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📱 When Our Phones Watch Us: Palantir and the Panopticon We Didn’t Elect 👁

Posted: September 13, 2025 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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“It isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” That warning from Philip K. Dick captures the slope Palantir is already halfway down—turning citizens into data points, and autonomy into algorithmic obedience (Goodreads).

As Edward Snowden put it, “Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free” (Goodreads). That’s the business Palantir is in: surveillance disguised as efficiency, control dressed up as analytics.

This isn’t theory. Palantir already fuels ICE raids, predictive policing, corporate risk dashboards, and battlefield logistics in Ukraine (IBANet). As Thor Benson reminds us, “Don’t oppose mass surveillance for your own sake. Oppose it for the activists, lawyers, journalists and all of the other people our liberty relies on” (Ammo.com).

Palantir isn’t just selling software. It’s selling obedience. And like all Silicon Valley myths, it started with a story about “innovation” that hid something darker.

Origins & Power Connections

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and Stephen Cohen (Wikipedia), Palantir wasn’t born in a garage—it was born in Langley’s shadow. Early funding came from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm (DCF Modeling). When your first investors are spymasters, your product isn’t disruption. It’s surveillance.

Its flagship platform, Gotham, was built hand-in-glove with U.S. intelligence agencies. Palantir engineers embedded inside government offices stitched together oceans of data: phone records, bank transactions, social media posts, warzone intel (EnvZone). Palantir didn’t just sell a tool; it sold itself into the bloodstream of the national security state.

By the time it was worth billions, Palantir was indispensable to the U.S. war machine. Its software was used in Afghanistan and Iraq (SETA Foundation), where surveillance wasn’t a civil liberties debate but a weapon of war. When those tools came home to American cities, they carried the same battlefield logic: control first, questions never.

Domestic Impact: Policing & Immigration

Palantir’s second act was on U.S. streets. Its predictive policing contracts in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and beyond promised crime prevention through data. In reality, biased arrest records fed the machine, and the machine spit bias back out dressed as math (SETA Foundation).

Shoshana Zuboff warned: “Surveillance is the path to profit that overrides ‘we the people,’ taking our decision rights without permission and even when we say ‘no’” (Goodreads). Prediction isn’t neutral—it’s a form of control.

Immigration enforcement sharpened that control. Palantir built ImmigrationOS for ICE, consolidating visa files, home addresses, social media posts, and more (American Immigration Council). Critics call it “deportation by algorithm.” In Palantir’s language, that’s “efficiency.” The human cost is invisible in the spreadsheet.

A traffic stop can spiral into deportation. A visa application can flag someone as “high risk” with no explanation. Entire neighborhoods live under digital suspicion. And when protests erupted against these tools, six activists were arrested outside Palantir’s New York office in 2025 (The Guardian).

Palantir insists it only “builds the tools.” But when those tools fracture families and criminalize communities, the line between code and consequence vanishes.

Global Expansion: From Battlefields to Boardrooms

War proved Palantir’s business case. In Afghanistan and Iraq, its engineers sat beside soldiers, mapping bomb patterns and insurgent networks with data fusion software (SETA Foundation). The Pentagon called it a breakthrough. Critics called it privatized intelligence.

Now, Ukraine is Palantir’s showcase. Its tools analyze satellite imagery, coordinate battlefield logistics, and even gather evidence of war crimes (IBANet). CEO Alex Karp boasts Ukraine is a “tech-forward war.” But once normalized on the front lines, surveillance rarely stays in the trenches.

And Palantir’s reach doesn’t stop at war. Its Foundry platform runs inside JPMorgan, Airbus, Merck, and Fiat Chrysler (Wikipedia). What began as battlefield software is now a corporate dashboard—tracking supply chains, financial risks, and consumer behavior. The architecture is the same: consolidate data, predict outcomes, reduce uncertainty. Only the labels change.

Surveillance Capitalism & The Future

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon imagined a prison where one guard could watch every inmate without them knowing when they were being watched. “Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower… Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at” (Farnam Street). It was a theory then. Palantir has built it for real—and scaled it to entire societies.

Zuboff called surveillance capitalism a regime that reshapes human behavior for profit (Yale Law Journal). Palantir goes further, reshaping governance itself. Its platforms don’t just analyze data; they dictate institutional behavior, target populations, and define acceptable outcomes. The architecture dictates the politics.

Glenn Greenwald cut to the core: “The mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent” (Goodreads). That stifling doesn’t make headlines. It happens in silence—when a protest isn’t planned, when a whistleblower doesn’t speak, when communities live in quiet fear of an algorithm they can’t see.

