UNLIMITED HANGOUT

Artificial Intelligence is arguably the most important, disruptive technological invention in human history. At the same time, AI acts as the perfect narrative cover for the largest power grab ever attempted by humans. These truths are not at odds with one another, and being able to intellectually navigate both simultaneously and successfully requires a nuanced framework that has, in my opinion, failed to materialize thus far in the public conversation.

The very idea of making an Artificial Intelligence lies within the combination of the intangible with the tangible –– the conscious with the unconscious, the metaphysical with the physical, the spiritual with the worldly, the psychological with the physiological, etc. Today’s AI programmers and chip manufacturers are yesterday’s alchemists –– attempting to turn sand into thought in lieu of lead into gold.

An issue I find in discussing AI is that the discourse so quickly sours to straight up propaganda from its creators or –– perhaps more insidiously –– surface-level, esoteric “mumbo jumbo” (see above) that muddies the ability to create informed consent for the masses. I have yet to resonate fully with any would-be sides of any would-be debate on the matter and remain quite skeptical of the public’s perception on its implications today, not to mention tomorrow. In my opinion, no champion of the technology has properly addressed the immediate and long-term effects from this distributed state-change of generative and analytical compute.

These two axioms –– tangibility and time –– I intend to use as scaffolding to house my thoughts, which admittedly contain much conflict, confusion, and unknown ignorance. Before diving in, I’d like to preface this purposefully “negative” opinion piece about the downsides with a brief caveat that I do believe there are a handful of use cases for this technology that are quite interesting as it relates to the supposed goal of “empowering the individual.” That said, I think the pros are far outweighed by the cons, and thus –– in addition to my belief that there are far more pro-AI talking points circulating than negative –– I will spare you from such and focus on the less discussed downsides of this disruptive technology.

The Tangible Today: Big Data and Surveillance

The most tangible threat vectors brought about by today’s proliferation of LLMs relate to data –– both the personal data willingly given by its users, and the immense amount of data already amassed. Both of these venues for surveillance, not to mention algorithmic-driven predictive policing, are enabled entirely by the incredible ability of AI to comb through ungodly amounts of data with ease, and to efficiently heuristically analyze people and things into a network from an otherwise insurmountable cache of data. While many proponents of the technology counter this notion with the suggestion of using locally-run, open source models to protect your data, this ultimately does little to truly minimize the effects of a terminally-shrinking anonymity set for internet users.

Unfortunately, simply opting out of using closed source AI does not negate the state change to world surveillance brought about by the technology. Choosing not to put a Ring camera on your front door matters little if your neighbor across the street has one facing your house. Furthermore, even if you convince your neighbor to take his camera down, and convince the greater neighborhood to remove their Flock-style cameras, AI-enabled surveillance satellites passing overhead and driver-less electric vehicles full of sensors passing by shrink your “meat-space” anonymity sets significantly.

The internet is an open network that communicates between nodes by breaking down larger data sets into tiny, easily transmissible packets, which are reconstructed into said larger data sets once they arrive at their final destination. For example, a video call you make on your cellphone is beamed to your conversational counterpart in compartmentalized bits of data via hardware infrastructure owned and operated by internet service providers. These packets are often broadcast without any sort of encryption, and said ISPs or software providers such as Google or Facebook, can easily amass and store immense data tranches of user activity, which up until now was a relatively useless venture due to the sheer volume of internet data volume. These same tools and data sets are now available to domestic and foreign intelligence, to domestic and foreign AI companies, and to domestic and foreign military powers, law enforcement, and court systems. Unfortunately, no longer can our activities online find safety within numbers.

As more and more humans become reliant on LLMs for task managing, communications, e-commerce, content creation, and even investment management, the amount of personal data that becomes beholden to these often privately-owned companies and their user agreements grows in magnitude –– often just one click away from being entered in the State’s data coffers. As more user data is accumulated in various silos, the want to forcibly take said data increases, and with AI-enabled exploits and advanced phishing techniques (see Revolut’s latest whoopsie) the ability to keep it safe is rapidly decreasing. AI necessitates more data to train on while also encouraging more user data be provided to said data silos.

This issue is further exacerbated due to a self-enforcing loop of human reliance on these very systems –– more usage today means more prompts and user data sent to the training sets, which in turn are used to strengthen and maximize the “stickiness” of users. Unfortunately, this reliance loop of data provided and data stored has likely reached some semblance of escape velocity, and trying to shove this system back in the proverbial Pandora’s box will fail on any level other than the extremely local level –– e.g. an individual opting out within their own home. Ultimately, this does nothing to address the very real state-change of surveillance enabled by AI in the real world.

As it stands today, the world at large has seemingly chosen to keep feeding this metaphorical runaway train with data centers, kilowatts, and dollars, blurring the lines between the public-private partnerships upholding this new industry. Many of the fears of a State-controlled, Big Brother system are only feasible with an enforceable, bureaucracy-scaling AI –– whether the system is ultimately co-opted by the State or run by a small, private group of technologists from Northern California is irrelevant.

All that matters is that it exists, and that it can be utilized by the humans hiding behind its linear algebraic curtains.

The Tangible Tomorrow: Empowering The Breakaway

One of the greatest tricks the AI industry deploys at large is focusing the discourse entirely on the technological level, and ignoring the human element. But on occasion, the idea of human empowerment from distributed intelligence is discussed on the individual level. For example, an entrepreneur’s small business is able to scale far more quickly due to deflationary efficiency gains from cutting costs on expenses surrounding human labor and time. This is generally viewed in a positive light, and there are certainly merits to it on shorter time frames. Unfortunately, tomorrow’s end game to this deflationary axiom is quite centralizing, with efficiency gains for them, and unemployment lines for you. The exponentiality of this very real mechanism is knowingly distorted by those most poised to benefit from it –– the stewards, creators, investors, and legislators –– while the entirety of the focus stays on the short-term empowerment of the working class.

Very real and very tangible nexuses of power, whether at the State level or within the private sector, already exist. AI-enabled automation and analysis allows these very parties an opportunity to seize the means of production and centralize the profits and efficiency gains downstream of this deflationary technology. While most rhetoric involving AI deceleration is framed by AI accelerators as CCP propaganda or communist gobbledygook, how exactly is the working class empowered by a small minority dominating the fields of AI-enabled, automated manufacturing of AI-enabled drones and droids? The fields of warfare, healthcare, education, construction, finance, agriculture and even hospitality and the arts, are up for serious and permanent revolution moving forward from these advancements. What appears as disruption and decentralization today can quickly turn to destruction and consolidation tomorrow.

For example, AI’s so-called “distributed efficiency gains” are capped by the masses’ ability to generate compute, which in turn requires immense amounts of energy and chip fabrication capabilities. Unfortunately, energy capacity and production remains one of the most State-controlled industries on Earth, despite recent gains in solar and battery technology. In addition, chip fabrication might actually be the most centralized industry on Earth. As distributed compute reduces the choke points of control to power and fabrication, the plausibility of these industries somehow migrating out from under the thumb of its controllers to the benefit of AI users diminishes the further into tomorrow we go.

The very AI-driven empowerment that is touted by its stewards also applies equally to the already powerful –– be it the literal State, the private companies and investors, or the fraternities within the breakaway merger of public and private interests which has dominated our lives both politically and economically for many decades. Many of my personally held fears regarding the State’s empowerment from tomorrow’s digitized economy –– in spite of today’s personal gains from digital asset appreciation –– are similarly ignored by AI sycophants who refuse to acknowledge the parallels of centralized pockets of control being empowered by AI –– open source or otherwise. There is a further parallel between the two models, given that the warm fuzzy thoughts reserved for open source AI are similar to those showered upon privately-issued dollar stablecoins, while closed source AI plays the role of CBDCs with respect to the surveillable and programmable money debate. (Even their marketing lingo has shocking similarities –– “braining the unbrained” is the new “banking the unbanked.”)

Compounding on this unfortunate reality is the idea that as the means of production –– be it for power capacity, chip fabrication, or compute –– are gobbled up by this breakaway power’s use and control of AI-enabled manufacturing, our would-be dissenters are stuck in group thought, which itself is distributed and homogenized by continued LLM use.

The Intangible Today: Viral Replication of Homogenized Thought

While we have discussed AI’s ability to analyze larges swathes of data, little time thus far has been given to its ability to generate content. This is likely due to the fact that today’s effects from AI’s generative capabilities are relatively intangible upon first glance. For starters, thought generation and content distribution, as it stands today, have centralized discourse to be native to social media platforms and trained on shockingly similar datasets –– both of which are determined by a small set of Silicon Valley stalwarts. This means that what you believe to be an efficiency gain as it relates to content creation is in fact an homogenization of thought, distributed on rails patrolled by curative bots and algorithms. This combination and context exacerbates a viral-esque replication of human homogeneity, with numerous and intangible consequences for today.

For example, this coagulation of content has huge effects on the ability to organize and properly discuss whether humans should actually be accelerating this at the scale that is currently being pushed today. Quite frankly, there is a case to be made that the entire world economy has been tethered to this idea that AI will “work” and that any debt taken on today will be offset with said efficiency gains and deflationary effects. Unfortunately, the very nature of AI’s generative and distributive nature, paired with a suite of malleable Silicon Valley-created content algorithms –– not to mention the monetary incentives at the nation and influencer-level –– has created the worst possible environment for appropriate discourse on the technology itself. Thus, it is my suggestion that you do your best to ignore the constructed and simulated mass fear of being left behind that plagues the purchased propaganda permeating today. It is okay to question the narratives of the Techno-Optimists, many of whom have merged their private tech firms with the National Security State. It is more than reasonable to question the motives of the AI industry. The accelerationists claim they are pushing the frontier of human thought with their research, but then shame those thinking outside the regulated lanes –– for thinking cautiously.

When we look back, I fear we will realize that many of the compounding mistakes made due to ignorance of the long-term effects of AI use could have been avoided with proper care regarding the unknowns of today.

The Intangible Tomorrow: The Suffocated Spirit

The last quadrant, the intangible tomorrow, unfortunately necessitates some discussion of the aforementioned esoteric “mumbo jumbo.” The generative, creative force of nature –– whether internally in the mind of an individual human or in a larger, physical ecosystem –– is in serious danger. Both individuals and collective humanity are at risk from the onslaught of slop corrupting humanity’s own intangible “training sets” as it dominates our most prominent cultural battlegrounds. Much like how an AI’s training set can become corrupted by training on its own generative content, so, too, can the prompter’s knowledge base become tainted from their incessant use of generative tools in lieu of their own intellect and creativity. Furthermore, even those that choose not to prompt a machine when, for example, writing an op-ed, their constant exposure to slop –– be it articles, podcast scripts, memes, music, or less obvious slop-portunities such as take-out menus, logos or websites –– will still influence their inspiria.

Much like how moving to a new country that speaks a new language can change your unconscious mind and affect your dreams, humanity moving into a new, AI-driven world with a new generative language for rhetoric and design will certainly have an intangible effect on our unconscious minds, be it collectively or individually. Not to vouch for the rest of their philosophy, which I certainly do not, but one could borrow the Theosophic concept of the “akashic records” as a parallel to the training sets that LLMs parse when they generate content. As more and more of the recent end of the “akashic record” –– the collective experience of humanity –– is dominated by experiences that are influenced and generated by artificial intelligence, concurrently less and less of the overall human experience remains human-derived. The long-term effects from this are simply unknown.

The off-shoring of one’s cognitive output to a LLM is one thing, but the communal consequences of society and culture doing so could have immense implications for the intangible –– for creativity, for the soul, for the generative nature of life itself. To the latter point, the very start of existence itself –– something from nothing –– has led to multitudes of spiritual, philosophical and religious reasoning throughout human history. The only certainty of such an event is that no one was there to observe, and while I do not fully understand my own reasoning, I fear the something-from-nothing nature of life itself could be buried by the amassing of surveillance data and persistent context enabled by AI.

Life and human creativity becomes buried in slop, while culture and society are suffocated by persistent surveillance –– regardless of AGI or ASI being achieved.

Yesterday and The AGI Paradox

I think there is a not-so great reason why the discourse up until now has focused so much on whether or not AGI is achieved, or if that is even possible –– it becomes a semantics issue, and it ultimately does not matter. The great fear around AI today, p(Doom) or the existential threat from a rogue artificial generative intelligence (AGI), fails to contain the reality that occurs regardless of a Skynet-esque act of war from our creation.

In my opinion, AI doom and AI abundance are yet another false binary, and that humanity will forever change with the onset and proliferation of modern AI algorithms, regardless if it meets the requirements for achieving AGI. To put it “poetically,” an algorithm need not contemplate existence in order to snuff it out. Hyper focus on the very unlikely extremes –– p(Doom) or AGI-enabled utopia –– clouds today’s discourse from discussing not only what has already happened due to AI, but what will likely happen.

I am less afraid for humanity’s doomsday caused by AI than I am of humanity doom-scrolling itself into irrelevance and spirit death caused by AI. I certainly do not think a top-down ban on the technology will do any good but further centralize control on an already centralizing technology, but I am more hopeful that a bottom-up resistance to AI could help us preserve humanity’s spirit –– warts and all.

After sharing an early version of this piece with a few trusted friends with very pro-AI stances, an opinion I kept hearing was that if the surveillance state was already so entrenched alongside the negatives outline above, why not just use the technology today? Unfortunately, I am unable to come to terms with a few elements of such a line of thinking.

For starters, I believe strongly that not every axiom of privacy is a dead end, and I will not gate-keep nor “doompill” about the very real efforts being put into carving out privacy-enabled enclaves, digital or otherwise, for humans to utilize. Secondly, I also believe strongly that the world –– or rather, the elite’s perception of the world –– relies on a karmic law of some innately unknowable sort. Having spent a handful of years now immersed in the dissection of the-powers-that-be’s plans, it seems apparent to me that revelation of the method is of utmost importance to them, and there are numerous iterations of hidden symbolism and “quiet part out loud” quotes from said leaders and their henchmen. For these reasons –– as ridiculous as they may seem to some –– I will not consent to giving up the privacy front in order to slightly streamline some processes in my day-to-day with AI.

Instead, I urge those that wish to normalize discussing an aversion to AI-generated content. Better yet, go out of your way to support AI-free content! Carefully curate your and your families’ intake of the aforementioned slop, and remain a steward of all that was achieved by humans in the days before silicon could think for us. Humanity is certainly barreling towards a new frontier –– one with many, many stated promises, and a few less-spoken fears. AI will certainly bring about a new world, just maybe not the one we were sold.

In order to ensure our tomorrow, all we must do today is remember yesterday.

Remember Yesterday: AI For Today and Tomorrow.

Op-ed: This is an opinion piece published on Unlimited Hangout. Most articles published on UH are not opinion pieces, so we are clearly labeling those that are.

It should be no secret to readers of Unlimited Hangout that I have a very negative view of the impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having on independent media and media in general. As someone who has been impersonated by AI daily on large video platforms for a few years now, I have come to acutely feel that AI is becoming a dangerous force that is making it increasingly difficult for well-meaning readers/viewers to distinguish between what is real and what is false. I don’t mean just for those hoping to view my content, as the personal issue I am facing is a microcosm of a much larger problem.

As a result, one might think that I would have been pleased, if not relieved, to see Substack, a large platform for professional writers, partner with an “AI detection tool.” Not only am I not pleased, but I have now taken the time to write an opinion piece explaining why I think this is bad and to also explain where I think a lot of this is going.

Substack’s new partner and, apparently, the AI detection tool of choice for most major media outlets right now is called Pangram. Pangram was founded in 2023, originally under the name Checkfor.ai, by Max Spero and Bradley Emi. Both Spero and Emi are Stanford graduates who, prior to Pangram, worked for companies like Nuro and Tesla where they both worked on AI self-driving car software (i.e. replacing human drivers with AI software). Both founders “have long been excited about the potential for AI to transform society” and say they created Pangram “to mitigate new issues caused by the proliferation of powerful generative AI models.”

I find it interesting that two Stanford graduates passionate about AI’s potential to “transform society” who then worked to facilitate AI-powered, human-free driving software decided to quickly pivot to “mitigate” issues caused by generative AI. A lot of the issues caused by generative AI were actually predicted years ago by figures like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Pangram co-founder Max Spero previously did work for Google). Schmidt, in a 2021 book authored with war criminal Henry Kissinger, essentially predicted that AI’s “transformative potential” would cause what he called “cognitive diminishment” in the masses and make it almost impossible for people to distinguish between what is real and what is not on their own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” to this problem was that we become reliant on AI to distinguish for us what is real and what is not –– in other words, to let another AI become the arbiter of our reality.

Pangram co-founders Max Spero (left) and Bradley Emi (right) – Source

I have written before about this Schmidt-Kissinger book and its predictions, and also noted that there these predictions and warnings –– given the power networks in which both men are/were enmeshed –– were more likely to be disclosure of what had already planned with respect to AI rather than warnings about what might happen upon the mass adoption of AI. Nevertheless, the Schmidt-Kissinger “warnings” were unusually prescient. In addition, their proposed solution is very similar to the what Pangram is currently offering –– in that Pangram uses AI to recognize AI vs. human writing. Pangram thus becomes the currently preferred AI arbiter of what is real human writing and what is not.

There has certainly been a successful marketing campaign to convince us that Pangram is the “most accurate” AI writing detection tool on the market. Headlines of articles promoting Pangram essentially communicate that it will definitely tell you whether AI wrote something. If you read past the headline, which many don’t, you will see the fine print that Pangram will also mark something as AI generated even if AI was only used to edit a human-generated piece of writing. Pangram’s AI-generated label doesn’t really distinguish between the two, even though, as co-founder Max Spero acknowledges, that label “changes how people approach the text.”

The fact that Pangram can’t meaningfully distinguish between a text fully generated by AI or one simply edited by it reveals that it is not an “AI detector” at all. As noted by Tim Requarth back in April:

The term AI “detector” is a bit of a misnomer, as tools like Pangram don’t scan a database of known AI text for a match; they make a guess about likely authorship based on differences in patterns between AI-generated and human-generated text. Rather than a detector, thinks of it as an “AI inferencer” or more colloquially, an “AI best guesser.”

As an inference tool, Pangram is vulnerable to everything that makes inference so difficult: small sample sizes (a single article rather than a corpus), small effect sizes (as the statistical distance between human and AI writing shrinks), and confounds (a human who reads and mimicks AI-generated text before writing her own).

Indeed, the way Pangram works is by making inferences about whether a given piece of writing features enough of the words, phrases, sentence construction, etc. that are currently common in AI-generated text. However, many humans writers, long before generative AI, used a lot of those words, phrases, etc., too. As a consequence, we now have writers who are altering their entirely human writing style in order to please the Pangram gods and hope they won’t be falsely labeled as AI slop purveyors.

A good example of this was recently discussed in a piece by Alex Kirshner for Slate. In that article, Kirshner writes:

Whatever the future holds for the accuracy of A.I. detectors, I am unsettled by what both the A.I. writing and the detectors are doing to me right now. I worry about how A.I. writing and efforts to sniff it out are changing fully human writing. I write all week, every week, and can feel this story’s arsonists (LLMs, particularly when used the wrong way) and firefighters (A.I. detectors) weighing on my process in negative ways.

Like many journalists, my writing style comes from the books, news articles, blogs, and (yes) social media posts that have latched on to my brain over the years. A.I. writing is now in my water supply, whether I can identify each new gulp or not. It feels inevitable that I’ve started to internalize its tics, even the most infamous ones, like incessant em-dashing and overreliance on the “It’s not x but y” structure. For one thing, I fear this will make me a worse writer, dragging a talent that was good enough to get me hired here (and elsewhere!) back toward the A.I.-generated median. Scarier yet, it’s possible that someone—or, heaven forbid, some A.I. detector—might mistake my text for ChatGPT’s. I have started to self-police against this outcome. A few times lately, I’ve caught myself modifying my own work to sound “less like A.I.” In the process, I’ve probably picked words I wouldn’t have settled on otherwise. It feels dystopian—and I doubt I’ve succeeded. 

I would go a step further than Kirschner and say that this outcome is definitely dystopian. It becomes more so when one considers that the supposedly “telltale” patterns of AI-generated text change as new, improved models are released, particularly as they are literally ripping through mountains of obscure, human-written books to train them to write more and more like humans. Meanwhile, the actual humans, to keep a job in a world where the pool of writing jobs is already shrinking rapidly, are scrambling to not sound like something that is rapidly being trained to sound like them as much as possible. Perhaps by design, this is not a game that humans are meant to win and, as I will explain later on, that means it is a game that writers should quickly stop playing.

