The American technocracy is using every lever at its command, including corruption, lawfare, media manipulation, and sectarianism to crush popular (and Papal) resistance to rapid data center expansion, crypto and prediction markets.
Before we start the article proper, there’s a scary prelude that might frighten some oligarchs.
Unionizing Tech Workers
Blood In The Machine reports:
…thousands of IT employees across the statewide University of California system have voted to unionize. They join over 6,000 tech workers already represented by University and Professional Technical Employees (UPTE), expanding the total to 8,400 workers across the bargaining unit. That makes the new unit the largest tech worker union in the nation.…Historically, the tech industry has been under-organized; for decades, tech firms have sought to pre-empt or ward off unionization by offering cushy perks and leaning into the entrepreneurial, laissez-faire ethos of Silicon Valley. But times are changing, and organized labor has made inroads. Hundreds of Google employees and contractors voted to form the Alphabet Worker’s Union in 2021—it doesn’t have full bargaining power but has proved influential nonetheless—and workers at tech companies like Kickstarter and at the New York Times’ tech desk (which was previously the nation’s largest tech worker union) have successfully organized in recent years. More recently, workers at Google’s DeepMind headquarters in London have voted to unionize.
But never fear, while the spector of organized tech labor is frightening, the technocracy has a tool or two in its humble warchest with which to fight back.
Let’s start the post proper with corruption, since America, like a fish, rots from the head down, and the tech bros are nothing if not au courant in the Trump 2.0 era.
Crippling the Commodity Futures Trading Commission
The New York Times has a major feature explaining “How Prediction Markets and Crypto Firms Steamrolled a Watchdog Agency.”
Key points:
Three companies — each with ties to the Trump family’s business empire — needed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to bless their ambitions in the white-hot field of prediction markets.…Senior career officials worried about whether Crypto.com was treating small bettors fairly. They feared that a second firm, Polymarket, did not have strong enough protections against fraud. A third, an offshoot of the crypto firm Gemini, had yet to pass the agency’s required review to open for business.
Despite these concerns, Caroline D. Pham, then acting chairman of the commission, and her senior counsel intervened to help the firms get what they wanted…
In the past 16 months of the Trump administration, the commission has shrunk its work force, purged career officials, sharply curtailed crypto enforcement and helped out prediction markets at virtually every turn, The Times found.
The gutting of the agency is particularly notable because of the Trump family’s deep ties to the crypto and prediction industries. The Trumps have sold their own digital currencies, generating enormous wealth for the family, while striking deals with prediction market operators as well.
The C.F.T.C.’s transformation has been muscled through by leaders with connections to those industries. Ms. Pham recently left the agency to work for a crypto company that has a partnership with Polymarket. Her senior counsel, Brigitte Weyls, was hired by a prediction market company whose application she had helped shepherd.
Good work if you can get it!
And here’s a timely reminder of why it’s so critical to bring the C.F.T.C. under control:
Donald Trump Jr is a paid strategic advisor for Kalshi, and a major investor and advisor for Polymarket.
The Trump administration is using taxpayer money to sue to protect their family’s investments.
This is what corruption looks like. https://t.co/naOttGx5Fa
— Melanie D’Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) May 24, 2026
It’s not just federal regulators that have to be handled, state level laws can be pesky too, and that’s where a captured federal commission can be put to good use.
Minnesota vs Prediction Markets & the Federal Government
The state of Minnesota got a little full of itself last week, per the NYT:
A day after Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota signed into law the first state law explicitly barring prediction markets, the Trump administration sued the state on Tuesday, seeking to block it from going into effect this summer.
The law, which had the backing of a bipartisan group of state legislators, would make it illegal to host or advertise a prediction market site in Minnesota.…At least 14 other states have introduced legislation seeking to regulate prediction markets, according to the National Conference of State Legislators, but Minnesota was believed to be the first this month to pass as sweeping a measure into law. The legal battle comes as states have struggled to police prediction markets, which have surged in popularity over the past year.
On Tuesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that regulates certain markets, filed a federal lawsuit against Minnesota, arguing that the state does not have the authority to put guardrails around prediction markets, such as the popular betting websites Kalshi and Polymarket.
“A federal agency that regulates certain markets” — that’s pretty rich.
Lawfare comes in handy when dealing with municipal trouble-makers, too.