And that’s why Benson’s warning should stick: “Don’t oppose mass surveillance for your own sake. Oppose it for the activists, lawyers, journalists, and all of the other people our liberty relies on” (Ammo.com). Because the weight of Palantir’s code doesn’t fall evenly. It presses hardest on those who dare to resist.

Orwell said it plainly: “Big Brother is watching you.” The 21st-century twist is worse. Big Brother has been privatized, optimized, and sold at a markup (The Guardian).

Truth Over Tribalism

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🌐 The Climate Shock Doctrine 🔥

Posted: September 2, 2025 in Frackishima
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How disaster capitalism thrives in the age of climate chaos

Disaster as a Business Model

Hurricanes rip coastlines apart, wildfires reduce neighborhoods to ash, floods drown farmlands. Each new disaster is framed as a natural tragedy—yet behind the smoke, someone always finds a way to profit.

Swiss RE reports climate disasters are already costing the U.S. 0.4% of GDP annually, with every dollar of adaptation saving eleven in avoided damages【time.com】. But adaptation isn’t what elites are betting on. Instead, they see chaos as an opportunity.

As American Studies scholar Kevin Rozario puts it:

“The human component is a massive accelerant to the fires.”【smith.edu】

The accelerant isn’t just carbon—it’s capitalism itself.

The Pattern of Profit

When a climate disaster strikes, everyday people lose homes, livelihoods, and loved ones. Meanwhile, corporations cash in.

In the insurance sector, even a catastrophe doesn’t halt profits. The Financial Times reports that despite massive underwriting losses, insurers are hiking premiums and retreating from high-risk zones, and “investors are rewarding them for becoming increasingly selective in the coverage they offer.”【ft.com】

In 2024, global disaster losses hit $320 billion. Only $140 billion was insured, leaving $180 billion uninsured, shifted onto individuals and taxpayers【thinklandscape.globallandscapesforum.org】.

Kay Young, a 63-year-old survivor of the Los Angeles wildfires, summed up the fight ordinary people face:

“They’re not going to give you the value of your house … if they do, you really have to fight for it.”【reuters.com】

The Shock Doctrine Playbook

This cycle is not an accident—it’s a strategy.

Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine laid it bare: disasters create a “shock window” in which elites exploit public disorientation to push radical privatization. The American Bar Association defines disaster capitalism as:

“Exploitation of natural or man-made disasters in service of capitalist interests.”【americanbar.org】

We’ve seen it after wars, coups, and financial crashes. Now, the same playbook drives climate response.

Wildfires & the Land Grab Economy

Few examples show this more clearly than California’s wildfires. In Malibu, where entire neighborhoods burned, wealthy investors swooped in. The Times reports lots reduced to rubble were resold for up to $7.5 million, raising “troubling questions about gentrification in the wake of climate-related disasters.”【thetimes.co.uk】

Governor Newsom eventually issued an order barring unsolicited offers from speculators preying on survivors—some of whom were approached while their houses were still burning【gov.ca.gov】. But the vultures had already circled.

Stephen Pyne, the historian of fire, describes this era as the Pyrocene:

Humanity’s combustion—fossil fuel and ecological disruption—has created a fire-dominated epoch.

In other words, we lit the match. Now, profiteers are selling the ashes.

Who Pays the Price

Communities most vulnerable to climate chaos are the ones paying the heaviest price. In developing nations, most disaster losses are uninsured. In the U.S., low-income and marginalized neighborhoods bear the brunt of heat waves, toxic smoke, and flooding.

Scholars writing in Global Environmental Change warn:

“Climate-induced disasters deepen inequality and social vulnerability, disproportionately harming marginalized communities.”【sciencedirect.com】

Meanwhile, wealth insulates the few: billionaires hire private firefighters, build fortified compounds, or buy real estate on higher ground. The rest of us scrape together GoFundMe donations.

Who Cashes In

The winners of this game are clear:

  • Insurance companies post record profits even as payouts shrink【greenmoney.com】.
  • Wall Street invents catastrophe bonds, letting investors bet on disasters.
  • Developers flip ruined communities into luxury zones.
  • Corporations snap up FEMA contracts.

The Allianz Group—hardly a radical source—warned bluntly that at 3°C of warming, damage will be impossible to adapt to or insure against, threatening the foundations of capitalism itself【theguardian.com】. Even the system’s architects know it’s unsustainable.

Resistance Against the Shock Doctrine

When fire levels a community, it should be a moment of collective rebuilding. Instead, it’s too often a handoff: loss for the many, leverage for the few.

