SUNDAY SPITBALLING: Your Own Personal Jeeves
Tech makes its move
It feels like we are in the middle of a political takeover. But it’s worth considering the possibility that the political turmoil is just the public-facing part of a much larger power-play. Trump’s sudden conversion from crypto critic to crypto catalyst during the 2024 campaign was the starting gun in a sprint. Surveillance capitalists are moving on the Neoliberals who’ve run the place since 1981. It’s Silicon Valley versus Wall Street. Tech is moving to supplant finance as the true source of power. And I think they want to privatize the money supply/currency.
More immediately, though, they are using Trump to hijack the Federal government. They needed the presidency to hyperscale their data centers ASAP and, therefore, to make their particular version of Ai inescapable. And the regime’s whole of government effort is giving them everything they want. Tech is also using that leverage to socialize the cost of electricity by forcing households to pay higher bills. Data centers support crypto, BTW. Not coincidentally, Trump and sons have become billion dollar players in crypto.
Trump also presided over a marriage of Silicon Valley and Riyadh. Tech and the Gulf Cooperation Council need each other. One needs to burn oil for electricity (STAT!) and the other needs to delay the coming of peak demand. Despite the US, the world is still scaling-up renewables. Hyperscaled data centers to the rescue. The massive spike in energy use is economic security for Oil … particularly if Ai agents create dependencies throughout business and society. Trump is the nexus of that synergy. Look no further than the billions in crypto and contracts the Gulf’s leaders lavished on Trump and his family since he won the election. Much of that payoff has come in the form of … crypto.
As far as I can tell, the surveillance capitalists’ next objective is to marry users to a personalized Ai agent…kinda like your own personal Jeeves. Those agents will “serve” us while also serving as surveillance devices. Think of a personalized Ai agent as a sleepless informant for Google, OpenAI, or Meta. The agent will be listening and reading and, in some cases, watching you constantly. It will learn things about you … intimate things. And it will accumulate data sets that will be mined for psychological insights that will further refine your personal agent into more than a device. It will feel to many that they’ve gained an insightful, caring friend. … it will be a companion that further isolates us from the humans around us. Ultimately, it’s just an inverse version of the Chinese Social Credit system. The main difference is that the Chinese version is public and social and based on shame. Silicon Valley’s version will be “private” and “personalized” and based on desire. Instead of putting us all in one prison, they will assign us all a personal jailer.