesto laying out his vision for America’s technological future and Meta’s place in it.

Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.

The most striking thing is not that Zuckerberg wants Meta to win. It is what he thinks victory requires. Despite years of periodic hostility from the U.S. government, he has positioned Meta as perhaps the most explicitly pro-American player in the AI industry. He is betting the farm on the proposition that America’s political principles — not merely its capital, engineers, or computing power — are what can carry us through the age of superintelligence.

That’s a gigantic wager, and it arrives at an awkward moment. Dissatisfaction with America’s actual system of government is near a breaking point. More Americans are asking whether the assumptions grounding the regime are viable any more — or even true.

Even many who still defend America’s founding principles believe the government we actually have has become corrupt, broken, and badly detached from them. The appetite for a “new founding,” on the left and the right, keeps growing. Yet the country is too divided and degraded for any ordinary political movement to break through to the other side.

That frustration is part of why so much American energy, ingenuity, money, and willpower have poured into the narrow goal of building the most powerful technology possible — something that may soon go far beyond what any individual human being can comprehend or control.

The irony is brutal. Technological prowess was once among America’s great sources of pride. Now millions of people increasingly experience it as a curse from hell rather than a blessing from God. They already feel reduced to peonage and stripped of agency by institutions they do not trust. And now tech, they fear, is preparing to sweep the refuse we have become into the trash.

Not so fast, says Zuck. His argument begins with a surprisingly old-fashioned insight: Human beings disagree. They struggle, suffer, compete, fear, and want incompatible things. No technical breakthrough abolishes politics because no technical breakthrough can reconcile every human value at once.

“There is no technological solution that can align with everyone’s opposing interests and values at once,” Zuckerberg writes. "Any singular superintelligence would have to prioritize some values over others." His answer is not perfect alignment but a balance of power — the same basic insight, he argues, that underlies Western democratic institutions.

That is why America’s humbler principles — dispersing power, allowing people to define their own goals, and trusting them to work things out for themselves — matter so much in Zuckerberg’s vision. Paradoxically, political humility produces personal ambition. It renews energy more reliably than any genius, planner, or guru could ever manufacture from above.

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If this sounds familiar, it should. Zuckerberg is singing from the hymnal of good old-fashioned liberal democracy. His wild idea is that machines powerful enough to transform human life beyond recognition are best developed by patriotic Americans who still believe liberal democracy is basically right about how human beings ought to live together.

And here is the problem.

If liberal democracy brought us to a point where the American government has largely expunged liberal-democratic habits from its own operation, how exactly are we supposed to encode those habits into superintelligence?

Do you believe your vote counts?

Do you believe legislative, executive, and judicial power are effectively separated?

Do you trust your fellow citizens to form judgments and pursue their own plans?

Do you think most of us still possess the maturity, education, thoughtfulness, and patriotism that self-government demands?

In other words: Do Americans still believe in liberal democracy strongly enough to teach it to machines?

That is where Zuckerberg’s argument becomes both elegant and unnerving. The same country that increasingly doubts its political order is now being asked to use that order as the operating principle for technologies more powerful than any previous institution.

Many Americans, meanwhile, are trapped between two impulses: burn it all down or run for the hills. Almost nobody has a plausible alternative regime that could actually work here, much less arrive through a peaceful and orderly transition. People feel bereft of political options, which is one reason the hunger for some higher, almost spiritual answer keeps growing.

The trouble is that whatever spirituality emanates from the upper reaches of the tech world often combines the creepiest and least American aspects of the hippie and the nerd.

Zuckerberg’s answer is startlingly different. He is not proposing that superintelligence replace liberal democracy. He is proposing that the arrival of superintelligence may force Americans to recover it. The new computational powers will be so immense that only a political order committed to dispersed authority, pluralism, and limits can keep a handful of self-appointed global masters from remaking everyone in their own image.

RELATED: The path to America-first AI

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That is the real bet: AI does not redeem liberal democracy because the machines become wise. AI redeems it by making the alternatives intolerable.

It is a surprisingly elegant and tantalizing vision. But there is one catch. For it to work, Americans will have to treat AI the way they treat liberty itself — not as an accessory or afterthought, but as something woven into daily life. Maybe you personally can remain mostly outside it. But if most Americans do, Zuckerberg strongly implies, the country may not generate the distributed competence, power, and agency his model requires.