A screengrab from Pangram’s website – Source

Before we get there, there are a couple of other things to note about Pangram and other AI “detection” companies. One is the issue of false positives. Yes, it is true that Pangram is considered by ostensibly independent researchers (and also itself) to have the smallest false positive rate in the industry. For the purpose of this example, let us use Pangram’s claim that only 1 in 10,000 Pangram-generated labels regarding AI or human authorship are false positives, meaning the text is labeled AI generated when it is not. On Substack, which now has Pangram embedded within it, we do not know exactly how many posts on average are made a day, as Substack does not disclose, but we can guess. The site itself claims that over 1 million posts are “discovered by potential subscribers in the app every day.” The site has over 2 million active publications, most of which publish at least weekly. Let us say, for the purpose of this example, that those 2 million publications do publish weekly. Then, 200 of them, per Pangram’s rate, will be marked as false positives every week. Over a year (52 weeks), we get over 10,000 Substack articles that are falsely labeled as AI, even though they are not. While this figure is still certainly smaller than what Pangram’s competitors offer, if we assume that those 10,000 false positives affect different publications, that could be 10,000 human writers being falsely labeled as AI slop, thereby affecting their reputation, revenue and, perhaps most crucially, their trust with their audience over that calendar year. I see it as a push to outsource trust about a writer’s authenticity from being between a writer and their audience to being between Pangram and a writer’s audience.

While these are statistics used by Pangram and its partners for marketing purposes, behind those numbers are real human writers facing an accusation from Pangram’s AI that could ruin their business. As this effect stacks over years, it could theoretically make the pool of human writers whose work has not been labeled as AI by Pangram smaller and smaller as time goes on. It is also fair to say that the false positive rate that Pangram cites is also the lowest one that has surfaced in research about its product, and it is cited most frequently because the company considers it most favorable to its interests. It is entirely plausible that the actual false positive rate is higher. There is also the added issue that if you run the same text through Pangram more than once, you’re likely to get highly variable –– as opposed to consistent –– results, making Pangram’s verdicts look more based on the luck of the draw than any meaningful “detection” of AI use.

Another important angle to explore with respect to Pangram is the potential for this tool to be deliberately wielded as a weapon for the purpose of censorship and/or discrediting a given journalist or outlet. Max Spero, Pangram’s co-founder, has notably been accused of using his Twitter account to call out specific outlets and journalists for using AI, which has –– in recent months –– generated major headlines and controversy. I don’t really think it’s relevant for the purpose of this article to investigate whether the claims levied against those journalists and outlets are true or not. As recently noted, Pangram does generate false positives, but it is also possible that these journalists did use AI in some way but did not disclose it. However, what is relevant here is that Spero in particular has used the verdict of his company’s AI “detector” to make weaponized claims against specific journalists and outlets.

As a long-time writer in independent media who has consistently written about controversial topics before it later became safe to do so (see my early work on Epstein’s Israeli intelligence ties, Peter Thiel and Palantir, among other topics), I am not a fan of mainstream or “legacy” media. On more than one occasion, they have either defamed me or used my research and writing without citing me. A good part of my career has also been spent picking apart the often misleading narratives they promote. As a result, I tend to be skeptical about the authenticity and veracity of the articles published by many of the same large outlets that Spero has targeted. However, there is another Spero quote that may get your attention if you have been closely following independent media over the past ten years.

In an article published by TechCrunch about Pangram’s recent raising of $9 million dollars from investors, Spero discussed wanting to start Pangram to mitigate new issues that emerged following the public release of generative AI tools. As an example of what types of new issues had emerged as a result of AI’s growing use, Spero offered “LLM-powered Russian disinformation campaigns and UAE-influenced campaigns on Twitter.”

Perhaps you remember the time, beginning roughly ten years ago and continuing for many years since, that any piece of reporting from independent media that was deemed inconvenient to the powers that be (particularly about US proxy wars abroad) was falsely labeled as “Russian disinformation.” Perhaps, more recently, you may remember pro-Israel influencers and media outlets similarly claiming that criticism of Israel in recent years has allegedly been driven by funding from Qatar, as opposed to public outrage over Israel’s live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Or what about the newer claim that LLM-powered bot accounts from China that had no reach whatsoever are really secretly behind Americans’ growing distrust of Big Tech and discontent over data centers?

If you have been following long enough, you may have noticed a trend whereby critics of certain power structures are routinely and falsely labeled as state-sponsored propagandists or “bots” as a way to discredit, not only the critics themselves, but also to discredit the broader concern –– be it the impact of data centers or imperial wars. I do not know if Spero’s intent with Pangram is to similarly weaponize his company’s product in a similar way, but it is certainly possible.

However, the fact that Spero’s Pangram is partnered with Newsguard certainly increases that possibility. As I wrote back in 2019, Newsguard is a dubious “fact checker” that was initially created to discredit independent media outlets critical of US foreign policy, while giving admitted US propaganda organs like VOA a pass. It is also worth mentioning Newsguard’s national security connections — for example, it originally counted the former heads of the CIA and DHS under George W. Bush among its advisors on determining what is “fake news” and what is not. One of their top investors is the founder of Kroll Associates, often referred to as the “private CIA,” Jules Kroll. Now, with Pangram, Newsguard is determining what is “AI slop” and what is not and has used Pangram to launch a “real-time ‘AI content farm’ detection” service.

Newsguard’s original Advisory Board – Source

What better way to digitally nuke a group of reporters and any accompanying wave of public sentiment than by using a now “trusted” AI detector to label both the writers and the sentiment as inauthentic and machine-generated. The potential is for Pangram to become a new way for censoring human-authored, yet inconvenient content, particularly if content labeled AI-generated eventually becomes algorithimically demoted over what Pangram labels as human-generated. The public will be told that the “AI slop” is being buried, when — in reality — it is dissent.

The way it looks to me is that Pangram is currently in the phase of normalizing the ubiquity of its product and building “trust” with those who use Substack or any other platform (or browser plug-in) that integrates Pangram. During this period, readers will be trained to see a Pangram label and trust its results with no further information needed. This is how a company like Pangram can raise $14 million in financing (including from one of Anthropic’s main investors) for a product that it is available for free. As has been said before about online products, if the product is free, then you are the product. In this case, I think that training you to outsource your “trust” to Pangram from the person or outlet you are reading is the product. Once you trust an AI “detector” tool, you will trust its verdicts, perhaps even over the writer you had grown to trust.

Pangram’s co-founders did not make Pangram to protect human-generated writing and speech. Pangram’s co-founders have long been excited that AI will “transform society,” and immediately prior to Pangram, were developing algorithms to replace human drivers with AI. As noted above, they created Pangram to stop what they referred to as state-sponsored influence operations among other “issues” that emerged upon the public release of generative AI tools. With their former Big Tech employers having public sentiment move against them, whether on data centers or “smart” glasses or something else, Pangram’s co-founders may offer a new way of doing away with accounts deemed too critical of AI’s “transformation” of society. Maybe not, but forgive me for being skeptical.

To conclude, I would like to again return to the Schmidt-Kissinger book on AI and its predictions. In independent media, many warn of the Hegelian dialectic, also known as “problem-reaction-solution.” That is, the powers that be first create the problem, then wait for the public to react and finally offer the public the policy outcome they always wanted as the solution. It certainly is convenient that Schmidt and Kissinger, two very terrible people who both helped create this mess in different ways, presciently predicted that AI would make it so people could no longer tell what was real and what was not. Now their prediction has become our reality and, right on cue, the company Pangram has stepped in to solve the AI slop problem (from which its own investors profit) by offering us what was also the Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” –– people relying on an AI arbiter to tell them what is real and what is not.

As I wrote earlier, the obvious way out of this dystopian game is not to play it. Do not trust Pangram’s AI just because it looks “authoritative” and has had some positive PR. It is not a “detector” as it claims to be and its results for the same text are rarely consistent. If you are a reader, ask the writers you are reading to disclose their use of AI. Trust should be built between writers and their readers directly, without an AI middleman and arbiter of authenticity or “humanness.” At Unlimited Hangout, we never use AI for writing, research or editing of our articles. This is made clear in our AI use policy, which you can read on our “About Us” page upon the imminent launch of the newly redesigned Unlimited Hangout website (In the meantime, you can read it here). We created this policy after helping create the IMA AI Transparency Pledge, which encourages independent journalists and outlets to voluntarily disclose if you choose to use AI and how.

Just like any other human writer, all I can offer to my readers is my research, my sourcing and my authentic analysis and, in the case of this article, my opinions. I am not going to run my articles obsessively through Pangram hoping for a “100% human-generated” result. I am not going to let fear of an unfavorable Pangram result change how I write and make me afraid of using words like “delve” or “profound” because Pangram might punish me. I know I write without AI and I have enough trust with my readers that they know I don’t use it in my writing either. Not unlike the entities that have labeled inconvenient reporters as Russian/Chinese “bots,” Pangram assumes that you can’t determine what is authentic and inauthentic on your own and that you need them to tell you.

While critical thinking may be in low supply in the age of AI, don’t let it be. You don’t need another AI to “help” you determine what does or doesn’t feel or seem authentic to you. You don’t need it to tell you what you should or shouldn’t read and who you should or shouldn’t trust. It’s never a good idea to outsource your critical thinking and your opinions to others, especially a non-human AI.

The Pangram Paradox: The Problem with AI “Detecting” other AIs.

Across this entire series, we have explored the dawning of a new kind of global governance structure. We are heading toward a multipolar, regional balance of geopolitical power, where financial and economic power is wielded by those who program the nodes on the finternet—those who set the unified regulatory and financial architecture, irrespective of their geographical location.

Populations will be controlled through the managed distribution and allocation of all resources—Technocracy. The United Nations (UN) believes global governance will be most effective when it is exerted extraneously of nation-states through a network of city-states. The global governance ambitions of the UN dovetail with the “Network Empire” objectives of the Praxians and the affiliated neoreactionary movement (NRx) accelerationists.

The Praxians and the NRx accelerationists want to deliver Governance as a Service (GaaS)—via Agentic AI—to captive populations of “customers.” They aim to achieve “the flippening of Network States over Nation States in real time” and ultimately to “establish a new form of human civilization: the Network Empire.”

Simultaneously, the UN wants to roll out “frontier technology”—a broad range of surveillance technologies including digital ID linked to programmable digital currencies—across a growing network of city-states. As we’ll see, the plan is to enforce Digital Nation Stacks on populations living in countries subsumed into their respective regional “poles” within a fragmented geopolitical world of bilateral partnerships between nations, which is the proposed basis of the multipolar world order (MWO).

The multipolar regionalization of global supply chains is giving rise to new types of international economic partnerships, such as Pax Silica. Thus, the MWO pole or union won’t necessarily be a geographically contingent region or global subregion, but rather a transnational partnership between geographically dispersed nations and subregions.

Just as access to the programmable nodes on the finternet will create new financial and monetary hegemons, commanding a city-state or Network State—as a node in a global “patchwork of [Network Empire] realms”—will create new geopolitical hegemons. The Network Empire is intended to institute a global partnership of hegemons (oligarchs) exerting global governance influence across the borders of the MWO.

In Part 3, we discussed a research paper published by the Soros-Omidyar network-backed policy think tank, the Center for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). The CIGI explored the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and its construction of “the finternet.” The finternet is described as “a unified, programmable financial internet, where digital money, tokenized assets, identity credentials, and compliance logic operate seamlessly across jurisdictions.”

Through its finternet, the BIS is seeking to command “the protocol layer of twenty-first-century power.” The CIGI recognized that the finternet represents “a new form of monetary hegemony,” which the CIGI called the “multipolar digital financial order (MDFO).”

Daniel Araya is a senior fellow of the CIGI. He explained how the MWO, with its integral MDFO, emerges through erosion of the existing global order:

In a multipolar world order, power is no longer concentrated in the hands of a single hegemon but diffused among a constellation of regional actors. [. . .] While the decline of unipolarity poses enormous challenges, it also offers an opportunity to build a resilient global order. [ . . .]

Decentralizing UN operations is essential to developing faster and more flexible crisis-response frameworks. [. . .] This means expanding cooperation with regional organizations such as the European Union, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the African Union, and Mercosur.

In my book The Technocratic Dark State, I called this apparent fragmentation of authority the “decentralization-to-recentralization trick.” While the system of international relations appears to be decentralized, it is then recentralized through the use of an overarching compliance management system. The Praxians, their oligarch partners, the UN, and various national governments want to use Agentic AI for this task.

Araya described what such a recentralized MWO system would look like:

Building on the efficiencies of artificial intelligence and robotics, UN administrative processes can be automated. [. . .] Real-time data analytics can [. . .] track humanitarian crises and monitor compliance. [. . .]

Most importantly, digital platforms can amplify the voices of smaller nations [and city-states], democratizing participation beyond the elite corridors of New York and Geneva.

The proposed global order, currently under construction, is unlike any form of government or intergovernmental governance system that we have ever encountered before. The so-called multipolar world order (MWO) is genuinely a new world order.

Despite the reported “wars,” the supposed “technological race,” the claimed “intense geopolitical competition,” and the alleged “economic chaos,” the movement towards regional supply chains, new international partnerships, digital transformation, and the increasing power of the private sector is relentless.

Nowhere is this unrelenting march towards the MWO more evident than in the Middle East. The reported “war” with Iran is leading to the construction of regional supply chains; Gaza is set to be an Agentic GaaS city-state, and Trump’s Epic Fury is leading to the disaggregation of hegemony in readiness for the multipolar world.

The Praxian and global governance goals are aligned. The Praxians had the means, motive, and opportunity to disrupt the Middle East. Evidently, they took it.

Glaring Deterritorialization

The United Nations wants to create a network of city-states within and spanning across the multipolar regions. To get to this point, the existing international rules-based order—often called unipolarity—has to be deterritorialized before being reterritorialized as the MWO.

To function as envisaged, there can be no global military or economic superpowers in the MWO. To form the multipolar regions, supply chains and energy corridors also need to be deterritorialized prior to being reterritorialized as more independent regional networks comprising both physical infrastructure and, crucially, programmable digital control mechanisms.

Global governance of all regions will be achieved by using the network of smart city-states and the global finternet to control the distribution and allocation of all resources to populations—Technocracy. Resource restrictions, enabled by surveillance technology that links individuals’ digital identities to all economic and social activities, will allow those who “write the code” to exert behavioral control over everyone.

With this proposed new system in mind, consider the amazingly prescient press conference address UN Secretary General António Gutteres delivered in late January 2026, just weeks before the US and Israel launched their joint attack on Iran and Lebanon.

Gutteres said:

These are early days, but 2026 is already shaping up to be a year of constant surprises and chaos. [. . .] We are living in a world where actions – especially reckless ones – are provoking dangerous reactions. [. . .] When perilous actions do not meet the adequate reaction, the system destabilizes. Impunity is driving today’s conflicts—fueling escalation, widening mistrust, and kicking the doors open for powerful spoilers to enter from every direction.

About a month later, the US and Israeli governments would demonstrate the “reckless actions” that would provoke the “dangerous reaction” to destabilize the global system. But contrary to Gutteres’ words, as we have already discussed in this series, the chaos was definitely no “surprise.” We can see that causing global economic chaos was the purpose of the so-called war.

We have also discussed how the UN views the populations’ adoption of frontier technology, through a network of smart city-states, as the most efficient means for it to enforce its new muscular model of UN 2.0 global governance. The UN has done everything it possibly can to support and encourage the global construction of the necessary smart cities. It has found common ground with the Praxians who seek to establish an Agentic GaaS Network Empire (see Part 3).

Turning his attention indirectly to the Network Empire, Gutteres said:

We are witnessing perhaps the greatest transfer of power of our times—not from governments to people, but from governments to private technology companies. When technologies that shape behavior, elections, markets, and even conflicts operate without guardrails, the reaction is not innovation; it is instability.

Gutteres’ solution, of course, is not to try to strengthen the sovereignty of national governments to tackle the instability. The UN 2.0 remodelling project is based upon the “transfer of power [. . .] from governments to private technology companies.” The UN’s remedy, therefore, is for the UN 2.0 MWO to ensure the allegedly necessary “guardrails” are erected to save the world from the “instability” the UN is helping to create.

Highlighting the instability “opportunity,” Guterres concluded that the UN’s own public-private partnership system has been engineered to address these challenges:

Our [global governance] structures and institutions must reflect the complexity—and the opportunity—of these new times and realities. One power alone cannot solve global problems. Nor will they be solved by two powers carving the world into rival spheres of influence. It is important to accelerate, deliberately and with determination, multipolarity—one that is networked, inclusive by design, and capable of creating balance through partnerships.

The MWO will be “networked” by embedding the Network Empire within it, spreading like mycelium across its regional and national borders.

Subsequently capitalizing on the so-called war with Iran, the UN has set up its Safeguards Accelerator to purportedly ensure that the “Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)”—the term that the UN assigns to the frontier technology being simultaneously installed by governments everywhere—is “inclusive” and delivers “meaningful and equitable economic change.” The UN’s sought-after “economic change” is the new “multipolar digital financial order (MDFO)” running on the BIS’ interoperable finternet.

The UN’s use of the term “Accelerator” should not be overlooked. In 2005, the Praxians’ Y Combinator launched the world’s first seed accelerator program. Since then, accelerationism has come to dominate the thinking of governments and intergovernmental organizations the world over.

“Accelerator” is not just some in-vogue label stuck on national and global initiatives for PR purposes. It has a very specific ideological significance. It shows a commitment to using “creative destruction” to deterritorialize sociopolitical and socioeconomic structures only to then reterritorialize them anew.

The UN offers its global Safeguard Accelerator as a “non-negotiable structural requirement.” This argument is also a common Praxian ploy: the “technological singularity” is inevitable, AI Agentic GaaS neostates are the only solution, and humanity must evolve to become “technoplastic beings.” All of these claims constitute risible hybrid warfare propaganda. None of the supposedly unavoidable responses are ineluctable or even necessary, and none are desirable from humanity’s perspective. It’s all just baseless assertion and propagandist bilge.

Bearing in mind the objectives of establishing the Network Empire, the MWO, and its requisite MDFO, the UN’s enthusiasm for accelerationism could not be more overt. Announcing its Safeguards Accelerator to create the “guardrails” to supposedly keep us safe, the UN insists there is a “crucial window for action” and that the UN is consequently “actively shaping country-level execution and delivering impact.”

The UN proclaims:

As the basic layers of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) develop, they change into systems that allow different countries to work together and create AI-powered services for both public and private use. [. . .] The Accelerator is the engine that drives local execution. [. . .] With implementations transitioning from pilots to population-scale rollouts, partners must embed practical safeguards into live code, design, deployment, governance, operations, and national policy now, or risk legacy institutional failure as these systems scale. [. . .] Where a country is rolling out or advancing an identity system, payments, data exchange layer, or sectoral DPI system, safeguards often need steady support. [. . .] The Accelerator is designed to help build this local capacity.

In a similar vein to the BIS’ finternet, the UN is adding “practical safeguards into live code” to make sure that those who write the Agentic governance code prioritize the UN goals in all of their programming. Equally, all programmable transactions must comply with global governance diktats.

The Multipolar Pax Silica Template

Though, according to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the EU is “a template that other regional organizations are following” to hopefully form a successful “bloc” or MWO “pole,” as yet it isn’t quite the perfect pole from the Praxians perspective. But that is all about to change.

The EU Commission has officially taken a dim view of Special Economic Zones (SEZs). This presents a slight problem for Praxians who want to construct European private SEZ charter cities—a new city granted a special jurisdiction to create a new governance system—as Elon Musk has in Texas for example.

Since the 2007 EU-wide SEZ ban, the EU mood-music on SEZs has been gradually shifting. In 2017, zone regulation amendments granted leeway enabling EU member states like Italy to expand their SEZ networks. Currently, the EU permits exemptions for its Export Processing Zones (EPZs), Economic Revitalisation Projects, the French “Zones Franches Urbaines,” and numerous other development zones, especially in Eastern Europe.

European Special and Free Economic Zones – Source

On June 23, 2026, the EU Commission signed the Pax Silica declaration. The Commission has committed the EU to work with “global partners to advance AI and supply chain security.” The stated purpose is to “create new opportunities for European business” but this will supposedly be achieved through “technological progress.” Tellingly, “economic security” is the goal—we’ll see why it is telling shortly. A significant expansion of the EU’s SEZ network is now very likely.

Back in 2024, the Draghi Report on the future of EU competitiveness was published. The research team, led by Mario Draghi, stated that the EU had an “innovation gap” and was lagging behind the US and China. Hence, the resultant Horizon EIC’s adoption of the DARPA model, for example.

Draghi is a former Goldman Sachs managing director; he was an executive director of the World Bank and, next, chairman of the Financial Stability Board (FSB)—a BIS cutout—before becoming governor of the Banca d’Italia. He then served as the president of the European Central Bank (ECB) and, finally, if relatively briefly, as Italian prime minister. Draghi is a prominent Bilderberger, a regular WEF delegate, and a member of the even more exclusive Group of 30 (G30). Draghi is a prominent member of the Deep State that exists to serve the oligarchy.

Draghi advised that to achieve economic security “[a]ccelerating innovation and technological progress” would be essential. The EU would need to maintain “low trade barriers in digital goods, services and infrastructures with the US [. . .] to guarantee access to the latest AI models and processors. “To this end,” Draghi continued, it would be important to secure “preferential trade agreements with key partners and guaranteeing critical supplies [. . .] and direct investment in production facilities. ” Draghi outlined how this could be achieved:

The EU must ensure that more cities and regions can participate in the sectors that will drive future growth, building on existing initiatives such as Innovation Valleys [and] Net-Zero Acceleration Valleys. [. . . ] This will require new types of investments in cohesion and reforms at the subnational level in many Member States. Specifically, cohesion policies will need to be refocused on areas such as education, transport, housing, digital connectivity and planning, which can increase the attractiveness of a range of different cities and regions.