Town Votes Down Data Center, Too Bad
Talk about uppity, the local government of Saline Township, Michigan, tried to vote down a massive data center, fortunately oligarchs can fight city hall, via Fortune (archived):
…an enormous AI data center—at 21 million square feet, the largest construction project ever undertaken in the state and one almost universally opposed by local residents—seemed to race through the process from application in late summer to groundbreaking in November.
Even more surprising: The $16 billion data center for OpenAI and Oracle’s Stargate AI infrastructure initiative, which will fundamentally reshape the area with its construction, traffic, electricity demand, and environmental impact, was flat-out rejected by both the town’s board and its planning commission in September. But those votes turned out to be only minor bumps on the project’s path: The developer quickly sued, the town settled, and the construction vehicles rolled in.…Politicians from both sides of the aisle are embracing the build-out, trying to get a piece of the economic development it promises for the communities they represent—including Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has been actively courting the hyperscalers building massive data centers since late 2024. At the end of October, Whitmer lauded the Saline Township project, saying the facility expected to create 2,500 union construction jobs, alongside 450 permanent jobs on-site and 1,500 more in the community.…Eight months ago, when Saline’s planning commission gathered in the 200-year-old white clapboard township hall to weigh arguments for and against the proposal from Related Digital to rezone 575 acres of farmland for the AI data center, the reasons for rejecting the plan looked straightforward: The land was zoned for agriculture, and much of it was considered prime farmland. The project would introduce industrial noise and environmental stress into a rural landscape and place new demands on emergency responders. It also conflicted with the township’s long-standing master plan, which envisioned development elsewhere.…The commission rejected the plan to rezone the farmland. The township board followed suit, voting 4–1 to deny it. But locals quickly discovered that amid the frenzied AI infrastructure gold rush, “no” does not always mean no.Two days later, on Sept. 12, Saline Township was sued by Related Digital and the site’s landowners. Their lawsuit alleged “exclusionary zoning”—that the community had unreasonably barred a legitimate land use under Michigan law, and it hinged on the fact that Saline Township had no land zoned for industrial use, and that a data center qualified as a “necessary” use that could not be excluded altogether.
The lawsuit underscored the township’s limited leverage. Even if officials had fought it, their lawyers advised them, the project could likely have moved forward via other avenues, such as partnering with an institution like the nearby University of Michigan, which can build projects that are not subject to local zoning in the same way as private developments. Meanwhile, a prolonged legal battle against well-resourced developers risked significant costs for the township, without securing concessions.
The best part is, not only can citizens not stop data centers, we’re going to get to pay for them, too!
Larry Fink Tells Texans How It’s Gonna Be
Earlier this month, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink sat down with Texas Governor Greg Abbott and revealed where the money to pay for these unstoppable data centers is coming from:
“Mandatory investment” means they’ve already moved your money out of your control.
Larry Fink is telling you the plan out loud: trillions for AI data centers and power grids, and it’s coming from your savings and pension accounts. He calls it “investment.” I would call it… pic.twitter.com/jkl0FsOoMb
— Catherine Austin Fitts (@austin_fit76995) May 25, 2026
Transcript:
Larry Fink: If we could get more and more Americans to think about growing with the United States, we will have more than enough money to invest in this infrastructure.
But as the governor was talking about, the need for electrons is growing every day. Some of these, you know, if we’re going to be the leader in technology, which we are, If we are going to be the leader in AI, which we presently are, it’s just going to require trillions of dollars of investments. And if we don’t invest in it, China will be the global leader in this. And so to me, it’s not whether. This is a must.
And if you think about how that translates, it translates into a more dynamic economy. We need the United States economy to grow at over 2 percent. We need the U.S. economy to grow at 3 percent, especially with the growing deficits the federal government has.
And so much of this money, not just the private, is going to be coming from the private sector, from savings accounts, from pension accounts, from insurance companies, and on and on and on. The whole world is in need of improving the infrastructure.
And if people don’t want to sacrifice their pension funds, then perhaps their electricity can be diverted elsewhere.
No Power for You, Lake Tahoe
Concerned citizens everywhere can learn from the example of patriotic Lake Tahoens who are surrendering electricity they would only waste on personal use for much needed data center use instead, via Fortune:
NV Energy, the Nevada utility that has supplied the bulk of Lake Tahoe’s electricity for decades, told Liberty Utilities—the small California company that services the region—that it will stop providing power after May 2027. The reason? NV Energy needs the capacity for data centers. As in: the energy supplier for the Lake Tahoe region is telling the utility company that it has less than a year to find another power source.