As Vanity Fair reported from wildfire-stricken California:

“Profiteers and misinformation have exacerbated the distress of the affected … community members … are concerned about future rebuilding efforts potentially displacing them.”【vanityfair.com】

This is the heart of the Climate Shock Doctrine: the transformation of catastrophe into capital.

The fight for climate justice is not just ecological—it’s economic. We can’t stop disasters from striking, but we can decide who owns the recovery. That means:

  • Public ownership of critical resources.
  • Investments in resilience for poor communities first.
  • Grassroots solidarity networks that sidestep corporate vultures.
  • Cutting off financial pipelines to fossil fuels—the “oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns”【newyorker.com】.

Because if disaster capitalism keeps winning, we’re not just burning forests—we’re torching the future.

☯ Wisdom is Resistance. Truth Over Tribalism. ∞

🏥 The Mental Health Crisis They Created 🏦

Posted: August 26, 2025 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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The system breaks us, then sells us pills.

They tell us it’s a personal failing. That anxiety is a chemical imbalance. That depression is a genetic curse. That burnout is solved with resilience. But look around: the conditions that feed this crisis are man-made.

“Doctors … argue that chronic stress, stemming from social problems such as financial distress, racism, and poor working conditions, is a key driver of mental health issues.” — The Guardian

We work longer hours for less pay. We doomscroll through endless cycles of bad news and empty distraction. We spend more time isolated in front of glowing screens than in human connection. The pressure is relentless—engineered to keep us consuming, competing, and collapsing.

“About one in four American adults suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year, and one in ten will suffer from a depressive illness, such as major depression or bipolar disorder.” — Johns Hopkins–derived data

And just when we break, they offer us a fix. Not by changing the system—but by medicalizing our despair. Big Pharma has turned misery into a trillion-dollar market. Antidepressant prescriptions keep climbing. ADHD meds are at record highs. Anti-anxiety pills sell like candy. And yet, rates of suicide, loneliness, and mental illness are higher than ever.

“In 2020, 20.3% of adults had received any mental-health treatment in the past 12 months, including 16.5% who had taken prescription medication for their mental health.” — CDC

“Today, a full fourth of U.S. women are on antidepressants.” — KevinMD / Harvard Health

This isn’t healing—it’s management. Profitable management. The more the machine grinds us down, the more pills they can sell us to function well enough to keep serving the machine. It’s a cycle of extraction: from our labor, our attention, and now our very psychology.

“The monthly antidepressant dispensing rate for females ages 12–17 surged 129.6% from March 2020 onward compared with beforehand.” — University of Michigan study in Pediatrics

None of this denies that meds can help. But let’s be clear: the crisis isn’t random. It’s not just “in our heads.” It’s the direct product of an economy built on overwork, digital isolation, and engineered anxiety. A society where meaning is stripped down to productivity, and hope is marketed back to us in capsules.

“Despite a significant rise in mental-health awareness and treatment … mental-health conditions are worsening. Suicide rates have increased by 30% since 2000, and nearly one-third of adults report symptoms of depression or anxiety.” — Time

“Between 1999 and 2022, antidepressant-related overdose deaths climbed; in 2022, there were 5,863 overdoses—comparable to heroin overdose deaths that same year.” — The Guardian

The mental health crisis wasn’t an accident. It was manufactured. And the ones cashing in are the same ones who built the conditions that broke us.

Wisdom is Resistance. Truth Over Tribalism.

⚖ The War on the Poor 📉

Posted: August 18, 2025 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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Systemic Cruelty Dressed Up as Policy

Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. — Nelson Mandela (earth.org)

Criminalization of Survival

Across the United States, cities are treating the act of survival—sleeping, sitting, asking for help—as criminal behavior. These punitive “sit-lie” laws, camping bans, sweeps, and aggressive policing do not solve homelessness—they entrench it.

The National Homeless Law Center notes that criminalizing homelessness punishes life-sustaining activities and makes it “more difficult to escape” homelessness (homelesslaw.org). Human Rights Watch calls Los Angeles’s enforcement “cruel and ineffective,” targeting the visible poor rather than root causes (hrw.org).

And the National Alliance to End Homelessness found in a 2025 report that criminalization fails to enhance safety and instead deepens racial inequities (endhomelessness.org).

Welfare as Surveillance

What was once a safety net has become a web of surveillance and moral judgment. Welfare recipients often face drug testing, work mandates, and algorithmic gatekeeping. The state spends more money building systems to punish “fraud” than the fraud itself.