As the EU is supposed to be antagonistic to state-subsidised SEZs, it instead calls SEZs “valleys.” Net-Zero Acceleration Valleys are a European network of SEZs where member states provide incentives for “private investment in energy, digital [transformation] and transport infrastructure.” Regional Innovation Valleys (RIVs) are larger SEZs—incorporating some Net-Zero Acceleration Valleys—that focus on “mastering the digital transformation” of, for instance, energy and food supply chains. The RIVs form a transcontinental network of EU regions which “address[ ] social challenges through cutting-edge technology.”

European Regional Innovation Valleys – Source

Consequently, with the EU’s Pax Silica signature imminent, ardent NRx accelerationists Jacob Helberg and Joe Lonsdale had good reason for optimism when they spoke in May 2026. You may recall from Part 1 that Helberg’s husband Keith Rabois—an accelerationist investor at PayPal and Palantir and a general partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund—was a campaign fundraiser for both Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance. It was Vance who subsequently appointed Helberg as US undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment.

Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale interviewed Helberg on his American Optimist podcast—Marc Andreessen’s misleading Techno-Optimist Manifesto (see Part 3) builds on the optimist theme. Lonsdale and Helberg spoke about the Pax Silica declaration and other matters. Apparently, Helberg wrote Pax Silica in consultation with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, though that probably isn’t true.

The purpose of Pax Silica is to form transnational partnerships that will secure “strategic stacks of the global technology supply chain, including, but not limited to, software applications and platforms; frontier foundation models; information connectivity and network infrastructure; compute and semiconductors; advanced manufacturing; transportation logistics; mineral refining and processing; and energy.”

Pax Silica is a US private sector-led operation which will seize the strategic digital supply chain stacks through “mobilizing the immense creative and financial power of private industry and entrepreneurship.”

The declaration says that “true economic security requires reducing excessive dependencies and forging new connections with reliable partners and suppliers.” Therefore, “to protect private investment from the market distortions” an isolationist and protectionist Pax Silica pole will be formed through international “cooperation on the enforcement of our respective policies to protect sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure from undue access, influence, or control.” Pax Silica is fundamentally multipolar.

It is somewhat ironic, but as Americans are increasingly questioning Zionist influence over their government, the Praxians—and supranational and intergovernmental organisations, like the EU and the UN, along with notable national partners, such as the Israeli government—are getting on with the business of building a global multipolar Technocracy. In this regard, Lonsdale’s interview with Helberg was remarkable for its frank disclosure.

Helberg claimed that the US needs to “win the race for innovation, and we need to win the race to secure our supply chains.” As we’ve already discussed in this series, the alleged “race” is marked more by collaboration than competition. The “race” narrative is purely a propagandist justification, in this instance, for the regionalisation of supply chains.

As covered in Part 3, Trump’s Epic Fury “war” with Iran has caused global economic chaos, not least by strangling the energy and commodity supply lines through the Strait of Hormuz. Jumping on this manufactured opportunity, Helberg stressed how vital it was to “de-risk[ ] the choke points that our economy depends on.” Continuing with the regionalisation theme, Helberg claimed the “operation Venezuela was incredibly historic” as its purpose was to regain US “influence in our hemisphere.”

As NRx accelerationists, both Lonsdale and Helberg believe in the Dark Enlightenment and the use of creative destruction to shape the future. They think of themselves as mavericks who, as fellow accelerationist Mark Zuckerberg once said, “move fast and break things.” As a brave pioneer of the Silicon Valley technological frontier, Lonsdale readily agreed with Helberg—and, in his absence, their friend Alex Karp—that there is something special about American business’s risk-taking. Supposedly, American entrepreneurs are “willing to be heretical and contrarian.” Presumably, business people outside of the US aren’t heretical enough. Whatever, for Lonsdale, the “heretical thing is really key.”

People in the US and around the world are increasingly expressing concern about the practices of Praxian mega-corporations like Palantir. This is because many of these organisations appear to be unethical and unprincipled, acting like despots who impose technological surveillance on entire populations while collaborating with genocidal maniacs to slaughter innocent people using advanced weapons technology.

Seemingly oblivious to this reality, rather than recognising the public’s legitimate reasons for concern, Lonsdale apparently thinks there is an underlying PR problem. The problem, he muses, is that people are just “really negative on successful people.” They’re jealous and think, “there’s something wrong with you if you’re too successful.” People and institutions are “anti-growth,” and this is their failing because, in Lonsdale’s bizarre self-serving world view, “freedom” is achieved through nothing but “innovation and manufacturing” in deregulated “free economic zones.”

On planet Lonsdale, concepts like individual sovereign equality, emotional and spiritual self-fulfilment, and freedom from oppression are anathema. All that matters is economic “freedom.” Lonsdale seems unaware of wage exploitation, fails to recognise the unaffordable cost of living, and believes that unemployment is a myth. If you’re not wealthy enough and can’t afford to buy happiness, well, Joe doesn’t understand where you’re “coming from.” He thinks you should work harder for him and his Praxian friends and suggests you may be “mentally retarded” if you don’t.

Like many Praxians and other NRx accelerationists, Joe Lonsdale is a big fan of China’s “free economic zones” and is pleased that US investor oligarchs “partnered with [China’s SEZs] for a generation”—actually, it’s more like two or three generations at this point. Noting the parallels between the modern Chinese and Silicon Valley approach to technological development, with Helberg highlighting the skills exchange between the two, Lonsdale says it’s a shame the US and China can’t work more closely together. Unfortunately they can’t, he ludicrously claimed, because the Chinese are “commies.”

Lonsdale had just outlined how China has embraced venture capitalism; operates a capitalist system of free trade zones—that enable China’s private enterprises to flourish—and has constructed a thriving consumer economy, even if it is stakeholder capitalist. But China also remains “communist,” according to Lonsdale.

Lonsdale contradicted himself by acknowledging the extensive, generational East-West partnership and China’s preferred economic model. These observations were totally at odds with his assertions about the East-West divide. His claim that East and West were irretrievably ideologically opposed was seemingly further propaganda meant to rationalise the ongoing facade of East-West rivalry.

Turning to the Pax Silica agreement with the EU, Jacob Helberg stressed the importance of the Draghi Report, stating that Draghi highlighted deregulation as the path to EU growth. Helberg added that private investment will flow into the EU if it can “secure [its] border, deregulate, lower taxes, and bring down the cost of energy.” He believes that European cultural inertia needs to change because it “disincentivises risk-taking and heterodox thinking.”

To understand the significance of the Lonsdale-Helberg chat, we must consider the broader context. In his interview with Lonsdale, Undersecretary Helberg said:

[Pax Silica] is a fundamentally different grouping than the G7 and the G20 [. . .] which is obviously an artefact of the Cold War; you’re really seeing diverging growth. And because AI is productivity, productivity means growth. [. . .] Pax Silica is an economic security coalition with a group of now fourteen countries that each bring unique industrial capabilities to bear to help secure our supply chains. [W]e want to take a holistic approach, an ecosystem-based approach to supply chain security. And so, one of our first big flagship efforts is the rollout of this economic security zone.

The Central American countries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Panama have joined Pax Silica. As have Chile and Argentina in South America. As recently reported at Unlimited Hangout, the governments involved, notably in Argentina, seem content for their populations to be guinea pigs in a large scale “beta test” trialling “what will likely become a global model for techno-authoritarianism, where AI-powered capitalism (likely with minimal human involvement) enjoys complete freedom while human beings enjoy essentially none.”

The fourteen original Pax Silica countries are now fifteen non-EU states plus the twenty-seven EU member states, six of which had already signed prior to the EU Commission adding its own signature. The non-EU Pax Silica countries also include the BRICS founding nation India, Israel, the UK; and GCC members Qatar and the UAE—which aims to install a fifty per cent Agentic AI government by 2030.

Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg, far left, joins international partners at the Pax Silica Summit in Washington December 12 – Source

In preparation for IMEC-enabled Pax Silica, the UAE government exited the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in May of this year. Western think tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) suggest this reflects UAE-Saudi tensions at the heart of OPEC. While it is true that the UAE and Saudi Arabia back opposing sides in the conflict in Yemen and have differing approaches to their relationship with Israel, the UAE clearly has other motivations for its decision.

OPEC sets price and production quotas for its member nations, and the UAE evidently seeks more autonomy. But, for more than two decades, the UAE has sought to diversify its economy away from its overwhelming reliance on energy exports. It has expanded its economic base by investing in digital technology and its financial sector. Its recent comprehensive plan for economic diversification is based upon encouraging private sector growth and attracting foreign direct investment in the UAE’s technological sector, focusing on the development of AI, renewable energy, financial technology (fintech) and digital services.

The comprehensive plan is to expand UAE smart city developments, increase investment in technological innovation hubs, and offer a range of tax, public funding, and deregulation incentives to private sector investors and companies across the UAE’s growing network of Special Economic Zones (SEzs). At the same time the UAE central bank has applied to join the “elite group” of countries that have currency swap arrangements with the US Federal Reserve (the Fed).

The European Central Bank (ECB) defines a currency swap facility as “an agreement between two central banks to exchange currencies. This allows a central bank to obtain foreign currency liquidity from the central bank that issues it.” This is not a loan but a swap at an agreed exchange rate for a fixed period, after which the swap is reversed. The currency swap enables foreign currency exchanges to take place outside of the foreign exchange markets (forex, FX).

The purpose of the swap facility is to shore up access to liquidity during periods of economic turmoil and market disruption. Trump’s Epic Fury has certainly delivered turmoil and disruption. As we shall see, the predictable and expected Iranian military response has included targeting UAE infrastructure, and the on-off switching of the Strait of Hormuz, which adversely impacts UAE oil and gas exports. But the UAE has more than $250 billion of US Treasurys and significant FX reserves and an estimated $1.5 trillion in assets; it has no need of liquidity assistance. Evidently, this move is part of a longer-term strategy to move capital around outside of regulatory oversight.

The UAE government is simultaneously at the centre of Pax Silica while also deepening its strategic relationship with Beijing—we’ll discuss this shortly. As highlighted by analyst Simon Dixon, “the UAE is positioning itself to survive and profit from a shifting world order.” But it is not doing so unilaterally.

The US-Israeli conflict with Iran has been described by the New York Times as a “Whiplash War.” Noting that “seesaws between fighting and calm are common in peace processes,” the NYT observes that “what is happening in this war is another matter.” The seemingly constant “cycling between conflict and negotiation”—at times opening, at others closing “the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial route in the global oil trade”—is obviously causing instability and massive market uncertainty.

As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in a 2011 interview with Bloomberg, “markets don’t like uncertainty; markets like, actually, totalitarian governments.” The purported war is shifting the world order to persistent instability, which global markets abhor. The UAE government is strategically positioning itself as a result.

Trump’s Epic Fury is clearly engineering a heightened global market desire for stability and the certainty that comes with autocratic order. Thus providing an incentive to move forward with the Pax Silica “pole.” Though the MWO is based on the deterritorialisation of the current global order, it is simultaneously founded upon the reterritorialization of a worldwide finternet, the Network Empire and the UN 2.0 “surveillance state” order. Pax Silica is designed to serve all of these elements.

Therefore, as the digital transformation progresses, no matter where you live, regardless of which pole you reside in, irrespective of your home nation or city, if the oligarch’s plans succeed, everyone is going to be subjected to their respective Digital Nation Stack.

The Digital Nation Stack

The EU already has a plan to construct “100 climate-neutral and smart cities” and a growing network of SEZs, or “valleys,” in which to accelerate their construction alongside the “digital transformation” of existing European cities, such as Paris. Pax Silica is the gateway for the Praxians to spread their Agentic GaaS-based Network Empire into the EU, UK, Israel, Japan, Australia, the GCC countries, and beyond.

As we have just discussed, “economic security” in the EU will be achieved, according to Draghi, by “[a]ccelerating innovation and technological progress.” Pax Silica is an agreement that says the “barriers in digital goods, services, and infrastructures” between the US and the EU must be removed to “guarantee access to the latest [US] AI models and processors.” In his interview with Lonsdale, Helberg added that the “flagship” prototype platform is the “rollout of this economic security zone in the Philippines.”

Precisely: the “economic security zone,” referenced by Helberg, is the “historic deal” Pax Silica signed with the government of the Philippines to construct a “4,000 acre[ ] first of its kind AI-native industrial park” in Subic Bay. This represents a model of the Network States Pax Silica will “connect together” to form the Network Empire within its economic security pole. To understand the Praxians’ plans for the EU and other Pax Silica members, we can look at their actions in the Philippines.

The Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) is a Filipino public sector “development corporation” that “engages in public-private partnerships to push forward vital public infrastructure such as tollways, airports, seaports, and major real estate developments.” The BCDA aims to attract private investors to “build[ ] great cities” and expand “economic opportunities for Filipinos [. . .] within special economic zones.”

The BCDA has several affiliate organizations, including the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA). The SBMA has a mandate to “develop the Subic Special Economic Zone” (SSEZ). The SSEZ is a “self-sustaining, industrial, commercial, financial, and investment center” specifically designed “to attract and promote productive foreign investment.” The BCDA is the public-private enabling environment for the SEZs, such as the SSEZ, and it is through the SEZs that foreign private investors, such as the Praxians, achieve jurisdictional autonomy.

To illustrate: the SSEZ is offered to foreign investors “as a separate customs territory” where the “movement of goods and capital within, into, and exported out of the Subic Special Economic Zone” is unfettered by virtually any regulation and is “free flowing.” The importation of “raw materials, capital, and equipment”—from wherever—into the SSEZ by the Praxians and other “investors” is “tax and duty free.”

The Philippine government will defend the “zone and [the] security of its perimeters,” but the private-sector owner-operators of the SSEZ are free to establish their “own internal security.” In other words, the Philippine SEZs are a largely autonomous commercial jurisdiction with their own private security forces within Philippine territory. None of which appears to be particularly beneficial for Filipinos.

Recently, when workers in the Laguna Technopark Special Economic Zone peacefully protested to highlight a deadlocked collective bargaining agreement with their employer—Package World Inc.—the SEZ’s private security forces were dispatched to attack them with water cannons and batons. Considered by many Filipinos to be little more than “safe havens for companies that want to avoid accountability,” the Philippines’ SEZs have an appalling history of worker exploitation in deregulated sweatshops.

United States officials led by Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg (third from left) pose with Filipino officials in Pampanga, Philippines on May 18 2026 – Source

It is evident that when Filipinos protest against barely subsistence wages and dangerous working conditions in SEZs, the Philippine government “red-tags” identified workers and union organisers. They and their families are then subjected to surveillance, harassment, and violent assaults which occasionally extend to state-sanctioned murder. Filipinos who stand up for their employment, housing and other rights in Filipino SEZs consistently face violence and intimidation. Praxians like Joe Lonsdale describe this situation as “doing well and succeeding.”

The BCDA and the SBMA have partnered with the NRx accelerationists and the Praxians “to make the Port of Subic Bay [. . .] the preferred maritime gateway for the Pax Silica initiative.” It is worth remembering that there are many such Pax Silica gateways, such as the expanded development of the UAE’s “Jebel Ali ecosystem,” which is a key port complex on the proposed India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC)—we’ll get to this in a moment.

Returning to the Philippines, SBMA Chairman and Administrator Eduardo Jose L. Aliño said:

The designation of the Port of Subic as the preferred port for Pax Silica Operations within the Luzon Economic Corridor is a great honor to the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority. [. . .] As part of the Luzon Economic Corridor, Subic’s deep-water port and shipyard facilities are designed to quickly transport raw materials like nickel and copper and processed tech goods between the port and the AI-native Economic Security Zone, or ESZ, in New Clark City.

Praxians like Joe Lonsdale and NRx accelerationists like Jacob Helberg have seized an economic free zone in the Philippines where they can do practically whatever they want—regulation and tax free. In the interview with Helberg, Lonsdale said he was part of the negotiating team that brokered the Pax Silica deal with the Philippine government. Now he and his fellow Praxians can “build some stuff” in the Philippines by moving “raw materials, capital and equipment” in and out of the SSEZ as they like.

At the signing ceremony, BCDA Senior Vice President for Legal Services Diana Joyce N. Basco-Galera reportedly said that land and port areas under SBMA jurisdiction would be surveyed and then “strategically leveraged for the Pax Silica initiative.” This will provide infrastructure, utilities, logistics, and port support for Pax Silica. This, in turn, is part of the planned master development of economic zones in the Philippines.

Like the Greater Bay Area infrastructure project in China (see Part 3), the Luzon Economic Corridor links the Filipino SEZs together. The objective of the joint US, Japan and Philippine government project is to “integrate infrastructure development with advanced industries, including electronics manufacturing, data centers, and logistics.”

Consequently, the Praxians can import any raw materials and “processed tech goods” they like—dual use drones, for example—and can funnel whatever undeclared finance they wish into the SSEZ and then use it to rapidly expand construction of “the AI-native Economic Security Zone, or ESZ, in New Clark City.”

New Clark City is supposedly going to be a place where human beings “live, work, and play.” However, as Helberg alluded to in the interview, it is also going to be the site for a “4,000-acre industrial hub to secure inputs vital to American and global supply chains.” New Clark is a new city that will serve as “a new model for AI-native investment acceleration hubs” in the Clark Freeport and Special Economic Zone (CFSEZ). The CFSEZ provides the Praxians exactly the same regulatory and financial freedom they enjoy in the Luzon-interconnected SSEZ.

In my recent book, The Technocratic Dark State, I observed that the Freeport Area of Bataan (FAB), close to Subic Bay, is another SEZ being developed as part of the Luzon Economic Corridor project. By purchasing a FAB Visa (Philippines FIV), foreign investors gain dual Filipino citizenship. Approval takes only five days, and thereafter, the sovereignty they have acquired allows the investor to purchase land and property within the Philippine SEZs overseen by the BCDA. This is contrary to Article XII, Section 7 of the Constitution of the Philippines, which forbids foreigners from owning Filipino land or property unless they can demonstrate a historical material link to the Philippines or its people. Independent SEZ jurisdictions circumvent constitutions.

The Philippines FIV acquisition service is run by Metropolis Global. In keeping with the Network Empire ambition, the tagline for Metropolis Global is “Designing the Nations of Tomorrow.” On its website, the company tells us:

Metropolis builds integrated legal, financial, and technology frameworks that accelerate civic and economic development. [. . .] We help nations activate Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and charter cities. [. . .] We develop digital economic infrastructure that helps jurisdictions access the digital economy and open new channels for participation in global markets.

Metropolis Global’s “Chief Evangelist & Founding Strategic Advisor” is Peter Thiel’s protégé Patri Friedman, who co-founded the Seasteading Institute with the Praxian Thiel in 2008. Three years later, Friedman, again supported by Thiel, switched his apparent focus from building new cities on the water to building them on land. Upon founding Future Cities Development Inc. in 2011, Friedman started a project to build a private charter city in Honduras, today known as Próspera.

Friedman is the founder and a general partner of Pronomos Capital, which specializes in investment in startup societies and charter cities. The Pronomos Capital investment portfolio includes Próspera and Praxis Nation. The Praxis Nation Manifesto openly declares the Praxians’ intention to “establish a new form of human civilization: the Network Empire.” The Praxian methodology to establish the Network Empire is “the flippening of Network States over Nation States in real time. Network States will coalesce neighborhoods and build cities.”

Patri Friedman as seen in a promotional video for Pronomos Capital – Source

Like Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, Jacob Helberg, and every other Praxian oligarch and NRx accelerationist, Patri Friedman’s life’s work is to achieve the “flippening.” Independent SEZ jurisdictions provide Praxians and other private investors the regulatory latitude to build their Network Empire city-states.

There are currently more than 7,000 SEZs in over 140 countries worldwide. As previously reported at Unlimited Hangout, SEZs vary in size and benefits, from small areas like export processing zones, that offer some customs and duties perks, to larger charter cities that enjoy major tax breaks and very few regulations to ease the construction of commercial and residential areas—essentially city-states.

In 2022, four years before Helberg published the Pax Silica declaration, the Charter Cities Institute (CCI) had already focused on developing the Philippine SEZs. Noting that the “Subic Special Economic Zone [is] a self-sustaining jurisdiction,” CCI Head of Policy Jeffrey Mason wrote:

[T]he Subic SEZ [is] managed as a separate customs territory with free movement of goods and capital, financial liberalization, no local or national taxes, and no currency controls. [. . .] What I’ve described so far is a very advanced special economic zone regime with a great deal of devolved administrative control. [. . .] But what makes Subic Bay and this enabling law particularly unique is how it addressed the establishment of the SEZ and its relationship with the surrounding communities. When the SBMA was established, each neighboring local government was given the choice of whether or not to join the special jurisdiction.

Jeffrey Mason also wants to digitally transform Gaza into an SEZ city-state. Observing that Gaza’s surviving population is young and destitute, and given that Gaza has been obliterated, Mason sees an enticing opportunity and wrote:

Given the level of physical destruction in Gaza, the scale of reconstruction necessary constitutes the construction of what is essentially an entirely new city. [. . .] Establishing a special economic zone in Gaza, or more ambitiously declaring the entire territory an SEZ, will help leverage a large population of young, working-age people in need of economic opportunities.