Northern Nevada has become one of the fastest-growing data-center corridors in the country. Google, Apple, and Microsoft have either built or are planning facilities around the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center east of Reno. The Desert Research Institute, using data from NV Energy’s 2024 Integrated Resource Plan, found that the 12 data center projects located overwhelmingly in Northern Nevada could drive 5,900 megawatts of new demand by 2033. At a regional business event last fall, NV Energy’s director of business development called the moment “unprecedented,” saying the company was eager to serve the new industrial load but that it would not “impact our existing customer base.”
But Liberty’s 49,000 California customers may already be bearing the cost. Liberty Utilities generates about 25% of its power from solar facilities it owns in Nevada. The other 75% comes from NV Energy, and that source will no longer be supplied to the region by this time next year.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” Danielle Hughes told Fortune. Hughes is a North Lake Tahoe resident, CEO of the nonprofit Tahoe Spark, and a supervisor within the California Energy Commission’s Efficiency Division.
It is like we don’t exist, isn’t it?
And how did a potentially unruly plebe class attain that blissful state?
Complete Media Control Is the Secret Ingredient
Two recent pieces hammer home just how manipulated the American information diet has become.
First from FAIR:
Each month, Press Gazette, a London-based magazine for the journalism industry, ranks the top 50 news websites in the US in order of monthly visits, based on data from the marketing firm Similarweb. FAIR tallied Press Gazette’s results over a 12-month span, from December 2024 to November 2025, to get a figure for total US visits to major news sites over that period: 45.6 billion.
More than half of those visits, nearly 25.5 billion, went to news sites controlled by just seven families or corporate entities.
pic.twitter.com/Zf4xHuLNNr
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) May 25, 2026
Direct ownership of online media outlets, it turns out, is a fairly crude mechanism, manipulating algorithms is the more elegant solution, per Vulture (archived):
Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users.…The point of this kind of marketing is that nobody is supposed to notice it. But lately, the machinery has started to show. In March, Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, co-founders of the digital music-promotion agency Chaotic Good Projects, gave a live interview to a Billboard reporter at South by Southwest in which they breezily described using sock-puppet accounts to manufacture enthusiasm for artists at every level of the music industry, from major-label pop stars to niche indie acts. Spelman called the practice “trend simulation.” His motto: “Everything on the internet is fake.”…the same techniques that Coren and Spelman bragged about onstage are now being used to fool people on every app they go to in order to find out what other people think, not just in music but across entertainment, politics, consumer products, and celebrity gossip. Shady marketing and propaganda aren’t new, of course, but what is new is that the entire infrastructure of public conversation has been quietly captured by both. On social media, popular opinion is being formed, measured, and manipulated all at once, and every signal the platforms produce — a trending song, a backlash, a talking point, the feeling that “everybody” is suddenly talking about the same thing — can now be fabricated by unseen actors with hidden agendas. We’ve locked ourselves in the stupidest possible version of Plato’s cave, where what looks like the spontaneous consensus of the hive mind is often just shadows on the wall, put there by marketers, political operatives, foreign-influence campaigns, or anyone else with a few hundred bucks and something to sell.
And with the masses duped into an obliging mood, the tech oligarchs are taking their fight to the top.
Lobbying Pope Leo
Politico has some background on the tech bros’ desperate efforts to influence Pope Leo’s first encyclical:
representatives of Meta, Google and Amazon, part of a small group gathered in Rome to discuss child protection in the age of artificial intelligence. The encounter with the pope was brief. The meeting that followed, in the French embassy to the Holy See in central Rome, lasted for hours.
There, Paolo Ruffini, the Vatican’s top communications official, sat across from the tech representatives to wrestle with a question now at the center of Leo’s young papacy: How should one of the world’s oldest moral authorities judge the cutting-edge technology Silicon Valley is racing to build?
The April 29 gathering was the latest in a series of meetings that, taken together, amount to a quiet lobbying push by the tech industry ahead of Leo’s first encyclical, according to interviews with seven people for this article. An official papal document due Monday will set out the Catholic Church’s position on artificial intelligence.
How’d that work out?
Pope Leo XIV Warns Against New Tower of Babel
The encyclical, humbly titled “MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS” dropped today.
