The Experiment of Representative Democracy Has Failed
What’s Next?
Elected representatives everywhere are compromised, bought or bribed—because we invested those representatives with the power that criminal organizations want. Predictably, a technocratic cartel is now locking itself into the place of government.
Abandon the belief that only power in the wrong hands is bad. No benevolent dictator was ever going to save us.
Recently, while watching the documentary The Agenda: Their Vision - Your Future by Oracle Films, I noted the narrator bemoans the fact that a technocratic elite are now controlling society, replacing elected representatives. That kind of thinking is what got us into this mess. Representatives should never have been trusted with all that power.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution did not envision representatives having the power to manipulate the economy, culture, and education. I suppose they expected citizens to be more directly responsible for themselves and their neighbors. Little by little, citizens have begged authoritarians to take control. Please fix this social problem. Please promote this kind of culture. Please support this industry. Please pay for science that can be patented. Please make this illegal for our own good. Please make everybody buy that for their own good.
Now government is the one-stop shop for everything humanity needs. All the other venues have been boarded up. We are being ushered into a digital ID prison—for our entertainment and convenience. All of our data, as well as that of our representatives, has been collected together: health, taxes, purchases, banking transactions, court records, genetics, biometrics, travel, browsing history, online comments, text messages, email, and even things we’ve said out loud around our smartphones.
PaIantir has all us thought criminals on a list. During the Covid psyop, it was PaIantir that handled the logistics of instituting medical martial law. With the “modernization” of government information technologies, they are going to be handling all the logistics. We’re about to live the sequel of Debbie Lerhman’s The Deep State Goes Viral.
Meanwhile, every day we hear more about lawlessness within our governments: controlled or stolen elections, illegal acts of war, violations of civil liberties, and outright mass murder. The message is: “You are powerless. You are useless.”
In recent days, they’ve ceased pretending that they intend to rule by any other means but by military technofascism.
Remember Deborah Birx, everybody’s beautifully silk-scarfed Auntie Deb who stood beside Fauci and told us to submit to a lockdown for “two weeks to flatten the curve”? She’s a former Army Colonel and she has now taken a seat on the board of PaIantir. Big Tech has always been connected with the military; the third-party contractor cover story was just there to get around the constitutional protections of civil liberties. As the Grayzone reports, four Tech Bros, from OpenAI, Palantir, and Meta have joined the military as Lieutenant Colonels, by-passing the usual procedures for attaining such rank.
The Overton window may have slammed shut by the time I post this. Full scale censorship, economic control, and robo-cop policing are poised to begin. PaIantir founders, Peter ThieI and AIex Karp have not been shy about expressing their contempt for humanity.
This is some cartoon-level villainy. We are meant to be aghast. Shock and awe is debilitating. This is statecraft as stagecraft. Who’s behind the scenes? The ones with the money printing presses as always, obviously.
Oops. AI is Terrible at Making Crucial Predictions
Palantir’s recent track record for predicting the outcomes of highly complex situations is not so good.
Apparently, PaIantir has been partnered with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) since 2015 and it was PaIantir that made the assessment (overriding Director Gabbard’s intelligence), determining that lran was nuclear weapon capable and lsraeI should attack, killing the nuclear treaty negotiations that were ongoing.
Ah, but lsraeI’s defense capabilities were greatly over-estimated. And the appetite of the lranian people for regime change was misjudged. If PaIantir is responsible for that fiasco in lran and lsraeI, the value of their fortune telling should be called into question. But we’re going forward anyway with the Big Beautiful Bill, which will shove a lot of Stablecoin (the new dollar) their way.
On June 30, 2025, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a notice stating that the Department of Defense would stop providing scientists with satellite weather data effective immediately. The reason given, as reported by NPR, was “cybersecurity concerns” and the need to meet new “information technology modernization requirements.” Is this because PaIantir is being given exclusive access to all government data? Is the US government really stupidly concentrating all information and all decision-making into one privately-owned prediction machine?
A ThieI-linked company called Rainmaker had seeded clouds thirty-six hours before the massive flood in Texas. (Flash floods in valleys occur about a day after rain saturates the higher hilly country.) Rainmaker’s contract is with NOAA. Did Rainmaker have access to PaIantir’s AI to make decisions about where and how much to seed? Weather, as a complex non-linear system, is notoriously unpredictable.
Could it be that AI is not very good at predicting outcomes for complex situations? I’ve been saying so in every substack essay for years now. AI can never predict the outcomes of complex systems due to their inherent tendencies either toward self-organization or deterministic chaos.
However, in all likelihood the goal of AI.GOV is not to make good predictions at all, but to cause chaos. If that’s the plan, then they might be surprised to discover that we won’t lock ourselves down and obey orders this time. We might respond with plans of our own to build a new humanistic order out of their chaos.
What Do We Do Now?
I invite readers to fill the comments section with your alternative plans. Make them radical.