Pax Silica has been presented to us as a US bid to secure a distinct semiconductor supply chain, and we are told that this “marks the latest step in the fierce geopolitical competition between China and the US.” In truth, what it really marks is the programmable digital control of regional supply chains, which is a prerequisite for the MWO that both the US and the Chinese governments equally support. With the EU, the UK, the UAE, Israel, India, and many other countries pledging themselves to Pax Silica, a new pole is forming. This pole is not based on geographical proximity but on shared “economic security” and the formation of a patchwork of “special jurisdiction[s].”

We’ve just discussed the UN’s creation of its Safeguards Accelerator, which aims to create the “guardrails” for mature Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) layers that will be interoperable and stretch “cross-border” to establish an “AI-enabled public and private service interface.” The objective is the “population-scale rollouts” of a public-private network that embeds global governance “safeguards into live code, design, deployment, governance, operations, and national policy.”

The purpose of the system is what it does (see Part 3). The purpose of the UN’s global Safeguards Accelerator system is to bind us all to digital identities tied to programmable digital currencies through which every aspect of our behavior can be engineered and controlled by a global governance agenda.

We have also discussed how Praxian and NRx accelerationist ambitions dovetail with the same global governance agenda, as does Pax Silica, which is a Praxian accelerationist project. Therefore, it is no surprise that Metropolis Global has developed its Digital Nation Stack in preparation for the new programmable regime.

The Metropolis Global Digital Nation Stack – Source

Wading through deceptive NRx propaganda is heavy going at times, and no more so than when reading Metropolis Global’s guff about its Digital Nation Stack. Framing everything as free market choice, privacy-protecting convenience, and some sort of digital ecosystem-based freedom, the Digital Nation Stack is an overt slave system.

Here is the reality of the Digital Nation Stack:

• The Stack does not “allow all global citizens to access essential services”; it restricts, limits, and controls “customers” access to essential services.
• The “new era of competitive governance and of mobility” is the Dark Enlightenment promise of “no voice, free exit,” where “customers,” not citizens, purchase Agentic GaaS, leaving them with no means of redress and a stark choice between obedience or exile.
• The “unique digital identity” is a slave brand, not an emancipating “bridge.” It does not “grant” access to the “digital nation or community” but rather controls access to everything.
• The “digital incorporation system” does not provide “maximum flexibility to global citizens for future [business] entity formation”; it centralizes authority over all business entities. It is compatible “across jurisdictions” because it operates on the worldwide finternet “standards” framework, uniting all special jurisdictions via a unified programmable layer that will surveil and manipulate all “trust in business transactions.”
• Uniting a monetary “world of stablecoins, cryptocurrencies, traditional fiat banking, and everything in between” and then centralizing global control of the “identity credentials” by which every human being on earth is permitted to “access” the new global network of digital “financial services” is not to empower an “ecosystem of partners” who simply want humanity to have more convenience. It is the creation of an authoritarian global programmable monetary and, thus, behavioral control system.
• “[A] simple easy-to-use portal” where only those with established “user identities” can “invest in real estate and other assets” is not a more flexible and egalitarian opportunity for people to purchase “land and assets.” It is a digital finance pipeline through which only the favored and approved will be allowed to own anything, including national territory. The introduction of “fractional ownership” does not ensure “maximum transparency for all”; it is simply the tokenization of all assets from which only the selected “stakeholders” will benefit (Part 3).
• “Special Economic Zones or Charter Zones” that are “tailored to leverage these digital platforms” in order to “leapfrog traditional systems by transparently linking ownership to identity” to establish “digital ownership of real-world assets such as plots of land or residences,” forming “charter zones [that] evolve into charter towns and even charter cities” is how the Network State will proliferate to form the Network Empire and flippen nation states. This is a global empire where only the chosen “stakeholders have a voice.” Everyone else is condemned and damned, excluded and exiled—surveilled, intimidated, beaten, and murdered.

By signing up to Pax Silica, this is the overarching Digital Nations Stack that the EU, the UK, the UAE, India, Israel, and other Pax members have agreed to impose on their populations. The European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM)—a globalist policy think tank specialising in EU-Africa relations—calls the EU’s version of the digital slave grid the Euro Stack:

The global discussion about DPIs has built on the success of India’s Aadhaar digital ID system. [. . .] A global conversation about Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) has gathered steam. [. . .] Within the European Union (EU), there is growing support for a model of sovereign infrastructure, increasingly referred to as the ‘Euro Stack’, building on a full technology stack approach – everything from hard infrastructure to software solutions and governance. [. . .] the EuroStack emphasises the importance of sovereign solutions.

The EU’s “tech sovereignty package” that promises to realise “Europe’s ambition to become an AI continent, strengthen its digital autonomy and help build a more sustainable digital future” is preposterous propaganda. As a Pax Silica member, the EU has committed itself to an international technology supply chain under a regional balance of power global governance system. Sovereignty is just a code word for multipolar regionalisation and the enforcement of the Digital Nation Stack on every EU “customer.”

Emphasising the absurdity of so-called EU sovereignty, in January 2026, key Pax Silica and IMEC partners, India and the EU, signed an enormous free trade agreement that binds two billion people to the EU and Indian Digital Nation Stacks—the Euro Stack and the Aadhaar-based India Stack. It is sovereignty that is permitted by a transnational public-private partnership that programmes the nodes while leaving billions of ordinary people with no sovereignty at all.

The world is being reterritorialized as the Praxians and their global oligarch partners desire. The necessary digital transformation is being accelerated by the “war” in the Middle East, and that appears to be one of the main reasons behind the Praxians’ apparent decision to instigate it.

Who Sent The US To War?

Previously in this series, we discussed the close working relationship between the Praxians’ technology firms and both US and Israeli intelligence. We considered the reasonable likelihood that the Praxians played a part in manipulating the alleged signals intelligence (SIGINT) failures that supposedly led to the virtually unopposed Hamas October 7th attack. We outlined how the Hamas attack benefited both the Praxians and the Israeli state.

Probably one of the most accurate assessments that followed the Hamas October 7th attack came from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah—reportedly assassinated in an airstrike in 2024—who said that the Israeli government’s genocidal response to the attack, with Praxian kill chain assistance, was likely to spiral into a regional conflict. Which it has.

Just as the evidence suggests the Praxians contributed to the literally unbelievable string of alleged Israeli errors and mistakes that clearly precipitated the October 7th attack, so there is a suspiciously similar Praxian intelligence influence leading up to the US and Israeli government’s decision to launch an evidently illegal “war” with Iran. To see how the Praxians have potentially manipulated what is supposed to be a political decision-making process, we need to first look at the antecedents.

Back in 2015, the US Obama administration made digital surveillance technology the backbone of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran. The JCPOA was dependent upon the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA’s) Iranian nuclear compliance verification system.

Unsurprisingly, Palantir was selected to provide the surveillance architecture and modified its alleged predictive-policing software to integrate it with the IAEA monitoring processes. The Palantir-IAEA surveillance system was called MOSAIC, which is also the name given to the world’s first graphical interface web browser developed by a team led by arch-Praxian Marc Andreessen.

According to the IAEA, Palantir’s MOSAIC is a suite of software packages. MOSAIC’s Collaborative Analysis Platform (CAP) reportedly enables the IAEA to “search, collect, and integrate multiple data and information sources to enable comprehensive analysis,” including the automated collection and analysis of “open-source, public data,” such as ordinary Iranians’ social media posts. The Electronic Verification Package (EVP) “assembles and processes in-field verification activities” to “link, display, and provide access to all available information associated with a verification activity.”

The first Trump administration withdrew support from the JCPOA in 2018 and reimposed US sanctions on Iran instead. By this time, the Praxian flagship Palantir, embedded within the UN agency the IAEA, seemingly had complete oversight and considerable influence over the Iranian nuclear verification program that continued irrespective of US government involvement.

Palantir entered into their official strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense in early 2024. By June 2025, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who just a few weeks earlier testified that Iran was “not building a nuclear weapon” (see Part 3), suddenly reversed her assessment completely and said that Iran was “within weeks” of developing a nuclear weapon.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2026/07/investigative-series/the-praxian-genocidal-kill-chain-part-3/

This reversal in the intelligence assessment had purportedly come from a secret Israeli spy dossier about which the US intelligence agencies were extremely skeptical. Not only was it contrary to the ten years of IAEA assessments, it was all based on mysterious claims about clandestine groups of Iranian scientists furtively operating off-the-books to build nuclear weapons. The only claimed evidence was the Israeli dossier itself, and no part of it could be verified by anyone, except, supposedly, the Praxians’ strategic Israeli defense and intelligence partners.

Published on May 31, 2025, a new assessment from the MOSAIC-reliant IAEA accompanied the release of the Israeli dossier. In an almost identical fashion, the IAEA alleged that there was an “undeclared structured nuclear programme carried out by Iran” and that Iran possessed “undeclared nuclear material.”

We are told that the Trump administration subsequently took the decision to embark on Operation Midnight Hammer and bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities—throwing the US into the so-called 12-Day War alongside Israel. Yet, as highlighted by investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed:

Palantir’s dual role – as the analytical engine powering nuclear verification and, simultaneously, a strategic military partner of the US and Israeli governments – represents a fundamental conflict of interest at the heart of the global non-proliferation architecture.

It seems highly likely, if not abundantly clear, that Palantir MOSAIC was instrumental in providing the intelligence that led, within days, to a new and highly questionable Iranian nuclear threat assessment. Israel immediately launched “Operation Rising Lion,” shortly followed by the US’ “Operation Midnight Hammer,” to bomb Iranian nuclear power plants.

Investigative journalist Freddie Ponton observed:

Defenders will claim MOSAIC was merely advisory, that human policymakers retained final authority, and that intelligence failures predate algorithms. Unfortunately, this defense collapses under scrutiny. When the machine generates urgency measured in hours, human deliberation becomes a rubber stamp. Why else did the official US position flip in weeks after years of stable consensus? Why did strikes commence before inspectors regained physical access to challenge the machine’s inferences? The timeline does not suggest consultation. It suggests automation.

Returning to more recent events: in 2026, Trump claimed again that “Iran posed a nuclear missile threat.” Yet, shortly after “Operation Epic Fury” began, the Director General of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, said “[w]e don’t see a structured programme to manufacture nuclear weapons” in Iran. Grossi conceded that the IAEA had been unable to physically access Iranian nuclear facilities for more than eight months. So from whom, or from what, did the Trump administration get its intelligence to inform its decision to attack Iran again in 2026?

If you recall, in Part 1, we discussed how adoption of Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS) and its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) has been accelerated across NATO via its Joint Warfare Centre’s “Task Force Maven.” Similarly, shortly before it attacked Iran, the US Department of War (DOW) published its Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

Supposedly, it was Pete Hegseth who “direct[ed] the Department of War to accelerate America’s Military AI Dominance by becoming an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all components, from front to back.” This innovation would be “fueled by the accelerating pace of commercial AI innovation coming out of America’s private sector.”

Outlining its “Acceleration Approach,” the DOW said that funding was available through the “Joint Acceleration Reserve” to “unlock critical foundational [private sector] enablers needed to accelerate war-winning efforts.” Two of the DOW’s acceleration strategy “components” were the “Pace-Setting-Projects” (PSPs) Open Arsenal and Project Grant.

Technological intelligence, or TechINT, is defined as “intelligence derived from the collection, processing, analysis, and exploitation of data and information pertaining to foreign equipment and materiel.” The stated purpose of PSP Open Arsenal was “[a]ccelerating the TechINT-to-capability development pipeline, turning intel into weapons in hours, not years.” In addition, the PSP Project Grant was the DOW commitment to “[e]nabling transformation of deterrence from static postures and speculation to dynamic pressure with interpretable results.”

Combined, Open Arsenal and Project Grant firmly moved US intelligence gathering towards even greater reliance on automated TechINT. The AI-derived TechINT was specifically purposed to turn intel into kinetic force “in hours, not years” and to rapidly move the US government “from static postures and speculation to dynamic pressure.” In the US, Praxian technology corporations almost exclusively control that TechINT.

Since 2017, Palantir’s MSS has been the tool of choice for the DOW and the US intelligence agencies for intelligence gathering and analysis. MSS “aggregates, organizes, and visualizes vast streams of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) data” and through Palantir’s AIP, AI performs the “ad hoc analyses” of that vast pool of MSS aggregated data. Also in Part 1, we noted the comments of US Air Force Maj. Gen. Daniel Simpson, who described the Praxians’ targetting systems’ use of MSS as “confidently wrong.”

To date, the Trump administration has not provided any verifiable or documented evidence to explain why it wrongly assumed Iran was actively developing nuclear weapons. We know that Praxian TechINT was almost certainly responsible for the Trump team reaching the same incorrect conclusion in 2025. Added to these findings, the DOW’s own AI strategy clearly outlines the US national security and intelligence reliance on Praxian TechINT.

The Praxians had the means and the opportunity to manipulate the Trump administration into attacking Iran, and they were strongly motivated to do so.

The Praxians’ Iran War Motivation

Pete Hegseth—the supposed US Secretary of War—who is presented as the mastermind behind the US Artificial Intelligence Strategy, is occasionally wheeled out to make an embarrassing public spectacle of himself for the lapdog press, but that’s about as far as his influence goes. His clowning adds to the impression of a dysfunctional US government, which is an appreciable objective of the Praxians.

As I noted in The Technocratic Dark State, the evidence strongly suggests that Pete Hegseth is a Praxian puppet:

[I]n an interview with CNBC, Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and a Thiel protégé who invests heavily in Anduril, said: [. . .] “Pete Hegseth, our Secretary of Defense, was very clear that he wants to have competition, he wants the best ideas to win. [. . .] And that means companies like Anduril and like Palantir are going to keep growing really fast.” [. . .]

Pete Hegseth’s public Venmo profile exposes his close relationship with the Thiel/Musk-linked faction bidding for control of Department of Defense (DOD). [. . .] It seems Lonsdale’s observation that Hegseth is “our Secretary of Defense” is far more specific than most American voters realize.

Nearly all Praxians and most NRx accelerationists either self-identify as Zionists or Christian Zionists. As we discussed in Part 3, the suspicion arises that the Trump administration embarked on its Epic Fury folly at the behest of the Zionist lobby and/or the Israeli government. That said, no matter what they claim to believe, the Praxians and their oligarch partners are not nationalists of any kind; they are not Zionists.

As far as oligarchs like the Praxians are concerned, nation states, including Israel, are geostrategic levers to achieve their collective and personal ambitions. The Praxians are building their Network Empire and are using their strategic partnership with the Israeli state to that end. But it is the Network Empire, not the Zionist project, that matters to Praxians.

Unsurprisingly, Praxian puppet Hegseth self-identifies as a Christian Zionist. In contrast to his Praxian masters, Hegseth may actually believe in Zionism. However, he appears to have the mentality of an emotionally unstable teenager, so his beliefs probably aren’t particularly well formed yet.

When, in March 2026, Hegseth asked Congress for a further $200 billion from US citizens’ pockets to ramp up war in the Middle East, Hegseth said—publicly—“It takes money to kill bad guys.” It is entirely feasible that these words were put in his mouth by one of his Praxian puppetmasters, Joe Lonsdale.

A few months earlier, in December 2025, Lonsdale praised the extrajudicial killings meted out by the Trump-Hegseth DOW, which unilaterally decided to murder people they claimed, without evidence, to be “narco-terrorists.” Via Musk’s X platform, Lonsdale said:

Killing bad guys is DoW [sic] job. [Hegseth] should brag more. Masculine truth: bold, virtuous men deter evil.

Evidently, Hegseth’s role is to be seen to make the announcements, observably sign the orders, and publicly agree to the budgets on the Praxians’ behalf.

All the indications are that the billionaire US Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg actually runs the Department of War (DOW). Feinberg is part of a cluster of “important” CEOs who have been gathering in the Washington Business Council since 1933 to give US governments the benefit of their “professional, intellectual, and leadership” prowess. Like Thiel’s Dialog (see Part 3), the Business Council enables the likes of Feinberg and Alex Karp to toss around ideas that they turn into policies before telling politicians to implement them.

War always benefits some, and war with Iran is definitely a boon for Feinberg. He is the founder and former co-CEO of Cerberus Capital Management. In 2024, Cerberus inaugurated its first venture capital fund as a “startup-focused vehicle” targeting “US defense contracts to AI, quantum computing, supply chain, and fusion energy technologies.” Currently holding the DOW purse strings, Feinberg still has a clear conflict of financial interests. He says he intends to divest his Cerberus holdings and has chosen Goldman Sachs to help him figure out how to conduct the very simple business transaction, but he hasn’t quite managed to do it yet.

It is hard to find a policy or decision made by Trump’s government that doesn’t serve the Praxians’ interests. For instance, when Trump was supposedly considering who should actually run his administration’s DOW, apparently there were two names in the hat. Trae Stephens, a partner in Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and co-founder of Anduril, and Feinberg, a startup venture capitalist who has now awarded a $20 billion “single enterprise contract” to Anduril. Much to the delight of Anduril’s Praxian investors, including Thiel’s and Stephen’s Founders Fund and Marc Andreessen’s Andreessen Horowitz.

Anduril’s software is now embedded within the US defense sector. Meanwhile, Cerberus Capital has consolidated its control of SubCom, the undersea fiber-optic cabling company that is the exclusive cable contractor for the US military-industrial complex. Cerberus Capital is grabbing more of the US military’s hardware infrastructure while its former CEO oversees the department awarding the contracts.

Palantir is now, officially, the cornerstone of the Pentagon’s strategy and, therefore, arguably the single most powerful influence in the US military-industrial-intelligence complex. Less than a month after the US 2026 attack on Iran commenced, Reuters reported:

The Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve ​Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders. [. . .] The memo ordered oversight of Maven. The memo directed the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office to take over oversight of Maven from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to the ​Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office. [. . .] Feinberg’s order is a significant win for Palantir, which has landed a growing ​stream of contracts with the U.S. government. [. . .] Those awards have helped double the company’s stock ‌price in ⁠the past year, lifting its market value to nearly $360 billion. [. . .] Pentagon official Cameron Stanley [said] Maven platform could be used for weapons targeting in the Middle East.

War is both a preferred strategy and big business for the Praxians. Following the Epic Fury strike on Iran, Palantir’s stock rose sharply. Joe Lonsdale—co-founder of Palantir Technologies and co-founder of his 8VC tech startup investment firm—had long been a vocal advocate for war with Iran. Speaking in June 2025 to CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Lonsdale claimed that “the Persian people, the Kurds, the others [are] much more natural allies of the Jews; of USA; of the West.”

He added:

I’m really excited to invest in Iran if we can get this country to be some sort of republic and not run by crazy people. [. . .] It’s a lot easier than doing that in Afghanistan or somewhere else. [. . .] It’s very clear that this administration says it’s about eliminating the nuclear threat. That’s their goal. [. . .] Iran’s clearly a really evil regime. So, I’ve been against the Iranian regime. I’ve been for freeing Iran for a long time.

By “freeing” Iran, Lonsdale meant attacking and killing Iranian people. The Trump administration’s determination to eliminate the alleged Iranian nuclear threat—one of the dubious casus belli trotted out—seemingly came directly from Praxian TechINT. In a matter of months, Lonsdale and his fellow Praxians were, once again, given exactly what they want by the Trump administration they put into office.

For Praxians, the opportunity to extend their Network Empire project to Iran is dependent on displacing the current Iranian hierarchy. This explains Lonsdale’s enthusiasm for war with Iran. Notably, Lonsdale is “really excited” about the potential opportunities Iranian regime change could bring for him and his Praxian network.

The Iranian government has already committed to the necessary smartification process and has set up the SEZ jurisdictions to enable Praxians and their oligarch partners to build their private city-states, but, from the Praxian perspective, the situation in Iran isn’t optimal yet. Tehran is putting all the necessary digital surveillance and control infrastructure into place and is zoning Iran as required, but it is also seeking to use that population behavioral control system to consolidate its own political power. This doesn’t quite meet with the UN’s and the Praxian’s shared objective of “flippening [. . .] Network States over Nation States.”

Having bombed Iran, however, the proposed US-backed, privately financed Reconstruction and Development Fund (RDF) appears to be the potential engineered entry point into Iran for Praxians and other oligarchs. Reportedly, the RDF will focus on “securing loans, establishing credit lines, or directly financing the reconstruction” of destroyed Iranian “energy, logistics, manufacturing and transport” infrastructure.

Though there are scant details, Reuters reports that $150 billion of RDF commitments from private investors have already been secured. Aiming to achieve $300 billion in total investment, according to Reuters, the RDF is a “private investment vehicle [. . .] for companies based in the U.S., the Gulf Arab states, Asia, South America and Africa.”

If the Iranian government is amenable, private sector foreign direct investment (FDI) will flow into Iran’s expanding network of SEZs and Free Trade Zones (FTZs). The Iranian government has been moving its SEZs and FTZs toward becoming manufacturing and production hubs to diversify the Iranian economy away from its heavy reliance on energy exports. Prior to Operation Epic Fury, it had attracted significant foreign direct investment (FDI) into its zones. Oligarch FDI will potentially increase markedly as a result of Trump’s Epic Fury.