Opening lines:
Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world.
For all the TL;DR’ers out there, Pope Leo quoted some scripture that Silicon Valley is familiar with, The Lord of the Rings:
In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV quotes J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that… pic.twitter.com/qPOPwqd1Dk
— Courtney Mares (@catholicourtney) May 25, 2026
And from the conclusion:
Our world is filled with attempts to seize control of markets and spheres of influence, often shrouded in reassuring rhetoric and seductive ideologies. Yet our hearts yearn for an approach that is wise and benevolent…
In the promises of transhumanism and some posthumanist currents of thought, which seek an enhanced and almost disembodied humanity, we recognize a yearning that is of concern to us, namely the need for a fuller life, less exposed to limitations and suffering. Yet the Incarnation opens a different pathway. On the one hand, old and new ideologies alike urge humanity to overcome limitations through technology, and to rise above others by asserting dominance. Contrary to this, the mystery of the Son of God entering into our human condition promises something quite different. The living God descends into our history in order to free us from all forms of slavery.
Maybe that’s why Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel warned Vice-President J.D. Vance about Pope Leo last fall.
Catholic Substacker Jack Whelan has some thoughts:
Most people, even Catholics, don’t pay attention to papal encyclicals. They are exercises in preaching to the choir that rarely change the minds of the people who don’t already know the words to the hymns. Humanae Vitae, the one banning artificial birth control, was ignored by most Catholics—or drove them out of the church. The others on environment or the economy, well, you know, whatever. Maybe a priest here and there from time to time will quote them from the pulpit. But how many Catholics quit their jobs on Wall Street after Caritas in Veritae in 2009 or their jobs in the fossil-fuel industries after Francis’s Laudato Si? Did it make anyone whose livelihoods depend on their jobs in those industries pause to think about it, even for a minute? And so why should we expect Silicon Valley to pause to think after Magnifica Humanitas?
The challenge in the long run is not to persuade the Altmans and Musks. We should assume they are unpersuadable. So the challenge instead is to galvanize opposition to them—not only to them but to all efforts wherever huge amounts of money and energy are being burned in this manic project to build the Tower of Babel.
It’s not the tech that’s the problem; it’s the accelerationist mania that’s driving it. Whatever the source of that mania, it isn’t good, it isn’t healthy, and isn’t taking us anywhere any sane person wants to go. And so there needs to develop a counterforce, not to stop it, but to direct it toward sane, humane ends.
The Tower of Babel is an archetype. And as with all archetypes, it points to a fundamental metaphyiscal reality, to something about cosmic law, which in this case, concerns human hubris and its consequences. It never ends well with hubris. It’s the law.
And why are the mighty mighty tech bros so confident that they should be telling the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics what to think?
Shh, We’re Building God
According to author Karen Hao, there’s a “Dark Reality” in the AI race to “create God,” via the Times (UK) (archived):
Hao was given unprecedented access to OpenAI’s offices in 2019, and has since spoken to hundreds of former employees and people within Altman’s inner circle to piece together the story of how OpenAI went from an ideological non-profit, with the purpose of “saving humanity”, to an engine of record financial investment and controversy…
Speaking to insiders later on, she would hear how what had begun as an organisation throwing ideas at the wall “to see what stuck” had been transformed under Altman’s singular obsession: to achieve AGI before everyone else. This included competitors, such as Google, but also states, such as China.
Its scientists and researchers were some of the brightest minds in the industry. But, Hao says, their belief in AGI was something more akin to a religious fervour. She calls it “the ideological pursuit of the machine god”.…OpenAI decided that the best way to achieve AGI was to take its large language models (LLMs) and dramatically scale them up. This meant “pouring ever more data into them and training them on supercomputers larger than anyone has ever built in human history”, says Hao. All this new processing power cost money, and OpenAI began a for-profit arm in order to find it.
“We’ve seen this collapsing of the entire AI field and the entire industry towards a singular approach that is intellectually extremely lazy and societally deeply harmful,” argues Hao.
“All of the things that we see in terms of the negative impacts of AI come from this scaling idea.”
The vast, water-consumptive data centres popping up all over the world, driving up local energy prices, are a result of AI companies feeding LLMs more and more data in an effort to expand their knowledge base. Meanwhile, companies trawling the internet for morsels of information on which to train them has eroded our privacy and intellectual property…
Well, good luck with all that.
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