So Zuckerberg’s wager runs in both directions. Liberal democracy must discipline superintelligence. Superintelligence must revive liberal democracy. Each is supposed to save the other.

Maybe that circle is virtuous. Maybe it is impossible.

But Mark Zuckerberg has placed his bet. Now? It’s your turn.

Meet The Fertility Org Funding Dystopian Embryo Experiments Across America

ASRM has a quiet but heavy influence and financial hand on assisted reproductive technology protocols in the United States.

Meet The Fertility Org Funding Dystopian Embryo Experiments Across America

ASRM has a quiet but heavy influence and financial hand on assisted reproductive technology (ART) protocols in the United States.

America’s newest jail has no walls



Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

RELATED: We’re winning the fight against Flock — but the surveillance isn’t going away that easily

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A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

That is the anarcho-tyranny trap.

Conservative thinker Samuel Francis used the term to describe a regime that tolerates disorder while imposing suffocating control on peaceful citizens. Authorities fail to punish criminals, then use the chaos created by that failure to justify new powers over everyone else.

Americans have already seen the pattern.

The government possessed enormous amounts of video from the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. Businesses burned, neighborhoods were looted, and citizens were assaulted. The system showed little appetite for using every available image to identify and prosecute everyone involved.

After January 6, the same government used surveillance footage, facial recognition, financial records, and digital communications to pursue participants with extraordinary intensity. Officials punished many who entered the Capitol and investigated people who merely stood nearby.

RELATED: Flock Safety CEO: It’s ‘terroristic’ to want to know where we put our spy cameras

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During the pandemic, technology companies yielded to government pressure, censored disfavored speech, and turned over user information. Neither the administrative state nor its corporate partners have earned the benefit of the doubt. They have repeatedly demonstrated that enforcement depends on the target.

I am less hostile to state power than many conservatives. A government that cannot control its borders, remove violent criminals, or maintain public order is not a serious government.

But power must be directed toward the common good. The officials asking for universal surveillance are the same officials who refuse to use ordinary authority against illegal immigration, organized crime, urban disorder, and politically favored mobs.

Giving them a database that tracks every American driver will not correct their priorities. It will magnify them.

Supporters will insist that only criminals need to worry. That argument assumes surveillance will remain limited to serious crime and that government will apply its powers impartially. Recent history destroys both assumptions.

Today’s stolen-car database can become tomorrow’s political enforcement system. A hot list can identify a murder suspect, an immigration protester, a gun owner, a church attendee, or anyone traveling to a disfavored rally.

The danger does not require a secret conspiracy. Bureaucracies naturally expand their missions. Politicians redefine threats. Private vendors seek new contracts. Once the infrastructure exists, every crisis supplies another justification for using it.

America’s disorder has obvious political causes. Elites imported cheap labor, weakened borders, excused criminality, and dissolved the social bonds that once allowed communities to police themselves informally. Citizens now feel like strangers in their own homeland.

Technology cannot repair that betrayal.

The difficult answers remain immigration restriction, deportation, competent policing, equal enforcement, and the restoration of families, neighborhoods, and civic trust. Cameras may assist legitimate police work, but they cannot substitute for political courage.

Flock promises safety without social repair. The bargain is tempting because rebuilding order is difficult.

Americans should refuse it.

Rewarding the people who created the crisis with the power to monitor every movement will not restore a high-trust society. It will lock law-abiding citizens inside an open-air prison while the disorder continues beyond the cameras’ reach.

The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?



Five years ago this month, I finished the manuscript for “Human Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War.” By fall, it was in print, available as an e-book, and inscribed on the Bitcoin blockchain. It remains available today exclusively in Bitcoin on canonic.xyz.

Despite its narrow audience — then considered a kiss of death, today hailed as smart “niching down” — “Human Forever” has made an enduring impact.

Why assume that posthuman intelligence would honor what ‘we’ mean by progress as an ultimate good?

Working from a relative handful of influences, insights, and goals, I was able to see quite a ways around the corner of the next five years. That may seem surprising, given how much has changed since then, especially in AI.

But the book’s continued relevance in an age of rapid obsolescence has to do with its thesis being larger than tech. Its central question was what, if anything, could be bigger than technology — more fundamental, more authoritative, more inherent to who and what we are.