For example, as reported in early February 2026 by the Tehran Times:

The Chabahar Free Zone holds particular strategic significance, acting as the Iranian terminus of the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), a multimodal network designed to connect India to Central Asia, Russia, and beyond.

A few weeks later, claiming the Chabahar Free Zone was a military target, the US bombed it. As hostilities continued—following the apparent breakdown in negotiations and the Islamabad Memorandum (see Part 3)—for no identifiable military reason, the US once again targetted Chabahar. It was reported that this threatened the Indian government’s investment in the Chabahar Free Zone, but, coincidentally, the Indian government temporarily divested its stake to an Iranian company shortly before Epic Fury began.

If the RDF ultimately proceeds as envisaged, the destruction wrought by the so-called war will potentially encourage, not deter, investment in the Chabahar FTZ and other Iranian SEZs. In turn, this situation could possibly be a boon to the Indian-backed “International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC).”

That said, India’s strategic interests in the Middle East have changed since it first announced the INSTC project more than twenty-five years ago. Saima Afzal, freelance journalist, analyst, and visiting lecturer and researcher at Germany’s Liebig University, outlined how India’s regional interests have shifted from the INSTC to the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), which skirts Iranian territory and crucially provides alternative rail routes through Saudi Arabia to potentially avoid passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

The proposed India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor – Source

In particular, Afzal observed how the Indian government had moved away from “post-Cold War diplomacy” and was instead focused on its regional “economic interests, connectivity initiatives, [and] defence cooperation [agreements].” She highlighted how “India’s partnerships with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates [have] deepened at an unprecedented pace.”

Afzal wrote:

Israel has emerged as one of India’s closest defense and technology partners, supplying advanced military systems, intelligence cooperation, cybersecurity capabilities and expertise in agriculture and water management.

Defense cooperation now extends beyond arms sales into research, innovation and technology transfer. Meanwhile, the Gulf monarchies have become central to India’s economic ambitions. The UAE and Saudi Arabia rank among India’s largest trading partners and are increasingly important sources of investment in infrastructure, logistics, renewable energy and emerging technologies.

The Indian government is building regional partnerships through a network of bilateral agreements. In so doing, it is deepening relationships with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and Israel. For example, the India-UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (India-UAE CEPA) is a bilateral agreement that gives the public-private partnerships in both countries considerable advantages.

CEPA excludes UAE exporters from Indian investigations into the practice of subsidising exports to undercut Indian businesses; it opens up UAE public sector procurement to Indian companies while affording UAE companies a ten per cent price advantage for selling to the Indian public sector; it reduces or removes India-UAE trade tariffs, and crucially, it sets globally agreed “standards as a basis for technical regulations.”

Speaking just days before Trump’s Epic Fury caused global supply chain mayhem and after his government had temporarily divested its Iranian holdings, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the Israeli Knesset. He promoted closer ties between the two countries and said both governments were “committed to expanding trade, strengthening investment flows and promoting joint infrastructural development.” Modi added that India and Israel would “work closely [on] the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor and the I2U2 frameworks.”

Gaza is now set to be an important IMEC hub.

I2U2 is a public-private partnership focused on “infrastructure modernisation.” Nominally led by the Indian, Israeli, UAE, and US governments, I2U2 “aims to mobilize private sector capital and expertise to achieve a variety of goals.” Among its goals is to hand control of “water, energy, transportation, technology, space, health, and food security” to the private sectors operating in all four nation states. The overlap with Pax Silica is clear, as is the intention for the private sector to control all resources essential for life.

Pax Silica and IMEC are closely interrelated. Stemming from the 2020 Abraham Accords—that sought to normalise relations between numerous Arab states and Israel—and following the I2U2 framework, the Indian, US, UAE, Saudi Arabian, French, German, and Italian governments, alongside the EU, signed the foundational IMEC MOU. Jordan and Israel were designated as transit territories but were not signatories.

The conflict with Iran has put the spotlight on IMEC’s physical infrastructure shortcomings. The proposed northern rail road—through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and then Israel—relies on the access to UAE ports like Jebel Ali and Khalifa that sit in the Strait of Hormuz. These are obvious Iranian and increasingly Yemeni targets, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it.

For example, we are supposed to believe that the multiple explosions in March 2026 at Jebel Ali—a port that just happens to serve as a US Navy deep-water harbour—were all caused by stray debris from destroyed Iranian drones. Similarly, we were told that the many massive Jebel Ali fires in August 2026—reportedly following seven large explosions in a 20-minute period—were just normal warehouse fires. This situation apparently makes Jebel Ali unusually susceptible to fires, if one chooses to believe the reports.

As reported by Geopolitical Monitor, the conflict hasn’t killed off IMEC hopes, as the UAE port of Fujairah and “Omani ports such as Salalah, Duqm, and Sohar” provide potential alternative ports for prospective IMEC northern rail links. Instead, the war “has exposed a structural limitation in [IMEC] design.”

The focus, however, on the possible physical transport and energy corridors misses a crucial aspect of IMEC’s design. A frequent contributor to the Rothschild-backed international public-private think tank the Lowy Institute, Dr Gedaliah Afterman, writing for Geo Horizon, observed:

IMECʼs [. . .] strategic value increasingly sits in the technological, digital and regulatory domain: the systems, standards, and governance frameworks that allow production networks to operate predictably across regions. [. . .] Digital IMEC [. . .] transforms IMEC from a geographically bounded corridor into a framework for cross-regional participation, including by countries such as Japan that are not located along IMECʼs physical route. This initiative includes security frameworks, technical standards, [. . .] interoperable customs platforms, secure data exchange, [and] smart port systems.

In the India-Middle East region, Digital IMEC is practically indistinguishable from Pax Silica. It is also extremely similar to the Chinese-led initiative the Digital Belt and Road, or “Digital Silk Road” (DSR), which proposes a regional “integrated networks for collecting data.” Formally announced by Paramount Leader Xi Jinping in 2017, the DSR is a multipolar regional counterpart to Pax Silica and Digital IMEC.

The DSR is a regional, or multipolar, public-private partnership project, focusing on developing and emerging economies, with leading Chinese firms such as Alibaba and international partners, such as US tech giant Accenture, actively participating. Following Xi’s 2017 announcement, the Chinese State Council for Information reported:

The nation [China] will focus on frontier areas such as digital economy, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and quantum computing. [. . .] Xi stressed the importance of advancing the development of big data, cloud computing and smart cities.

As we have already discussed, the purpose of the BIS’ finternet is to create the interoperable technological standards architecture upon which the new global fintech economy will operate. Just as Pax Silica stresses the importance of regionally interoperable “software applications and platforms, frontier foundation models, [and] information connectivity,” so the DSR seeks to set its regional connectivity standards for “fifth-generation (5G) mobile networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), big data, smart cities, data centres and cloud computing in the digital economy era.”

Returning to the analysis of Geopolitical Monitor: as a result of the widening Middle East conflict that started with the Hamas attack and Israel’s genocidal response—leading to the conflagration with Iran—IMEC currently “functions as a set of bilateral agreements and digital and energy projects. [. . .] This configuration is more resistant to any single conflict, because it does not depend on the simultaneous cooperation of every participant.”

The New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation (ORF), a global public-private policy think tank backed by, well, everyone, calls the impact of the Middle East conflict on IMEC the Paradox of Resilience:

[W]hen a joint United States (US)-Israel campaign against Iran triggered Tehran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the same sea lines that IMEC was designed to traverse have become the global economy’s most distressed maritime artery. […] [T]he conflict has produced a strategic paradox. It has simultaneously reaffirmed IMEC’s underlying logic of diversification away from concentrated chokepoints; and complicated its implementation, as the corridor’s own physical nodes pass through the current conflict zone. Whether IMEC survives geopolitical fragmentation depends not on whether the conflict ends, but on whether the corridor’s architecture is recalibrated to reflect a more honest assessment of risk.

Again, the alleged paradox assumes the purpose of the Praxians’ Epic Fury was not “geopolitical fragmentation.” It is pretty clear that “geopolitical fragmentation” is precisely what the architects of the Network Empire seek, and it appears to be a strong motivation for the Praxians to start a war.

A fragmented and diversified global geopolitical system of bilateral agreements establishes a system of international relations that does not depend on wider international agreements. This creates the structural political conditions for both multipolarity and the Network Empire to prosper.

Writing for Arabian Gulf Business Insight journalist Valentina Pesquali reported that a US State Department spokesperson had informed AGBI that the March 2026 meeting between Emirati and US officials had been the first formal conference under the bilateral US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership agreement. As previously reported at Unlimited Hangout:

In May 2025, Trump [. . .] signed a deal to supply US AI-chips, including NVIDIA processors, to the Abu Dhabi AI digital transformation hub. [. . .] Trump called the deal the “U.S.-U.A.E. A.I. Acceleration Partnership.” [. . . ] The UAE-China AI partnership, specifically the Abu Dhabi digital transformation hub, has a Trump administration agreement in place for the supply of the processors and it serves as a “crucial base for Chinese AI firms.”

AGBI went on to report:

Pax Silica and the India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (Imec) have different origins and goals, but broadly aim to shift supply chains for artificial intelligence and other vital industries away from China and its Belt and Road Initiative [BRI]. They also rely heavily on collaboration between the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other GCC members, and Israel.

But Pax Silica-related projects, such as the US-UAE AI Acceleration Partnership, are not moving away from China’s interests. Exactly the same connective infrastructure, replete with its financial and digital rails, is being constructed by China and its partners through the DSR and its bilateral partnerships, such as its own UAE-China AI partnership. The Chinese private sector, led by global corporations such as DeepSeek, China Mobile, Huawei, ZTE, and Dahua, is equally committed to the same multipolar global governance system. This emerging new “fragmented” global order is most conspicuous in the Middle East.

GCC countries are forming the new Pax Silica pole while simultaneously strengthening their bilateral trade, economic, and defense partnerships with China. Israel too is seeking greater autonomy by breaking its reliance on US military aid while pursuing deeper bilateral integration with its GCC partners and, by extension, China, India, and other BRICS partners.

Multipolarity, dependent upon the regionalization of supply chains and the disaggregation of hegemony, is a monumental scam. The hybrid propaganda claims that regional protectionism delivers “win-win cooperation.” These assertions are simply attempts to justify a new global governance system based on, as António Guterres said, “the greatest transfer of power of our times – not from governments to people, but from governments to private technology companies.”

Both East and West are collectively contributing to a global effort to construct one allegedly multipolar global governance system founded on the principle of fragmented international relations. Multipolarity is typified by a network of bilateral agreements. The geopolitical deterritorialization is reterritorialized into a centralized Technocracy by the standardization of international trade regulation compliance across all supply chains.

Suzanne M. Richer has thirty years of experience as a leading analyst of global trade compliance and supply chain risk. She notes that Agentic AI is “increasingly being deployed in global trade compliance.” It is being used for “automated customs classification and real-time sanctions screening.”

Richer also observes that using Agentic AI to enforce global trade regulatory compliance introduces “significant legal, operational, and ethical risks.” She assesses that Agentic AI’s “opacity, scalability and decision-making autonomy [amplifies] existing compliance challenges and complicate[s] explainability, auditability and error remediation.” Richer advocates “human-centric oversight [. . .] to preserve accountability, traceability and legal certainty.”

Using our analytical lens of “the purpose of the system is what it does” (Part 3), we might suggest that Richer is missing the point. The centralization of standardized regulatory compliance systems for international trade, using Agentic AI as the enforcement mechanism, gives those who program the nodes immense power and authority. Combined with a finternet that enables the literal programming of all transactions “cross border” “in real time,” a more opaque, less auditable system of international trade appears to be the oligarchs’ purpose for scaling Agenitic AI compliance monitoring globally.

What Battle For World Domination?

Just as the Pax Silica/IMEC corridors and financial rails mirror, and will almost certainly be interoperable with, the DSR/BRI corridors and rails, so the physical infrastructure between IMEC and the BRI connects in multiple locations. Yet we are still expected to accept the absurd hybrid propaganda narrative that “the battle for world domination” is being fought in the Middle East, with Western powers from the US and Europe on one side and China and its partners on the other.

In September 2023, a few short weeks before the Hamas attack on October 7th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented his plan for a New Middle East (NME) to the UN General Assembly. He suggested an Israeli rapprochement with the UAE, Jordan, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia to form the envisaged NME. Palestine—both Gaza and the West Bank—was conspicuously absent from the map of Israel he showed to depict his geopolitical NME concept.

Benjamin Netanyahu presenting his NME concept to the UN General Assembly in September 2023 – Source

Explaining the “magnitude of the transformation” he had in mind, the expansionist project Netanyahu outlined was not the “Greater Israel” project analysts often highlight, but something else entirely.

Netanyahu said that he envisioned the following:

[A] corridor that will stretch across the Arabian Peninsula and Israel. It will connect India to Europe with maritime links, rail links, energy pipelines, fiber-optic cables. This corridor will bypass maritime chokepoints [the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal]. You see, the Land of Israel is situated on the crossroads between Africa, Asia and Europe. We’ll build a new corridor [. . .] that connects Asia through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, to Europe. This is an extraordinary change, a monumental change, another pivot of history.

Zionism is not the driving force behind the global digital transformation, and it is that which will see populations across the world oppressed under their respective Digital Nation Stacks. Concerns about Zionist control of the American polity, for instance, are well-founded but ultimately serve as a distraction. While the media, politicians, and the enraged public focus on these matters, the real project races ahead behind the scenes. Zionism is the oligarchs’ attention coral to divert public awareness away from what they are really doing.

The frequently forwarded argument that the genocide in Gaza and conflict with Iran are fundamentally about Israeli expansionism misdirects populations. Though people rightly protest against obscene Israeli war crimes and decry the appalling rhetoric of Zionist extremists, the transnational capitalists are exploiting the anger, enabling them to get on with business largely free from any public scrutiny.

Fundamentally, Netanyahu’s proposed NME is not a Zionist project, though it is likely to be applauded by Zionists. It is a transnational infrastructure project intended to make the Middle East the crossroads for a global trade and financial network: a multipolar planetary choke-point of fragmented bilateral agreements running on a unified regulatory and financial architecture.

The port development in Haifa (Israel) is part of the planned IMEC, depicted by Netahyahu. The “war” has supposedly put a strain on Israeli trade relationships in the region, and the proposed joint Turkish- and Saudi-led re-routing of IMEC has led some to suggest that Haifa may be left out.

The geopolitical argument has not deterred the Israeli global logistics giant GADOT Group from increasing its investment in Haifa in support of IMEC. GADOT Group CEO Opher Linchevski reportedly said that the success of IMEC was dependent on the “ability to connect ports, terminals, storage infrastructure, logistics centres, transportation assets and distribution networks into one seamless supply chain.”

Linchevski has good reason to be confident about the GADOT investment in the Haifa complex because it is also a key port for the BRI. The global construction corporation leading the development of Haifa is the Shanghai International Port (Group), which has a twenty-five-year port management contract. As the State Council for the People’s Republic of China reported in 2022:

China and Israel have seen bilateral cooperation develop and expand to their enormous mutual benefit. [. . .] From Belt and Road cooperation to technology and innovation exchanges, China-Israel relations have achieved fruitful cooperation in various fields over the years. [. . .] Supported by the Israeli government, the Haifa new port is a microcosm of win-win cooperation between China and Israel under the Belt and Road Initiative.

The development of the UAE’s Jebel Ali port, part of the Jebel Ali Free Zone (SEZ), sits on both IMEC and the BRI. As does Khalifa Port in Abu Dhabi, which has been co-developed with China’s COSCO SHIPPING Ports Limited. The public-private UAE-China Joint Investment Cooperation Fund is financing the project.

Meanwhile, the Indian government, which sees Khalifa as integral to the Eastern Segment of IMEC, claims that it is fiercely opposed to the BRI. Apparently, this is because of its alleged squeamishness about Chinese debt diplomacy, its potential strategic encirclement, environmental concerns, and, comically, a lack of transparency in China’s “bilateral agreements” with its regional GCC partners. The Indian government has practically identical and equally opaque bilateral agreements with the same regional GCC government partners.

Exemplifying the absurdity of the geopolitical stories we are fed about enmity that evidently does not exist, NATO—represented by its US-dominated Atlantic Council think tank—asserts that IMEC has to happen precisely because of the purported “war” that has caused the global economic turmoil everyone knew it would. NATO now says the situation that the US, its most powerful member state, engineered has to be remedied with a new “network of corridors.”

Stating that Saudi Arabia is the “structural backbone” of IMEC and that rail connectivity remains the corridor’s most “consequential infrastructure gap,” NATO recommends IMEC proceed with the construction of:

The Saudi Landbridge—a 950 km railway linking Riyadh to Jeddah, with extensions to Dammam and major industrial hubs—would transform Saudi Arabia from a road-dependent transit corridor into a fully integrated rail spine connecting the Arabian Gulf to the Red Sea.

Fortunately for NATO—and the US-led Atlantic Council think tank—the Saudi landbridge from Riyadh to Jeddah looks likely to go ahead because it is a major transit corridor along the “Iron Silk Road.” The BRI rail link will indeed “transform” the Saudi Arabian peninsula from a region that is “reliant on shipping lanes to a [region] that replaces them.”

The Iron Silk Road project is led by the “Saudi China Landbridge Consortium (SLCC), a strategic joint venture involving [Saudi Arabian Rail] SAR and the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC).” Riyadh and Jeddah—a center for Saudi-China joint technological innovation—are just two more of the many terminus points and logistic hubs that directly link IMEC to the BRI in the Middle East region.

Shortly, we’ll discuss the proposed redevelopment models for Gaza. In May 2024, just after the Praxians formalized their strategic partnership with the Israeli state, the Israeli government proposed the Gaza-Arish-Sderot Free Trade Zone, or the “Gaza 2035” project.

Gaza 2035 would see Gaza become a smart city and a regional hub for energy production, AI innovation, and regional trade. Via a high-speed rail link, the plan saw the Saudi NEOM SEZ connect to Gaza, thereby affording direct access from NEOM to the Mediterranean, with further routes planned to other ports, including Haifa.

An Israeli government commissioned depiction of it “Gaza 2035” project – Source

The notion that IMEC and the BRI and other proposed global trade infrastructure projects—such as the Russia-Iran trade corridor—are opposed or designed to “counter” each other is total dross. While everyone becomes increasingly agitated about the influence of Zionism, the system being constructed, incorporating both physical and digital infrastructure, is intended to be interoperable and, therefore, to empower the transnational capitalist oligarchs. Programming the nodes on an envisaged Agentic GaaS network is what they are about, not Zionism.

The system is agreed upon, and it is being built. The rivalry that does exist is between some public but mainly private sector “entities” that are competing for access to the networks’ financial and regulatory programmable infrastructure. War in the Middle East is the SCAD excuse to move the project forward. The resultant geopolitical fragmentation increases regional reliance on bilateral relationships and instigates the disaggregation of hegemony itself.

The Disaggregation of Hegemony

The West’s policy think tank grandee, Chatham House, found that Operation Epic Fury initially resulted in an Islamabad Memorandum (MOU) that “accommodates virtually the full catalogue of Iranian demands” (see Part 3). Though the MOU has supposedly now been abandoned and hostilities have intermittently resumed, the fact that the Trump administration ever agreed to such a MOU in the first place demonstrates that the US has lost “its key pressure points, whether economic or military” in the Gulf region.

On July 21, 2026, from its subjective viewpoint, Chatham House considered the further implications of the US military failure. Dr Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, the reporting Chatham House analyst, is a pillar of the Western hierarchy. It is reasonable to suspect that she is paid to produce analysis that is favourable to the furtherance of the Anglo-American oligarchy’s interests.

Calling the US strategy “wishful thinking,” Dr Tabrizi wrote:

Nearly five months after the United States and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran, it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape one conclusion: the central objectives that underpinned Washington’s decision to go to war have not materialized. [. . .] The likely outcome is neither decisive victory nor durable peace, but an increasingly familiar cycle of tit-for-tat, temporary ceasefires, failed negotiations and renewed escalation. [. . .] [T]he war risks becoming self-perpetuating, driven less by achievable political objectives than by the hope that the next round of military pressure will succeed where every previous round has failed.

This is the “whiplash war” we mentioned earlier. Given the global economic disruption the war has caused, the pro-Western establishment stance of Chatham House, and the observable impact on GCC states, three major inferences are apparent.

Firstly, the whiplash war is a flay that functional oligarchies can use either to inflict global economic pain or withhold to relieve it. Secondly, for the foreseeable future, the so-called war is not likely to be won but sustained, thus accustoming us all to grinding financial hardship and inculcating in us a willingness to accept any solution. Finally, the projection of US military superpower in the Middle East has been exposed as a sham.

Condemnation of Trump’s Epic Fury from the Western policy think tanks has been striking. The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) reported that all the “war” has achieved is the “mauling [of] America’s allies” and the disruption of vital “maritime traffic through critical waterways.”