A lot of my friends and colleagues are starting to realize that we’ve been wasting our time focusing on what this or that Reality TV actor did this week. It’s all a distraction from what we really need to be doing: making plans, imagining a better future. We can’t reform a system that is completely captured by rogue forces. We will waste our time starting a new party, rehabilitating government agencies, electing better representatives.
Reform isn’t going to happen. No Covid reckoning will be forthcoming from the perpetrators.
We were told that an AI surveillance company like PaIantir could solve “waste, fraud, and abuse” by eliminating “information silos” and feeding all data into a new Magic Eight Ball. But the problems that Elon Musk’s DOGE uncovered are problems that have been created by the mistakes of previous Congresses that have taken us further and further away from the US Federal Government’s original duties. For instance, there wouldn’t be waste, fraud, or abuse at the IRS without the the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The income tax requires that all citizens open their private financial records to the government. Every citizen is potentially vulnerable to corrupt administrations that seek to punish people for their political views or activism.
Government has gone from supplying court houses for jury trials, building roads and delivering mail, to trying to micromanage the economy, culture, and society. A government is not suited to those additional roles because the main tool of government is the threat of brute force.
Yes, culture and research are extremely important to society. That’s why you don’t ask the government to help. I have been the recipient of some very generous Federal and State grants. But I believe that support for culture, research and welfare needs to come from universities and (non-government funded) charities, supported by individuals. It is not appropriate for a government to forcibly take money from people to support cultural and social programs they do not want. This gives way too much corruptible power to the government and distorts the kinds of programs that get support. In general, we are not better off culturally or scientifically or socially with the support we’ve been getting from government.
Let’s stop wasting time on politicians and spend our time building the independent institutions we need.
There are three branches of society: government, private industry, and non-profits. They play different roles and they all need to be separate. A government should not collect taxes to pay private industry or NGOs.
I think a government should mostly be a buildings and grounds department, erecting infrastructure: transportation and communication lines, ports, roads, bridges and train tracks, court buildings, public theaters, school buildings, community centers, and hospitals; all funded with Greenbacks (End the Fed). Citizens could pay moderate fees to use the infrastructure and, through local boards and cooperatives, hire the management to run them.
Right now in prisons, millions of able-bodied men recline in bunk beds or do piece work for pennies for private corporations. Instead, prisoners could be expected to serve the poor of their own communities, growing healthy food for them and building them safe, durable, and modest but pretty houses. This will give convicts a sense of purpose and it will help end the conditions that led to crimes in the first place. When they are released back into the public, they will know how to grow their own food and build/improve their own houses.
We are not powerless. We are not useless.
In the comments, let me know what kind of radically new world you want to build.
-V. N. A.
p.s. Because politics are so depressing, I’ve lately turned my attention back to writing and promoting my novels. Please take some time to listen to me go on about Naked Singularity on Instagram. There is a new audiobook version out.
In the story, a man who is dying from throat cancer asks his daughter to euthanize him and she doesn’t want to do it. This brings up questions about the nature of freewill and the question of who gets to decide when. The plot twists when a male night nurse enters the scene and seeks to take advantage of the desperate daughter.
Instead of paying taxes so that I have more government grants to apply for, you could get one of my books.
Thanks for the shout out! My thought is that before we build, or maybe while we are trying to build, resilient local communities, we need to get as many people out of the various propaganda bubbles as possible. Simply warning friends, relatives and neighbors about mRNA, vaccines in general, CBDCs, NATO as a nexus of evil, etc is a huge task. If most of the Covid dissidents hadn’t been vacuumed into the MAHA/MAGA bubble, we would be so much better off. They might not be as brainwashed as the Covid cultists, so perhaps trying to extract them is worthwhile. I’m not sure of anything at this point, except that we need as many people as possible to get off the hopium and stay in the struggle.
“Reform isn’t going to happen.” <— Precisely.
Where there is belief in ‘reform’ you’ll also find one of two things: 1) a clinging to the notion that certain personalities can guide us out of this mess, or 2) a deep-seated laziness which refuses to acknowledge the depth of the hole and tar. This is what too many think of as ‘hope’. This is seen in too many supposedly ‘intelligent’ individuals.
It’s a manifestation of denial, a refusal to come to grips with the true depth and breadth of the problem. Nearly everything we’re commonly taught and trained to believe in is wrong-headed and based in deception. That’s a hard pill to swallow. The imp in too many minds keeps taunting: “It can’t be that bad.” But it is.
A great many have yet to face the true depth of the crisis, and will learn only when they are badly burned by it. Many of the comfortable haven’t had to confront this yet, so don’t grapple with it. Tweaking details at the margins won’t fix anything.
This isn’t a black pill. It’s a frank outlook: the problems are enormous and deep-rooted. It’s so massive that individual action in protest ends up being a whisper. The first collective steps are also challenged by the most inertia. More people need to publicly acknowledge (as you have in your essay) the deep nature of the problem. What should then follow is currently hamstrung by the over-reliance on surveilled and censored technological communication platforms.