While many are now locked in debate over whether technology is upstream of politics or politics is upstream of technology, “Human Forever” explored the primacy over both of spiritual being, spiritual life, and spiritual order.

Few were discussing this dynamic in 2021. Many are discussing it now.

That is not surprising. As I argued in the book, and have continued to explore in the essays and posts it set in motion, the cultural and social resurgence of spirituality in all its dimensions — including those most of us were trained to believe would never return from the distant past — is largely attributable to the direction, speed, and scope of technological advancement.

Technology has now reached a point at which it is discrediting many of the sophisticated intellectual mechanisms once designed to justify human existence and supply human purpose without spirituality, revelation, or faith in the divine.

Today even — perhaps especially — those working at the frontier of AI development are gravitating toward spiritual structures, from the ancient Christian church to novel and idiosyncratic cults.

But momentum at the technological frontier still favors those who would rather replace all previous and existing religions than kneel with the faithful of any.

RELATED: At 250, America’s fate is wonderfully unwritten

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Welcome to the party

I now notice two main trends relative to what I argued in “Human Forever.”

The first is a gratifying high-level awareness of what is at stake and what is needed to preserve our accustomed freedom and command in the digital age.

Recently, none other than Palantir CEO Alex Karp helped kick off a remarkable turn among key hyperscalers toward concepts and priorities laid out in the book: control of compute as an index of sovereignty; technological competition consolidating among a handful of civilization-states; the need to protect and preserve the shared memory, or ontology, of people and organizations; and the spiritual risk of a new kind of slavery typified by what cybernetics theorists call homeostasis — an unceasing feedback loop optimizing for predictability, uniformity, and interchangeability.

In the book, I emphasized that Bitcoin offered ordinary human beings an exemplary opportunity to re-establish healthy freedom and command under digital conditions. Bitcoin is relatively mature, stable, comprehensible, and ready to use now, without requiring trust in massive organizations with equally massive trust gaps.

I am still waiting for leading tech figures to sing that tune. On the other hand, perhaps it is best for ordinary people to figure it out for themselves, without monitoring or supervision.

The secular trap

The second trend is more uncanny and unnerving.

A funny paradox has emerged. Many of those most euphoric about developing AI into a recursively self-improving cosmic intelligence — one that removes our pain, solves our problems, and likely erases many of the limits of human being — simply assume that the machines will preserve their very human ideas about “improvement” itself.

They seem to believe that machines designed to surpass us in every way will somehow neither surpass nor contradict them when defining the core concepts and purposes at the heart of the AI project.

Improvement, advancement, perfection — these and related ideas define the AI-maxxing ideology. But for us, absent divine teaching about what they truly mean, they remain inescapably human ideas.

If “we” are building entities with the goal of liberating them from the petty confines of human intellect, agency, and identity, why would we expect them to retain modern secular-human notions of value and progress?

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Why assume that posthuman intelligence would honor what “we” mean by progress as an ultimate good?

Strangely, the stubborn reliance on merely human definitions at the heart of the ostensibly posthuman agenda mirrors the same reliance among many of the most visible and well-funded anti-AI movements, which rally around symbols of human identity such as a caveman’s handprint.

Neither side of the conflict seems eager to confront the hard lesson of history: When we stray from divine teaching about what it means to improve, progress, and perfect, and when we replace that teaching with merely human measures of justice, truth, beauty, and goodness, the result is often the opposite — sometimes catastrophically so.

The true frontier

Of course, there are many incompatible religious teachings in the world today. But they are nearly unanimous on the folly of turning away from divine instruction and trying to do it ourselves — especially when that effort frustrates us so badly that we attempt to outsource it to institutions of our own creation.

Historical warts and all, the implication is strong: Stubborn secular humanism will undermine even the most ambitious and well-intentioned goals of both AI lovers and AI haters.

For many Americans, and for many others across the globe, the only authoritative, resonant, reliable, and compatible frame of spiritual authority will be a Christian one.

For Americans in particular, that poses a unique challenge.

Just as an AI theocracy would be unconstitutional, so would a Christian theocracy. America will have to work harder than other countries to resolve the relationship among spiritual authority, political order, and technological development.

Instead of worrying about whether we still have time, we had better make the time.