It is important to appreciate that think tanks like the CFR and Chatham House, and so-called independent analyst outlets, such as Foreign Policy Magazine—that are closely aligned to the Western Deep State—don’t publish anything without purpose. The CFR article was written by senior CFR fellow Ray Takeyh, who said “it is still not entirely clear why President Trump launched the war in Iran in February. The administration’s explanations have shifted and the goalpost has constantly moved.” Though this is an accurate portrayal of events from a narrative perspective, it is also misleading.

The US is a functional oligarchy, and the idea that a blow-hard like Trump commands the nation is farcical. Takeyh’s apparent purpose for alleging that Trump actually leads anything is to maintain the illusion that elected officials make all the important decisions. The ruse is intended to protect the oligarchs, who actually rule, from public scrutiny and to instill false hope for political solutions in the population.

Takeyh continued:

[Iran can] impose costs on the global economy and American taxpayers alike. The question is not who can inflict more pain, but who is prepared to endure more. [. . .] Unpredictability appears to be the defining feature of Trump’s strategy, with military campaigns repeatedly called off and then quickly resumed. [. . .] The longer the war goes on, the more likely that the distinction between civilian and military targets will erode. This is how humanitarian crises unfold—one step at a time.

The CFR is setting Trump up as a patsy. As the conflict kills more and increases the financial pressure on working families around the world, Trump is set to be cast as the incompetent fool who didn’t plan an effective US strategy. For hard-pressed Americans, the offered solution will be to elect another political leader, just as powerless and malleable as Trump.

Takeyh eventually reveals the overarching purpose of the CFR propaganda:

The United States should appeal to the United Nations to authorize a multinational force dedicated to ensuring the safe passage of all ships through the Gulf.

The solution to rogue politicians making calamitous decisions is better global governance—the multipolar world order.

The Western think tank-linked media outlet Foreign Policy Magazine (FP) suggests events in the Middle East have instigated a fundamental geostrategic shift. A new kind of cooperation between Gulf states is likely as a result. FP writers Rabah Arezki, a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Tarik M. Yousef, a senior fellow at the Middle East Council on Global Affairs, wrote:

For 70 years, the U.S.-led order endured because commerce and security moved together. The Middle East is the first major arena where this coherence is dissolving. Economic and security dependence point in different directions, and the result is not a clean handoff from one hegemon to another but a potential disaggregation of hegemony itself.

Emphasising the disaggregation of hegemony, thereby leading to a system of international relations that does not rely on the favour or patronage of superpower partners, Arezki and Yousef stress that a “narrower and more pragmatic” order is emerging in the Middle East. National autonomy that eschews “external mediation” by focusing on regional negotiation is the new imperative, they claim.

The analysts say that regional partners “need not trust one another” if they “codify their disagreements, and create channels capable of surviving crises.” The pair of analysts add that a “fully institutionalized regional order” is no longer necessary.

Noting how China has become an indispensable GCC regional partner, the FP highlights how China’s commercial value to the region as its “largest trading partner” has “ushered in a new era of cooperation centered on energy and infrastructure.” This shift has global ramifications, and the two Western think tank analysts conclude:

The more diffuse the international order becomes, the greater the incentive for Middle Eastern powers to reduce their exposure to great-power rivalry by managing tensions directly with one another. [. . .] The evidence of Middle Eastern states increasingly opting for de-intermediation—engaging one another directly rather than through external patrons—is difficult to ignore. [. . .] Gulf states are coordinating with neighbors on energy infrastructure, transport corridors, and logistics in ways that would have been politically unthinkable a decade ago. Quiet channels between Riyadh and Tehran, Ankara and Cairo, and Abu Dhabi and Doha increasingly substitute for Washington’s good offices.

China is not replacing the US as a superpower. Instead, as the most overt proponent of global governance on the international stage, Chinese foreign policy and trade relationships are the vector through which the disaggregation of hegemony is flowing. Palpably, the Western think tanks are, at the very least, open to this new world order. In truth, a global regional balance of power order has been the Anglo-American oligarchy’s objective for more than a century.

Geopolitically, the “disaggregation of hegemony” is the foundation of multipolarity. The lack of superpower hegemony paves the way for a network of private sector hegemons. The new hegemons will program the financial nodes. They will declare themselves the founders of the Network Empire—a transnational, trans-regional network of smart city-states enforcing frontier technology on hapless customers oppressed under their Digital Nation Stacks.

Gaza is destined to be a prime and sickening example of a Network node.

Introducing The Network State of Gaza

Everything we have discussed, over four articles, in relation to the Praxians—their plans and their progress to date—is currently coalescing and manifesting in the most vile manner imaginable in Gaza. The Praxians and their partners are attempting to construct one of their Network States literally on the crushed bones of the Palestinian families whose murders they aided and abetted.

Nothing is settled, and there are many problems the oligarchs have to overcome before any kind of large-scale reconstruction begins in Gaza. About the only thing that is agreed is the scale of the problem, or more accurately, the opportunity.

In February 2025, the UN specialist agency, the World Bank, working in collaboration with the EU, estimated the cost of reconstruction to be just over $53 billion. Since then, Israel and the Praxians have continued the destruction. Together, since the start of the genocide, they have killed at least 73,000 Palestinians, injured more than 173,000 and forcibly displaced approximately 1.9 million. Estimated reconstruction costs have risen to around $71 billion.

There are also competing visions for Gaza’s reconstruction and redevelopment.

Two of these visions will result in forcing surviving Palestinians to live in a UN 2.0 frontier technology-based smart city under a full Digital Nation Stack. The third will probably result in the same, but it does afford Palestinians more control. The first two proposals we’ll discuss are the Arab League plan for Early Recovery, Reconstruction, and Development of Gaza (ERRDG) and the Trump administration’s plan for Gaza Reconstruction, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT).

The ERRDG is backed by the Arab League, led by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. As an influential internal grouping within the League, the GCC also formally backs the plan. Consequently, China supports the ERRDG, as does the Russian government. The European governments of France, Germany, Italy, and the UK have also thrown their weight behind the ERRDG.

Sometimes referred to as the Team Gaza Initiative, the EU Commission has taken a slightly different tack and has officially endorsed neither the ERRDG nor the GREAT plans. Instead, it is trying to position itself as a mediator between both proposals, though it leans towards the GREAT plan and seeks more influence for itself.

Hamas—still the de facto government of Gaza—supposedly represents and defends the lives and the interests of Palestinians in Gaza. Hamas has not backed the ERRDG but has opted to approve the US-led GREAT plan. The GREAT plan doesn’t remotely protect and serve the Palestinian people, but neither did attacking southern Israel on October 7, 2023, to initially accelerate the deterritorialization of the whole region.

In truth, Hamas support for either the GREAT or the ERRDG proposals is irrelevant. Both plans represent an ongoing disaster for Palestinians.

The Arab League tells us that the ERRDG “aims to establish the foundations for sustainable and comprehensive development that reshapes the urban landscape [into an] integrated urban environment.” Apparently, this effort “calls for a forward-looking vision based on precise scientific planning [Technocracy] and the use of the latest technologies in reconstruction and smart construction.”

Under the ERRDG, the infrastructure proposals for its version of the future Gaza are as follows:

• Integrating renewable energy, efficient buildings, and smart waste management to reduce the environmental footprint.
• Developing pedestrian-friendly streets and multi-use spaces to enhance social interaction and encourage walking.
• Strengthening public transportation, smart infrastructure, and seamless mobility to improve accessibility.
• Implementing digital governance, smart networks, and AI-powered services to achieve efficiency and flexibility.
• Supporting entrepreneurship, investment, and local industries to create job opportunities and enhance economic growth

That is to say, if the ERRDG plan succeeds, the people of Gaza will have to live in a 15-minute city, subjected to the full gamut of surveillance and behavioral control technology, where Agentic AI delivers GaaS to them as customers within an innovation hub that serves the interests of investors, not them. The GREAT plan is slightly less favorable, but the difference is minimal.

There is, however, a third option the Palestinians living in Gaza could potentially choose called The Phoenix Gaza. Other plans, such as the Palestine Emerging plan (2024) and the UAE Al Habtoor plan (2025), are intended Technocracies that have now largely been incorporated into the ERRDG. The Phoenix Gaza plan stands slightly apart.

Phoenix was designed by “a voluntary, multidisciplinary team of Palestinian professionals and academics from Gaza, the West Bank, and the diaspora.” It focuses on maintaining and building upon Palestinian “property rights.” It is opposed to the “erasure and exploitation” of the people. It seeks to strengthen Palestinian “local governance [and] supports joint planning through [. . .] consistent dialogue with [Palestinian] institutions.” The Phoenix plan purportedly “rejects imposed master plans” in preference to Palestinian “voluntary collaboration.”

Unfortunately, Phoenix is based upon the “Master Plan developed by Dar Al-Omran (DAO),” and, with its commitment to sustainability, resilience, and the circular economy, it is still likely that Phoenix will also result in Gaza becoming another programmable smart city. Nonetheless, Phoenix at least offers the Palestinians some property rights and an active voice in the redevelopment of their homeland. In reality, neither the GREAT nor the ERRDG propositions offer them any. The actual inclusion of Palestinians in the Phoenix planning process probably explains why not a single government, supranational, or intergovernmental “entity” supports it. Hamas certainly doesn’t.

Moving Toward the Network State of Gaza

After it funded, armed, equipped and diplomatically supported the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, and having greatly assisted in the levelling of Gaza, on September 29, 2025, the Trump administration officially announced its 20-point Gaza peace plan. Point 9 established the “technocratic [. . .] committee”—the Palestinian National Transitional Committee—that would be appointed to facilitate “the day-to-day running of public services and municipalities for the people in Gaza.”

Points 10 – 12 Establish the Network State of Gaza as a Technocracy. In Point 10, the founders of the Gaza Network State Technocracy are defined as the “Board of Peace” that will oversee the “panel of experts”—the technocratic committee—who have “helped birth some of the thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East.”

According to the Trump administration’s 20-point plan, miracle cities are those that “rebuild” urban environments by attracting “investments that will create jobs, opportunity, and hope.”

By the term “modern miracle cities in the Middle East,” Trump was therefore referencing recent or current urban renewal projects in the Middle East region that have attracted outside investment in order to transform the cityscape. Examples include Masdar City (UAE – Masdar City Free Zone), King Abdullah Economic City and King Salman Energy Park (Saudi Arabia – King Abdullah Economic City SEZ and SPARK SEZ, respectively), Lusail City (Qatar), Beirut Digital District (Lebanon), Smart Muscat (Oman), and Smart Amman (Jordan).

The listed “miracle cities” in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are already in their own dedicated SEZs. Qatar offers a nationwide system of SEZs and other Free Zones to attract foreign direct investment, as do Oman and Jordan. Oman and Jordan actively encourage foreign investors to apply for the establishment of new SEZs. Under the Package Deal Contracts (PDC) system, large-scale foreign direct investors in Lebanon receive ten-year exemptions on income and dividend taxes, full exemption of land registration fees, and half-price residency and construction permit fees. In effect, the whole of Lebanon is a Special Economic Zone.

All of these “modern miracle cities in the Middle East” share clearly identifiable common features. All are smart city projects, and they all use sustainable development as an excuse to enforce frontier technology on their people to surveil, monitor, and control their behaviour. Consequently, they are all designed to comply with muscular UN 2.0 global governance.

As required for a Network Empire special jurisdiction to form—such as New Clark city in the Philippines—Point 11 of the plan, which is allegedly Trump’s, proclaims that a “special economic zone will be established with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.” In the pure Dark Enlightenment tradition of “no voice, free exit”—which presumably Trump follows—Point 12 announces that “those who wish to leave will be free to do so and free to return.”

Of course, people with limited means, those who have family commitments, or families who have invested their lives, perhaps over generations, in the land where they live, are not simply “free to leave.” Nor are they likely to want to leave.

This alleged free choice is a Dark Enlightenment feint and a deceitful so-called philosophical concept that is evidently shared by those behind the envisaged miracle city in Gaza. If the Network Empire forms as intended, the vast majority of the world’s urban population, especially Palestinians in Gaza, will have no option but to suffer whatever is heaped upon them by their corporate rulers.

Virtually all Palestinians fled Gaza under duress. They were forced out by Praxian targeting systems and Israel’s weapons. “No voice, free exit” is tyrannical abuse, not a libertarian freedom.

Point 13 names the miracle city in Gaza “New Gaza” and commits Hamas to “not have any role in the governance of Gaza, directly, indirectly, or in any form.” Hamas duly complied, at least verbally.

To form the technocratic committee, Hamas agreed to work with Fatah, its long-time adversary within the Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA is a coalition of Palestinian political parties, which Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, dominates. In 2007, Hamas and Fatah fought a brief Palestinian civil war that resulted in Hamas taking political and military control of Gaza.

Points 14 and 15 deal with the demilitarisation of New Gaza and the creation of a regional International Stabilisation Force (ISF), chiefly formed with the assistance of the Egyptian and Jordanian governments in consultation with the Israeli and Egyptian border forces. The ISF will form the New Gaza police force. The proposal is a virtual facsimile of the Israeli Gaza 2035 initiative—mentioned above—which suggested that Gaza should be administered by the Israeli and Egyptian governments overseeing the Gaza Rehabilitation Authority (GRA). In May 2024, Netanyahu added that the same model could then be “repeated in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.”

Point 16 outlines Israel’s apparent agreement that it “will not occupy or annex Gaza.” This would be achieved in phases by the IDF “progressively hand[ing] over the Gaza territory it occupies to the ISF.”

There was no mention of a two-state solution and no guarantee of Palestinian statehood. Instead, Point 20 references “peaceful and prosperous co-existence” between Israelis and Palestinians on some projected “political horizon.”

Calling the 20-point plan the “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict,” on November 17, 2025, UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (Res. 2803) was passed. It formalised adoption of the 20-point plan, and thus the GREAT plan, as the basis for ending hostilities.

Chatham House suggests that the Trump administration cornered the UN—currently the world’s central functional oligarchy—into accepting Res. 2803. After defeating significant Russian draft amendments, with the support of Qatar, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Jordan, and Turkey, the US supposedly “applied a pressure cooker technique.” Allegedly, as the Comprehensive Plan had the support of the “regional states most affected” by the disruption in the Middle East, this cunning US government ploy somehow cajoled the UN Security Council into adopting Res. 2803. This story is abject nonsense. No “entity” wants a Network State technocracy in Gaza more than the UN.

The UN Security Council has five permanent member states—the US, China, Russia, France, and the UK. They each have a veto over security council resolutions. Ten other Council members are selected every two years by recommendation of the Security Council and approval of the General Assembly. Res. 2803 passed by 13 votes for and none against, with two abstentions. Neither China nor Russia used their veto; they abstained.

China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong said that China didn’t use its veto because what mattered above all else was “a lasting ceasefire,” humanitarian relief operations, and to “launch post-war reconstruction [. . .] for the people in Gaza.” Outlining the Chinese government’s reservations, Fu reportedly said that “the draft resolution does not demonstrate the fundamental principle of Palestinians governing Palestine,” as if the ERRDG plan that China supports does. If that were the Chinese government’s concern, it would have supported the Phoenix plan and vetoed the GREAT plan.

China and Russia did not use their vetos because they are equally committed to a muscular UN 2.0 global governance system based on the rollout of “frontier technology” across an international network of programmable smart city-states. That is precisely what Gaza is now close to becoming by authority of a UN Security Council resolution.

As all governments that voted for the resolution, or abstained, are well aware, Res. 2803 does much more than simply provide the basis for a ceasefire and the reconstruction of Gaza.

Within weeks (January 22, 2026) and with the global authority of the UN behind it, the Trump administration signed the Board of Peace (BoP) Charter, not in New York or Washington, but in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering—the ceremonial home of the global public-private partnership (stakeholder capitalism).

The Charter supposedly empowers the BoP to start building programmable smart city-states in any “areas affected or threatened by conflict.” It can create public and private legal “entities” with international standing that can “enter into contracts, acquire and dispose of immovable and movable property, institute legal proceedings, open bank accounts, [and] receive and disburse private and public funds.”

The BoP is designed to be a private dynasty. Trump is personally—not by virtue of his official public office—the Chairman for life, and only the Chairman has the “authority to create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary [public or private] entities” of the BoP. Before retirement, only the Chairman can appoint his or her successor, and the “Executive Board” can replace the Chairman only if he or she is incapacitated. The BoP is effectively a CEO dictatorship by design.

To buy a slice of Network State Technocarcy in Gaza—or anywhere else, actually—national governments have to pledge $1 billion of their taxpayers’ money the first year. Americans have already pledged £10 billion. Only relatively wealthy nations need apply.

So far, by all accounts, taxpayers have stumped up $17 billion for BoP to run its Network Empire, though frankly, it’s impossible to know what amount of whose funds might be sloshing around in its private bank accounts. As reported by the Financial Times (FT) four months after the BoP Charter was signed:

Rather than use the fund administered by the World Bank, and endorsed by the UN, the board has received donations directly via its JPMorgan account. [. . .] While the World Bank must report on the financial position of the Gaza fund [. . .] no independent transparency requirements are in place for the JPMorgan account.

The FT added that Democrat US Senator Brian Schatz said that Trump referred to the BoP as “sort of a king’s court.” This appears to be a pretty accurate description.

Legal scholars are perplexed. They just can’t understand how the UN ever let such a situation arise.

Writing for Jurist News, Ayesha Naz reported that “[t]he Board’s charter does not mention Gaza once. It frames the Board as a permanent global institution for conflict resolution generally.” She deduced that, via Res. 2803, the UN created “an entity outside the UN system that carries [UN Security] Council-conferred authority without Council-imposed accountability.” Further, the BoP Charter means that nothing “ties the chairmanship to his tenure as president.” Whoever Trump chooses as his successor, be they from the public or the private sector, they will be the king.

Struggling to come to grips with what she had found, though perhaps not recognizing it as the true purpose of Res. 2803, Naz nevertheless fully understood the implications:

If the [Security] Council can confer [. . .] authority on bodies governed outside [UN Charter Articles], the distinction between UN-authorized action and privately controlled action starts to collapse.

This is exactly what Res. 2803 means. It is beyond ridiculous to imagine that the army of legal advisors employed by the fifteen member states of the UN Security Council who voted on Res. 2803, even if they abstained, weren’t aware of it. Of course they knew.

The purpose of Res. 2803 is to collapse the distinction between the UN and the privately controlled “entities” with which it is aligned—such as the WEF. The BoP is a global public-private partnership deal. As the White House said, upon the establishment of the “technocratic committee” to govern Gaza, the actions of the privately controlled and unaccountable BoP “perfectly aligns with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2803.”

Many have posited that the BoP has been created in opposition to the UN. These criticisms completely miss the point that the UN supports the “transfer of power [. . .] from governments to [. . .] private technology companies.” The increasing power and influence of the private sector is the central pillar of the UN plan to, eventually, “flippen” nation-states and thereby firmly establish its multipolar UN 2.0 global governance order.

Whether the BoP succeeds or not, and there are many hurdles in its way, it is precisely the kind of international “entity” the UN wants to see. It is the operating principle established by Res. 2803 that the UN is most eager to promote.

The purpose of the system is what it does.

The purpose of the proposed miracle city in Gaza is equally obvious. The GREAT plan adopts every single technological and structural component of a Praxian Network State. We are seriously expected to accept that this situation is just a coincidence as well. Trump, bought and paid for by the Praxians, is, we are told, the independent-minded POTUS behind the whole project.

The Network State of Gaza

Two years to the day after the Hamas attack, on October 7, 2025, US Military Central Command (CENTCOM) officially announced the opening of the Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in the city of Kiryat Gat in Israel’s Southern District, close to the Gaza border. The CMCC purportedly brings together “stakeholders who share the goal of successful stabilization in Gaza.” The selected stakeholders include representatives from “partner nations, non-governmental organizations, international institutions, and the private sector.”

Those “private sector” partners include the Praxians. As reported by 972Mag, Palantir’s logo is clearly visible on the Maven Smart System (Palantir MSS) being used by CMCC personnel in released promotional video footage. Perhaps it is worth remembering that, according to Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, Palantir MSS “optimiz[es] the kill chain.”

Photograph clearly showing CMCC staff using Palantir’s Maven MSS – Source

When the Trump administration first mooted the possible GREAT project in October 2024, the promotional video carried the corporate logos of Tesla, Amazon, Constellis—formerly Blackwater—and others. When approached by journalists, most of these companies denied any involvement. Tesla, Amazon, and Constellis declined to comment.

The deployment of Constellis and other similar mercenary outfits in and around Gaza has been a consistent government tactic. The Israeli government has openly conceded that it finances, arms, and equips so-called “counter Hamas” paramilitary groups in Gaza, such as the Popular Forces. When these “allied groups,” alongside IDF troops, have evidently murdered Palestinians desperately trying to obtain hold of food and medical aid, the Israeli government has reportedly called this “open-ended control over Gaza.”

As we noted earlier in our discussion about Pax Silica, the use of “private security” forces in autonomous jurisdictions (SEZs) is a key feature of the Network Empire. The GREAT plan, or “Trust,” refers to this as “Hybrid Security.” Private security contractors (mercenaries) will “distribute aid security and build and operate temporary housing zones.” Once New Gaza is established, the private contractors will “maintain public order.” If BoP plans proceed, the International Stabilisation Force (ISF) in New Gaza will ultimately be a private military contractor (PMC) corporation.