The broader trend is summed up in the concept of the criminalization of poverty—fines, anti-homeless laws, welfare policing—all disproportionately penalize people for behaviors tied to economic status (en.wikipedia.org).

Bipartisan Neglect

From Clinton’s “end of welfare as we know it,” to Republican austerity, to performative pandemic relief—both parties have abandoned structural solutions. Poverty remains a prop for campaigns, a scapegoat for policy failures.

The trajectory is clear: LBJ’s 1964 War on Poverty drastically reduced poverty, but the programs were retrenched in the decades that followed (en.wikipedia.org). As the New Yorker observed, “the retrenchment of the social-welfare state went hand in hand with the rise of the prison and policing state” (newyorker.com).

Policy as War

This isn’t side-effect cruelty—it’s intentional. Austerity is meticulously planned: sprawling military budgets and corporate bailouts while school lunches vanish, shelters shrink, and Medicaid is constantly threatened.

Anti-homeless laws that target sitting, sleeping, begging, and even sharing food are not about solving poverty—they’re about making the poor less visible (en.wikipedia.org).

Turning Cruelty into Care

Poverty isn’t inevitable—it’s policy. But if it’s made, it can be unmade.

Everyday Direct Care

  • Support mutual aid groups, solidarity kitchens, street medicine teams, and eviction defense networks.
  • Donate to or volunteer with organizations that protect civil rights for the unhoused, such as those advancing a Homeless Bill of Rights (en.wikipedia.org).
  • Choose ways to help that don’t rely on surveillance or punishment, but on trust and dignity.

Local Policy Pressure

  • Demand that local officials defund homeless sweeps and redirect funds to housing-first programs, mental health care, and tenant protections.
  • Organize for the passage of Homeless Bills of Rights in your state or city.
  • Pressure city councils and state legislatures to prioritize affordable housing budgets over police budgets.

State & National Strategy

  • Advocate for restoring and expanding War on Poverty–era programs like Head Start, expanded tax credits, and affordable housing investments.
  • Oppose laws that subject welfare recipients to invasive surveillance, drug testing, or punitive work requirements.
  • Build alliances that prioritize social infrastructure over military expansion or corporate subsidies.

This is the real choice: treat poverty as crime, or treat it as solvable. The first path guarantees endless war on the poor. The second path builds a society worth living in.

Truth Over Tribalism

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💸 Bread, Circuses, and Billionaires 🍞

Posted: August 8, 2025 in Excess and Algorithms
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How manufactured distraction masks elite power grabs

“The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” — Steve Biko

We’re not fighting each other.

We’re being told we are.

While billionaires rig markets, write laws, and extract more than ever before, we’re fed a diet of distraction: who wore what, who said what, who to cancel, who to worship.
Culture wars and celebrity scandals dominate the headlines. Political rage becomes entertainment. Reality is replaced with performance.

Meanwhile, real decisions get made in rooms we’re not in.

Distraction is strategy.

Bread and circuses is policy.

The phrase comes from ancient Rome. Give the people food and entertainment, and they’ll ignore the empire crumbling around them.
Today’s version isn’t lions and gladiators. It’s 24/7 news cycles, viral beef, televised outrage, algorithmic dopamine, and the myth that “both sides” are the problem.

But both sides serve the same class.
The one you’re not in.

“The purpose of the modern media is to make the public passive and distracted, not informed and engaged.” – Glenn Greenwald

Who benefits from distraction?

Follow the money.

Culture wars don’t threaten capital.
They serve it.
If we’re busy hating each other, we’re not organizing. If we’re bickering about bathrooms, we’re not taxing billionaires. If we’re glued to gossip, we’re not watching the war profiteers, the surveillance state, or the bought politicians signing our futures away.

Distraction is not a side effect. It’s the point.

Manufactured chaos is cover.

Power prefers shadows.

The more noise, the less clarity.
The more conflict, the less unity.
The more fear, the more control.

Every celebrity trial, every TikTok feud, every political theater act keeps us from looking up. Keeps us consuming, not questioning. Arguing, not organizing.

“The press is not a watchdog. It’s a tool used by the powerful to manage public opinion.” – Matt Taibbi

We don’t need more sides.

We need more sight.

Start with the question: Who does this serve?
When the story goes viral, when the talking heads scream, when the rage is addictive—ask it again:
Who benefits from our attention being here?
Because the real theft isn’t always money.
Sometimes, it’s focus.

“You are being made to focus on the sideshow, while the tent burns down.” – Edward Snowden

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