Therefore, it is not surprising that PMCs like Constellis, who claim they specialize in delivering “critical humanitarian services in [. . .] complex and high-risk environments,” are eagerly bidding for the lucrative contracts. Again, in October 2024—coinciding with the first murmurings about the GREAT plan—Israeli-American tycoon Mordechai “Moti” Kahana floated the idea that “well trained private security,” who are “equipped for non-lethal and lethal methods of crowd control” and “trained to use deadly force,” should police “gated communities” in Gaza. Kahana is the founder and CEO of Global Delivery Company (CDC), which he has called an “Uber for war zones.” CDC’s other board members include former US and Israeli intelligence, military, and law enforcement officers.

Described as the formation of “biometric ghettos,” two US PMCs—UG Solutions and Safe Reach Solutions (SRS)—were awarded the contracts to run surveillance checkpoints in Gaza in January 2025. SRS operations were led by former US special forces intelligence officer Phillip F. Reilly. SRS is a registered agent of Two Oceans Trust, LLC.

Two Oceans is a Wyoming-based “independent, partner-owned trust company” that provides “tax advantages, modern trust laws, and privacy protections” to “ultra-high net worth individuals, families, and foundations.” Plainly specializing in providing its services to ultra-wealthy tech oligarchs, Two Oceans says it is the “first US financial institution to offer comprehensive generational management for clients who have substantial digital assets.” Due to investor confidentiality, we cannot identify these tech oligarchs, but we can make an educated guess.

Certainly private capital investment is a core component of the GREAT plan. In December 2025, as reported by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and property empire impresario, and Steve Witkoff, the real estate mogul serving as the US special envoy to the Middle East, presented Project Sunrise, a.k.a. the GREAT plan.

Projecting a total $112.1 billion cost over ten years, Kushner presented a plan for transforming Gaza into a “digitally-driven smart city.” Critics immediately pointed out that the plan would fail due to the difficulty in resolving the so-called “conflict.” CFR fellow Steven Cook pointed out that the plan was based on Hamas disarming and that “Hamas will not disarm, so nothing will happen.”

Hamas has recently, however, publicly agreed to disarm itself in the hope of moving the GREAT project forward. This may seem surprising, but Hamas has frequently served as a proxy for the US and Israeli governments, so it shouldn’t shock anyone, least of all CFR fellows.

A Slide from Jared Kushner’s official Project Sunrise Presentation – Source

Calling Project Sunrise Trump’s “Master Plan,” $60 billion for the “the contemplated workstreams” would be financed through US government “grants and guarantees” on debt obligations. In other words, the US public sector would cover the financial risk for private sector investors.

Once New Gaza was up and running, the remaining financing needed would be raised by “monetizing 70% of Gaza’s coastline” to attract further foreign direct investment. With the offshore Gaza Marine Gas Field potentially up for grabs—generating an estimated annual revenue stream of $4 billion—and as a prospective IMEC and BRI hub located just 70 km south of Israel’s Silicon Wadi, what’s not to like for oligarch investors and globalist socialites looking for a Mediterranean beach front tax haven?

After the January 2026 ceremonial signing of the BoP Charter, Kushner expanded on the Master Plan at a Davos follow-up event. Kushner said there was no “Plan B” and, embodying the neoreactionary accelerationist ethos of creative destruction, he said the plan was going to capitalise on “catastrophic success.” Kushner added that the interested parties, including Hamas, had “signed an agreement [and] we are all committed to making that agreement work.”

Formally announcing the GREAT Trust (plan) in February 2025—at a joint White House press conference with Benjamin Netanyahu—Trump initially indicated that the GREAT plan didn’t include a provision to rehouse any Palestinians in Gaza. Fully adopting the Network State strategy, Trump said BoP should take “long-term ownership,” evidently with a view to making Gaza a shining beacon of the Network Empire in a new Middle East. Now that it has been cleared, Gaza was, he said, a “good, fresh, beautiful piece of land.”

Were it not for the fact that Gaza is their home, when we consider what the GREAT plan has in store for Palestinians unfortunate enough to live in it, we might wonder why any would ever want to stay. If they are wealthy enough, they should be fine, but for everyone else, New Gaza will be a prison camp.

Leaked documents reported by Dropsite News revealed that the CMCC has advanced plans for “planned communities” of Palestinians where they would be under constant biometric surveillance; their movements tightly controlled by checkpoints; their purchases and payments constantly controlled and monitored—via digital ID linked to digital currency—and their children subjected to re-education camps to “normalise” their views of Israel.

Under the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation (GREAT) plan for New Gaza (and New Raffah) a full Network city-state will be constructed.

“An unprecedented public-private partnership [to] rebuild Gaza” will make New Gaza a fantastic profit-making venture for oligarchs. Projecting that a “$35-$65B private investment” should return a ten-year ROI of “$324B in assets, [plus] $37B in taxes (from $185B revenue of investing countries’ [and] companies),” wealthy investors and companies will be attracted by an annual New Gaza revenue stream that will “exceed $4.5B by year 10.”

Multinational corporations will relocate to New Gaza primarily because of its strategic location “at the crossroads of a New Abrahamic Architecture” (NAA – IMEC). It will attract multinational corporations to relocate there because it will be a “regional trade hub” at the center of the “pro-American regional architecture.” It will be a “Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism” linking the markets of “Europe, GCC, [and] Asia,” uniting their resources and regional development plans.

The overarching SEZ—covering the entire New Gaza—will be split into sub-zones. The “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone,” for example, will thrive because it will “feed[ ] from and to” the NAA (IMEC). “Private industry investors” will build the necessary “regional data center for Cloud Service Providers, and advanced manufacturing facilities (e.g., gigafactories).”

In addition, as a deregulated employment zone with a desperate and captive “young workforce,” New Gaza will be an enticing manufacturing zone for “Israeli tech” and an appealing prospect for “GCC investments.”

New Gaza will be based on an interconnected system of “Gaza planned cities” consisting of “6-8 dynamic, modern and AI-powered, smart planned cities on the inner side of the Gaza Ring [border]. All services and economy in these cities will be done through ID-based digital system.”

The imposition of UN 2.0 frontier technology and the prerequisite behavioural control systems are guaranteed. The CMCC’s planned system of armed PMCs patrolling biometric and digital ID-linked checkpoints is a New Gaza design feature.

Like all good Network States, nothing exists in New Gaza unless it is on-chain, and all value becomes digital. The intention is that using “blockchain as record of ownership (e.g. digital land title registration)” will “[c]reate and register tokens for fractional ownership.” Consequently, any Palestinians that still live in New Gaza will have to “place their privately owned land in the Trust in exchange for a token that gives a right for a permanent housing unit.”

For at least the first two years, all Palestinians will live in “short-term modular shelter” camps because the “construction [of permanent housing] starts in year 2.” With no land rights, Palestinians will be issued programmable on-chain digital tokens as revocable permits conditionally allowing them to stay in exchange for the land that was once theirs.

Rent payable for the “tokenised” home they can’t own will be “subsidized for 4 years” and food for the first year. After which neither will be subsidised. Thereafter, there are no proposed rent controls and no long term plans for food distribution or local agriculture. Palestinians who make it out of their “short-term modular shelter” will eventually own nothing and be happy, or not, in New Gaza. For investors, not ordinary Palestinians, all of this will “increase [the asset] value of Gaza to ~$324B from $0 today.”

The projected “[b]aseline Gazan population is ~2.14M, with a 2.02% annual growth rate” based on the assumption that “75% of Gazans will remain in Gaza during reconstruction.” Palestinians will be offered $5,000 each to leave. This is important because timescales, and ultimately profits, will improve if “the number of Gazans who volunteer to leave Gaza during the reconstruction” is maximised.

The fact that the CMCC is using Palantir software or that the Trump administration is splashing Praxians’ corporate logos on its promotional videos and pamphlets does not alone demonstrate that the Praxians are among the private sector stakeholders that are leading the GREAT redevelopment of Gaza. Nor does the fact that the Tony Blair Institute—a Larry Ellison front organisation—was involved in Project Aurora, which modelled the forced relocation of Palestinians from Gaza in October 2024. Naming New Gaza zones after Praxians doesn’t constitute conclusive proof either.

It is the Praxians’ openly stated control of the Trump administration; the years of Praxian corporations’ deep involvement with the Israeli defence and surveillance tech sector; the strategic partnerships they have with Israel for “war related missions;” the co-development of AI targeting and surveillance systems with the Israeli state; and the increasing financial and technological footprint they have within Israel, which demonstrates their power and influence in the region.

The definitive proof that New Gaza is a Praxian project stems from the fact that it has been designed as an exemplary UN 2.0 smart city-state project: a Network State within a rapidly emerging Network Empire.

Series Conclusion

Over four essays we have picked apart the global system that is coalescing, acutely in microcosm, in the envisaged New Gaza. To report these observations is not to be blackpilled. To ignore how power structures work and whose interests they serve, however, is to metaphorically stick your head in the sand.

It is because nearly every government is complicit that I have criticised: the Chinese, US, Israeli, Iranian, and many other governments. I have not denigrated the people ruled by those governments, nor their nations, nor their cultures.

In reference to to the purpose of the series you have just read, and to paraphrase former Moldovan Deputy Prime Minister and journalist Iurie Rosca: I have written these lines in total solidarity with the people and I make a clear distinction between the rulers and the ruled.

The Praxians want to exit the current Westphalian system, build a parallel network of Agentic GaaS smart city-states, and then defend them by working with intergovernmental organisations to achieve diplomatic recognition. They and their oligarch partners hope they will thereby construct a techno-feudal global governance system.

To reiterate a point stressed throughout this series, we don’t have to accept any of these behavioural control measures. We can reject Technocracy, we can deny the Network Empire power grab, and we can end the oligarchs’ ambition of finalising permanent global governance.

We could repurpose some of the technology, presently being installed to oppress us, to free ourselves. It is our choice. If we act in unison we can build better societies that oligarchs cannot possibly control. The global oligarchy knows it and this is why we are deluged with so much propaganda intended to divide us.

We can do some “flippening” of our own. We could repurpose some of the basic concepts supposedly underpinning the proposed Network Empire. We too could exit, build, and defend, not neofeudal Agentic GaaS city-states but voluntary democracies. We can combine permissionless DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and fintech (financial technology) to develop counter-economics into a cattallaxy where spontaneous order is the only order we need.

This is just my suggestion. I am sure there are many other long-term goals we could pursue, and numerous and varied peaceable tactics we could employ to achieve them. Whatever path we choose, resoundingly defeating the malevolent plans of the Praxians and their oligarch partners is essential. It is not hyperbolic to say the alternative is slavery.

As power is transferred “from governments to private technology companies,” our continued compliance and obedience to the system is no longer an option. Thankfully, all of us can engage in mass non-compliance.

If we decide to take responsibility for our lives and commit to conducting ourselves as honourable human beings, we can maximise our individual sovereignty. We can abandon the politics of obedience and replace it with voluntary exchange in a free and open society, one where Natural Law is studied and Natural Justice is applied by each and every one of us living as equal human beings with equal inalienable rights and equal responsibilities—a life without rulers, not a life without rules.

So let’s get on with it!

The Praxian Genocidal Kill Chain – Part 4.

Patagonia, positioned at the tip of the South American continent, has long been valued for its dramatic landscape, its pristine waters and its unique wildlife. However, for some, the value of Patagonia’s natural treasures has shifted. No longer are its majestic glaciers and temperate rainforests to be protected. Instead, it is now being proposed that Patagonia, with its brisk climate and abundant water resources, become home to a new animal –– the data center.

The proliferation of data centers has become a huge political issue in recent months, particularly in the United States, largely due to concerns about their gargantuan appetite for local resources –– driving up utility prices for everyday consumers and endangering communities where some of those resources were already scarce. Many have been outraged about how their local governments, elected to ostensibly protect their interests, have rolled over for data center developers, promising jobs that rarely manifest and –– if they do –– largely evaporate after the center is built. Meanwhile the technology many of these data centers power, Artificial Intelligence (AI), has also sparked its own set of concerns, nominally focused on AI’s usurpation of human jobs and human creativity while generating generous returns for the ultra-wealthy and dubious benefits for the rest of us.

The predation of Patagonia by data center developers has been greatly facilitated by the policies of Argentina’s president Javier Milei. Milei has made it a point to partner with Silicon Valley, as well as the current U.S. administration –– itself colonized by Silicon Valley to an impressive and unprecedented degree. He has also developed generous tax benefits schemes for foreign U.S. Big Tech firms to operate in the country, while offering those that seek to park their data centers in the country next to no regulation regarding their construction or operation. Earlier this year, Milei wrote an editorial in the Financial Times where he “invite[d] AI to free itself” and proposed allowing AI-run companies with no humans involved to operate in his country. While some pointed out that these statements seemed to value AI activity over human activity, this is not an isolated incident. For instance, one adviser in Milei’s inner circle, Demián Riedel, has controversially argued that humans are, in fact, Argentina’s biggest problem, particularly in Argentine Patagonia, because they present an obstacle to AI infrastructure and development in the region.

Riedel was notably involved in brokering a major deal for what will become a truly massive data center in his country: Stargate Argentina. Stargate Argentina is the newest constellation of OpenAI’s Stargate project, which was initially launched in January 2025 “to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.” A few months later, in May 2025, OpenAI announced with little fanfare that it planned to internationalize its Stargate project via its new “OpenAI for countries” initiative. Not long thereafter, and with the direct involvement of Milei and his top officials, Stargate Argentina was born.

While OpenAI is now a well-known name, virtually unknown was their partner in Stargate Argentina –– a company called Sur Energy. Not only was Sur Energy unknown internationally, it was also unknown within Argentina, despite being billed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman as one of Argentina’s “biggest energy companies.” Lurking behind this company, which appears to have no real assets in the country aside from letters of intent, is a man who may be slightly more familiar, at least in Argentina.

Emiliano Kargieman is the face of Sur Energy, but it is only his latest venture in a series of companies that have sought to complement the growing influence of Silicon Valley corporations over the public sector. As will be explored in this article, Kargieman’s previous ventures, particularly the satellite surveillance firm Satellogic, not only boasts close ties to current and former top figures in the Trump administration, but has become an increasingly important part of the AI surveillance grid that the U.S. intelligence contractor Palantir has been amassing. In particular, the company is due to enable –– within the next year –– what was once Palantir’s most implausible ambition –– predictive policing of the entire planet in real time via AI-powered satellite surveillance, i.e. total information awareness.

However, more recently through his efforts alongside Sam Altman to create Stargate Argentina, Kargieman has revealed some hidden truths, not just about the data center he hopes to build, but about the data center build-out at large. As will be detailed in this article, Kargieman has casually admitted that Stargate Argentina is not about bringing jobs to locals (despite what some Argentina politicians have claimed), but about generating dollars. Perhaps more revealing of all, he revealed that it is likely that his partner in Stargate Argentina, OpenAI, will not be ultimate end-user of this massive data center, suggesting that the prominent AI firm will collapse under the inevitable popping of an AI debt bubble. In stating this he notes that, whether OpenAI or not, someone will be using this data center. If so, who will use it and what for? Based on Kargieman’s statements and the available evidence, we have attempted to answer those questions, revealing increasingly likely possibilities that will have implications far beyond Argentina.

A Questionable Past

Raised in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires, Emiliano Kargieman’s childhood was characterized by his early obsession with computers and a rebellious streak. For instance, he learned how to repair computers at age 10 and was also kicked out of school for filling the principal’s office with toilet paper. At 15, he claims to have created his first software company. By this time, as a teenager, he had also become part of a hacking collective called “Hacked by Owls”, or HBO. According to Matt Travizano, Kargieman’s long-time friend (and later his co-founder at Sur Energy), some of the HBO members used their technological prowess to spy on the conversations and communications of Argentine Congressmen. Though HBO seemed adversarial to State interests, with its members claiming to espouse “anarchist” ideals, many of its members –– including Kargieman –– simultaneously worked for the Argentine government.

For instance, while Kargieman has declined to disclose this in media interviews, one of his old CVs lists him as working for the Argentine government’s Special Information Security Research Group from age 14 to age 17, overlapping with his time at the HBO collective. This group was part of the DGI (Dirección General Impositiva), Argentina’s General Tax Directorate. This is notable given that, while working for this State agency, Kargieman’s hacking collective was also allegedly spying on elected officials.

In 1997, when Kargieman was 20, he and the broader HBO collective began working directly for Argentina’s AFIP (Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos; in English, Federal Public Income Administration). That year, the DGI, which had employed Kargieman as a teenager via the Special Information Security Research Group, was placed under the AFIP’s authority. Shortly before then, in 1996, Kargieman had created a cybersecurity company that would later become known as Core Security Technologies. He did so with five of his friends, including Gerardo Richarte, Lucio Torre, and Jonathan Altzszul, who had previously worked at the Special Projects Office at Argentina’s AFIP.

Emiliano Kargieman at a TEDX event in Argentina in 2011. His talk was titled “Hacking Space” – Source

Richarte, Torre, and some long-time employees of Core Security, such as Norberto Kueffner, later followed Kargieman to Satellogic, the satellite surveillance company he would later create. Notably, Kueffner is now Director of IT for Javier Milei’s administration. Another veteran of Core Security, Ariel “Wata” Waissbein, is now the head of Argentina’s Federal Cybersecurity Agency (AFC). Yet another Core Security veteran who also went to work for Satellogic was Aviv Cohen, a former Israeli intelligence officer who was, for a time, Satellogic’s head of “special projects.”

In 1998, a year after becoming entangled with Argentina’s AFIP, Kargieman’s firm Core Security began focusing expressly on the U.S. Market. Shortly thereafter, it attracted significant attention from U.S.-based businesses, such as Apple and Lockheed Martin, and the public sector. Core Security’s main U.S. public sector clients soon included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. military’s DARPA, NASA and the NSA.

The same year, in 1998, Core Security was named an “Endeavor Entrepreneur” by the Endeavor Foundation –– a non-profit organization founded the year prior by two Americans, Linda Rottenberg and Peter Kellner. While much can be said about Endeavor, which features prominently in a previous investigation from Unlimited Hangout, their affinity for a small Argentine software company should be of little surprise given the organization’s intimate relations to the South American country. For starters, Rottenberg and Kellner met while in Argentina. Long before the likes of Edgar Bronfman Jr., Reid Hoffman, and Pierre Omidyar had donated vast sums of money to the entrepreneurial evangelicals, Endeavor’s first success story was Marcos Galperin’s MercadoLibre. Galperin became Argentina’s richest man –– on paper, anyway –– due to his firm’s success, before joining Endeavor’s board when the once-non-profit added a new venture capital component to their organization. Endeavor, now advised by Galperin, eventually funded Kargieman’s later company Satellogic, and Galperin now serves on Satellogic’s board.

By 2001, Kargieman’s Core Security also gained the attention of Pegasus Capital. As noted by iProfessional, Pegasus –– beginning in February 2001 –– began “collaborating” with Core in the development of Core’s business model, growth strategy, organizational design and much more. Pegasus Capital was created by Craig Cogut, a key figure in the “junk bond” financial scandal at the now defunct bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. Drexel’s junk bond department, led by Michael Milken, engaged in blatantly illegal activity and used junk bonds to help fuel the takeovers of major corporations by the era’s infamous “corporate raiders” prior to the bank’s collapse. More specifically, Cogut was the lawyer who advised the Milken-run and scandal-ridden junk bond department on the legality of its transactions, including those that saw Milken become a convicted felon. Following Drexel’s collapse, Cogut teamed up with a group of Drexel alumni led by Leon Black –– now best known for his close association with the deceased sex trafficker and Black’s “financial adviser” Jeffrey Epstein –– to co-found Apollo Advisers (now Apollo Global Management) in 1990. Cogut left Apollo to found Pegasus in 1996. Pegasus has since became a key player in several UN-supported “green” finance initiatives, including some which have directly involved Kargieman’s other company Satellogic.

In 2006, Kargieman created Aconcagua Ventures as a joint venture with Pegasus Capital. This firm ostensibly “focused on investing in high-tech startups in Latin America to develop them as global businesses.” By 2009, it had only invested in Core Security as well as the company Popego, where Kargieman served as both CEO and director in 2007. Popego was described around this time as an artificial intelligence (AI) software company.

Emiliano Kargieman in 2011 – Source

Popego, as well as Aconcagua Ventures, backed a non-profit organization that launched in 2009 with the goal of creating a virtual currency related to one’s online reputation. That organization was called The Whuffie Bank and Emiliano Kargieman is listed as one of its founders. The Whuffie Bank, which launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2009, aimed “to promote change in the web by rewarding users with a positive impact on the web with this karma-like digital currency.” This “non-profit” planned to closely surveil social media users by “monitor[ing] [their] activity across various websites, including things like comments, posts, and more.”

As TechCrunch further explained:

“When you complete positive actions, you gain Whuffies, and you lose them when you do something that the organization deems to be detrimental. [. . . ] The algorithm takes into account ‘public endorsements’, or the number of times a user’s tweets are retweeted, or a Facebook post is Liked. It also takes into account who is making the endorsement, and the content in the messages that are being posted.” 

The Whuffie Bank website noted that the goal of the organization was to drive “social change” through its virtual currency, while another Whuffie Bank co-founder, Santiago Siri, has described its goal as “rethink[ing] the future of money.” Siri, while working at the Whuffie Bank, was named a World Economic Forum Global Shaper for his efforts to advance digital, reputation-based money that rewards or punishes users based on their online activity and speech. The Whuffie Bank represents an early effort to link digital currencies to the digital behavior and reputation of its users, efforts which continue today in other forms and have raised concerns about ascendant “social credit systems.”

While the Whuffies went extinct, Kargieman’s next venture Satellogic quickly placed him shoulder to shoulder alongside the very pioneers responsible for digitizing the U.S. financial system, e.g. former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (previously the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the largest dealer of government securities in the country). Before his low Earth observation satellite firm took off, former NASA contractor Kargieman found himself in Northern California, at the very Air Force base where Silicon Valley unofficially took hold of the country’s space program –– taking what was once the pride and joy of the US government firmly into the private sector for good.

Satellogic’s Launch Pad

According to the earliest iterations of its website, Satellogic was founded in 2010 by “two graduates of the NASA Ames-based Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program” in order to build “shared low earth orbit infrastructure to open real-time satellite data to a new generation of application developers.” Emiliano Kargieman and his co-founder, Andrew Fursman, came up with the “concepts that would become Satellogic” while enrolled in that graduate student program. The program took place at Northern California’s Moffet Federal Airfield –– one of the most prominent locales for NASA’s extensive collaboration with the private sector.

The airport was formerly a US Naval facility. Right up until the year Satellogic was founded, it had housed the Air Force’s 21st Space Operations Squadron. Today, the airport is served by the California Air National Guard, and notably the 7th Psychological Operations Group of the US Army Reserve –– an influential support group for military actions which “involve[s] sharing specific information to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior of governments and citizens” including “cyber warfare and advanced communication techniques across all forms of media.”

NASA’s Ames Center is also known for containing one of the largest free standing buildings in the world –– Hangar One. This building, built in 1933, is over 8 acres large and is known for having fog and other weather-type patterns within its voluminous confines. In addition, it became home to the private jets of past and present Google executives Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt after a $33 million renovation plan Google offered to NASA in 2011. NASA, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board eventually came to an agreement in November 2014 which saw Google’s subsidiary Planetary Ventures LLC sign a 60-year lease worth $1.16 billion in rent, which included plans to significantly remodel the famous hangar.

Notably, the first oldest archive version of Satellogic’s website features an image of Hangar One, complete with a five-point star adorning a large bay door and another on top of the building. This is quite likely due to the fact that back in 2009, NASA, Google, and the Ames Center staff collaborated on the founding of the very incubator program that germinated the core ideas of Satellogic.

A photo of Hangar One that was displayed on Satellogic’s homepage – Source

Unlimited Hangout’s first investigation into Satellogic –– April 2024’s Debt From Above: The Carbon Credit Coup –– focused mainly on the firm’s public-private partnerships related to their enforcement of a blockchain-enabled carbon market scheme via satellite surveillance. To spare repeating information regarding Kargieman’s company that was previously addressed, this article will instead focus on placing Satellogic within the context of the decades-long transmutation of America’s space program from the public sector’s federal budget into the private sector powerhouse. From the evidence, it appears that the main figures and sites responsible for NASA partnerships with the Tech industry, not only produced Elon Musk’s SpaceX –– Satellogic’s “preferred vendor for ride share missions” –– but also Satellogic itself. It seems that Satellogic was essentially created to aid both the privatized U.S. space and mass surveillance programs.

https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/04/investigative-reports/debt-from-above-the-carbon-credit-coup/ Singularity University and the Privatized Space Program

In September 2008, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil teamed up with space entrepreneur and X PRIZE Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis to found Singularity University (SU). Their decision to partner came after Diamandis read Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near, which argues that machine intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence and that humans and machines should, at that point, merge into a transhumanist collective. Diamandis approached Kurzweil after reading and suggested they partner on what would become Singularity University.

The goal of SU is to educate the “leaders of tomorrow” in emerging technologies that Kurzweil, and presumably Diamandis, believe will allow humanity to accelerate the arrival of this “singularity” event and thus a transhumanist future for humanity. Singularity University’s website boasts that it has consequently developed “a global ecosystem of techno-optimists.” This term appears to be a reference to venture capitalist (and current Pentagon advisor) Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which Andreessen argues for a full-throated embrace of “transformative” technologies like AI on an accelerated timeline, with complete disregard for whom or for what it could create negative consequences. Kurzweil is notably a “patron saint” of techno-optimism and Andreessen’s manifesto more or less portrays the ideology that Singularity University seeks to instill in its “techno-optimist” graduates.

The “Techno-Optimist” ideology overlaps considerably with Technocracy. This overlap is detailed extensively by Iain Davis in his book The Technocratic Dark State. Davis, in his book, defines Technocracy as a form of governance that claims to maximize efficiency by “scientifically” managing and socially engineering the human population using autocratic sociopolitical and technological behavioral control. In a technocratic system, the management and social engineering of the “human animal” is to be performed by unelected “experts” in science, engineering or technology, also known as the technocrats. This form of governance has been heavily adopted by the wealthiest men in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen as well as others like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

A few months after Singularity University was created, the newly-formed university found a home at NASA’s Ames Center after securing “Corporate Founding” funding from Google and ePlanet Ventures. While Google needs little introduction, ePlanet Ventures is a venture firm associated with Tim Draper’s DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), whose investment committee once featured all three of DFJ’s partners. One of those partners, Steve Jurvetson –– much like SU founder Diamandis –– is a long-time friend of SpaceX’s Elon Musk, with positions on both the Tesla and SpaceX board. He is also credited with bailing out Musk in 2008 with large investments in both firms. However, Jurvetson hardly deserves singular responsibility for SpaceX’s survival. Two other men who were involved in that rescue also happened to play a prominent role in the founding of SU, where Satellogic was born.

Then-Director of the Ames Center, Simon “Pete” Worden, spoke upon SU’s founding, stating that “The NASA Ames campus has a proud history of supporting ground-breaking innovation, and Singularity University fits into that tradition.” Worden had been selected to run Ames by his long-time friend, Dr. Michael Griffin, who became the Administrator of NASA in 2005. Both Worden and Griffin were alumni of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO) –– colloquially known as “Star Wars” due to its early 1980s formalization under President Ronald Reagan –– with Worden having taken over Griffin’s job as Head of Technology in the space-focused missile defense program.

Simon “Pete” Worden near the NASA Ames Center in his favorite costume, a “goat herder” – Source

While at SDIO, both Griffin and Worden were responsible for immense strides taken in fields quite relevant to today’s commercialized space industry. For starters, their work helped pioneer the development of Low Earth Observation (LEO) satellite constellations such as those later launched by Satellogic. Their advancement of satellite broadcasting capabilities in general was accomplished via SDIO’s Clementine project –– a “small, low-cost, and rapidly developed satellite used to test sensor and propulsion technology for missile interceptors” and which also “mapped the Moon.” Additionally, Griffin was working at the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences after his time at SDIO, a company which pioneered the use of “a system for collecting data from remote locations using satellites in low-Earth orbit.” Worden is considered a “crucial innovator and promoter of small satellites in the early years of development” while at SDIO.

Worden and Griffin were also both instrumental to the commercially-viable build out of the reusable, vertical take-off and landing of the “DC-X” rocket, which set the stage for SpaceX’s commercially-viable building of reusable, vertical take-off and landing Falcon 1 rockets. In fact, Musk himself told former manager of SDIO Jess Sponable in 2013 that SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project!” While many details remain outside of the scope of this article, Griffin’s stint running a budget-starved NASA while Worden merged the space program with Silicon Valley at Ames led to accusations from Ames employees that the two men were “part of a conspiracy to destroy America’s space program.”

Michael Griffin Sworn in as NASA Administrator by Vice President Dick Cheney in 2005 – Source

There are few people more responsible for the private sector takeover of the space industry than Griffin, Worden, and Diamandis –– all of whom have their unique ties to Elon Musk and the founding (and eventual success) of SpaceX.

In August 1993, the Falcon 1 predecessor “DC-X” took its first lift off in White Sands, New Mexico during testing by contractor McDonnell Douglas on behalf of the SDIO. Griffin, the Deputy Director of Technology for SDIO at the time, stated that the “DC-X was government R&D at its finest.” The DC-X took its last flight in 1995 before being upgraded to the DC-XA, which was promptly passed back within NASA proper, only to be shuttered after a final flight on July 31, 1996.

In May 1996, the month prior to the shutdown of the DC-X project, Diamandis officially founded the X Prize. The prize offered $10,000,000 to the team that could successfully breach the lower atmosphere. While the winning team would not do so until 2004, the prize kick-started the private, commercial space industry, and was influential in addressing new forms of fundraising and project management for NASA. The original X Prize Foundation Committee, announced in December 1996, featured Worden in addition to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, among others. Due to the nature of the prize being first announced in 1996, the many teams competing had to spend years building their rockets and technology, causing nearly a decade of waiting for the new space industry to blast off.

During this interim period, Diamandis got a call from Bill Gross, the founder of the early tech startup incubator Idealab, in 2000 to come aboard a new company as CEO. That new company, called BlastOff!, was given a $1 billion budget to organize a private moon mission. In a 2008 video for the Google Lunar X Prize, which officially brought together the Griffin-led NASA with SU’s funder Google and Diamandis’ X Prize, Diamandis describes the team at BlastOff! as having eventually decided to use the Russian ICBM “Dnepr” to launch their moon mission. BlastOff!, which operated in stealth, eventually shuttered in January 2001.

From left to right: Rob McEwen, James Cameron, Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk & Jim Gianopulos – Source

Only a few months prior, in October 2000, Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of PayPal/X.com, with PayPal also having come out of the Idealab incubator (as Confinity) with an early investment from Gross and Idealab in January 2000. Furthermore, the first board member of PayPal was Idealab VP Scott Bannister, who graduated college with PayPal founder Max Levchin, and who was responsible for introducing Levchin to Peter Thiel. As previous investigations from Unlimited Hangout have aimed to prove, Idealab –– despite being little known today –– is intimately connected to the primordial origins and subsequent immense success of Google, PayPal, Palantir, Tether, PolyMarket and arguably Musk’s SpaceX.

Out of a job and about to be flush with cash from the sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk set his sights on the stars, Mars, and beyond. The year after he was ousted from PayPal, Musk met Griffin at The Mars Society in 2001, which kicked off their lengthy friendship. The Mars Society was previously formed in 1998 and boasted Griffin as a founding Steering Committee member. X Prize Foundation Committee member Aldrin, and a plethora of employees from NASA’s Ames Center soon joined him. Musk made a large donation and subsequently joined the Steering Committee alongside Griffin. Musk has since overtly promoted the idea of establishing a technocracy on Mars. Affinity for technocracy seems to run in Musk’s family, as his maternal grandfather previously led the technocratic movement in Canada.

In 2001 and 2002, Musk and Griffin made multiple flights to Russia in an effort to purchase Dnepr rockets in order to begin experiments in space travel, arguably continuing the work of the Idealab-sponsored BlastOff! On one of their trips to Russia, after finding the purchasing price of the Russian ICBMs too high, Musk typed out a model to manufacture the rockets needed, but at low cost. He reportedly came up with the plans for SpaceX on the flight back alongside Griffin. Griffin was offered a role as Chief Engineer at SpaceX, but decided instead to become the President and COO of the CIA’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel. Musk allegedly named his son Griffin Musk after his friend, and eventually gave Griffin an advisory role at SpaceX-subsidiary Castelion in 2022. Castelion boasts mass-production capabilities of hypersonic missiles, and additionally features fellow In-Q-Tel-alum Lisa Porter on the advisory board.

Griffin left In-Q-Tel to take the reigns at NASA in April 2005 after being selected by President George W. Bush. Only a week after his appointment, Griffin met with Musk at NASA Headquarters. Two key changes to NASA’s status quo occurred at the onset of Griffin’s term –– massive budget cuts to the likes of the Ames Research Center in November 2005, and the authorization of the “Prize Authority.” This novel fundraising and budget concept had been pioneered by Diamandis’ X Prize. Only a few years later, Google, NASA and X Prize collaborated together on the aforementioned Google Lunar X Prize in 2008. Griffin was quoted as being “an advocate for the use of Prize Authority we’ve had at NASA since 2005.”

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin (left) meets with the CEO of SpaceX Elon Musk (right) at NASA Headquarters in Washington – Source

Griffin used his position at NASA to further advocate for the commercial and private space industry, and when Musk’s SpaceX nearly folded after three failed rocket launches, Griffin and his friend Worden came to Musk’s aid. In April 2006, after the explosion of a Falcon 1 on its maiden voyage, the Pentagon selected Worden to lead the inquiry into the mishap, as DARPA had helped fund the launches. The very next month, in May 2006, Worden was selected by Griffin to lead the ever-important Ames Research Center. Two years later, in December 2008, the Griffin-led NASA formally partnered with X Prize and Google, and gave $3.5 billion in contracts to SpaceX and Griffin’s former company Orbital Sciences –– saving Musk’s then-troubled company in addition to the aforementioned private bailout from Jurvetson.

The next month, January 2009, Singularity University was announced by X Prize’s Diamandis with support from the Griffin-led NASA and with funding from Google and the Jurvetson-affiliated ePlanet Ventures –– stationed at the Worden-led Ames Research Center. Early reports of the announcement even listed Worden as an official founding member of SU, although he never appears in later iterations of their founding story. When Worden finally announced his 2015 departure from the NASA Research Center, he specifically referred to “the nine years he spent at Ames” as “the most enjoyable of his 40 years of public service.” Worden furthered:

“In the last nine years we have launched dozens of small, low-cost satellites – and helped ignite a major new industry in this area… Ames has provided entry technology for the emerging commercial space launch sector. We have helped launch small satellites working with a number of nations. And we’ve hosted and inspired thousands of students.”

It is hard to separate Worden’s musings on his time at Ames from Kargieman’s decision to found of Satellogic. Not only did Kargieman become interested in the commercial space launch sector and “small, low-cost satellites” while studying at the Worden-linked, “techno-optimist” graduate program, but the same Ames facility where that program was hosted also apparently became Satellogic’s first home. Thus, more than just sparking the idea for Satellogic, Ames seems to have incubated it as a company. Furthermore, it remains difficult to parse the beginnings of Satellogic from its connections to major players in the privatization of the military and space programs. Many of these companies have been discussed in prior investigations from Unlimited Hangout –– including SpaceX, Tether, and Palantir –– not to mention their willing public partners within the US government. Notably all three of these companies have since become directly and significantly partnered with Satellogic.

In addition, one simply has to look at Satellogic’s board members, both past and present, to understand that Kargieman’s company is hardly a simple tech startup, and operates far more like a cog in a well-designed, multi-headed apparatus developed by the U.S. government but profiteering as a private company.

Satellogic’s board as shown on its website in April 2024 – Source

As previously stated, much was written about the founding and funding of Satellogic in Debt From Above, but the more recent developments deserve reminding for the context of this piece. For starters, in 2022, the current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who boasts intimate ties to stablecoin issuer (and eventual Satellogic investor) Tether, helped connect Kargieman’s company with former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who then funded Satellogic via his firm Liberty Strategic Capital. Both Lutnick and Mnuchin joined the Satellogic board that same year. Another board member who also joined that year has direct connections to the Pentagon –– Liberty Strategic Capital’s Senior Managing Director General Joseph Dunford (Ret.), who was the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first Trump administration. In addition, Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald notably helped take Satellogic public, with the ticker $SATL.

In February 2022, Satellogic also officially partnered with Palantir, the privatized version of the Pentagon’s controversial Total Information Awareness program. Satellogic claimed in a press release that its partnership with Palantir was intended to “leverage Palantir’s Foundry platform” in order to “accelerat[e] business process, rapid image product delivery, AI model training, and enterprise-wide data integration.” The partnership also saw Satellogic become a major provider of space-based surveillance data to the U.S. government via Palantir, which contracts with all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, the military and many other U.S. federal agencies. According to Satellogic’s press release, as part of the deal, “Satellogic will provide Palantir’s U.S. government customers with ready access to Satellogic’s high-resolution satellite imagery to drive analytical insights across a range of mission-oriented use cases.”

Kargieman poses with one of Satellogic’s satellites in 2023 – Source

A few months after announcing their partnership, in April 2022, Satellogic and Palantir launched their “first Edge AI-enabled satellite into space” with assistance from SpaceX’s Transporter 4 mission. This trio working together directly lends credibility to the theory described above that the common players behind all three companies were building collaborative infrastructure –– in this case, satellites, AI and rockets. According to their press release, the “new Edge AI-enabled NewSat” is the product of a “six-month project” in which “Satellogic adapted its hosted payload program and edge computing hardware” in order to “run Palantir’s Edge AI platform.” Their “joint project” aims to “deliver[. . .] new capabilities which will have broad applicability across mission sets in both government and the commercial sector.” This technological collaboration allows for quick swapping between different algorithms depending on its location. The press release furthers:

“We are able to hot-swap between models and chain capabilities, depending on mission requirements and terrain. For example, when the satellite passes over a port we can run the cloud detector, image segmentation, and ship detector models, and when passing over a town we can switch to vehicle and building detectors.”

In total, the Satellogic hardware is capable of running 6 additional third party models, including Palantir Omni and Palantir Overcast, in addition to Xailient, Pilot.ai and Mind Foundry. According to Palantir, “the Palantir-Satellogic collaboration represents a significant step in expediting delivery and dramatically improving the quality of data sent back to customers.” Palantir’s blog post on the collaboration concluded that:

“[T]his pioneering application of Edge AI in space aims to serve as the foundation for advanced analytics that can inform timely solutions to address critical global priorities, like combatting climate change, preventing disasters, and improving emergency response.”

One of Satellogic’s more recent announcements relates to the imminent launch of a new constellation of satellites it has named Merlin. Due to launch this October and become active some time in 2027, Merlin will “support persistent monitoring of unlimited locations worldwide” by “enabl[ing the] daily remapping of the entire planet at one-meter resolution.” Presumably, this will also grant its analytic partner, Palantir, the same capability.

In announcing Merlin, Kargieman stated the following:

“Until now, organizations had to choose between global coverage at low resolution or high-resolution monitoring of a limited number of sites. Merlin removes that trade-off and enables persistent monitoring at planetary scale.”

In an interview earlier this year with Forbes Argentina, Kargieman remarked that Merlin will soon “allow us to do things we never imagined. With AI [and Merlin] we can begin to predict the future.” As noted in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout, a long-time major focus of Palantir is predictive analytics, particularly predictive policing –– often referred to as “pre-crime.”

Merlin exemplifies Satellogic’s efforts to push planetary surveillance into a new paradigm. Kargieman has referred to this new paradigm as “Persistent Global Intelligence,” a departure from the existing Earth Observation paradigm of “episodic imagery.” Its efforts in this regard are meant to empower global intelligence and defense agencies, particularly those of the United States. This is reflected, not only by Satellogic’s existing and new U.S. government contracts, but also through their recent partnerships with U.S. government contractor SynMax (AI surveillance data analytics company backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC) and appointing one of the main architects of the U.S. military’s controversial Project Maven (AI-powered weapon targeting software) as a strategic advisor.

Stargate Argentina

While engineering Satellogic’s pivot to AI-powered “Persistent Global Intelligence” satellite surveillance, Kargieman decided to create yet another company –– this one aimed at cashing in on the AI “boom.” He, along with Matt Travizano and Stan Chudovsky, founded Sur Energy in 2025. Travizano was an Argentine who was also the head of Sur Ventures, which invested in Satellogic, and had long-standing business interests in California. He is also credited with connecting the administration of Javier Milei to prominent figures in Silicon Valley. Travizano died last year while scaling California’s Mount Shasta, shortly after founding Sur Energy. Meanwhile, Chudovsky was previously VP of Messaging at Meta/Facebook and, prior to that, VP of Growth and Global Strategy at PayPal.

Shortly after launching, and even before having a website presence, Sur Energy announced a massive partnership with OpenAI, the formerly non-profit but now for-profit AI company run by Sam Altman and the developer of ChatGPT. Altman is a protégé of Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir whose recent move to Argentina and meetings with Milei and top government officials earlier this year made international headlines.

OpenAI executives meet with Javier Milei (center) and some of his top officials, including Demián Riedel – Source

The Sur Energy-OpenAI partnership, formalized in October 2025 via a letter of intent, seeks to develop a $25 billion data center in Argentina’s Patagonia region called Stargate Argentina. Oracle, the CIA-linked data infrastructure company helmed by Larry Ellison, will likely operate Stargate Argentina upon its completion, per Kargieman. Oracle is notably OpenAI’s partner in the U.S.-based Stargate project, which –– per OpenAI –– now has global ambitions. Kargieman has also claimed that construction on Stargate Argentina will begin this year and end in 2027, even though the planned location of the site has not been made public. Notably, Milei’s administration was intimately and directly involved in the discussions that led to the signing of the letter of intent between Sur Energy and OpenAI.

In announcing the project, OpenAI’s Sam Altman referred to Sur Energy as one of Argentina’s “leading energy companies,” which it is not. Upon the announcement, even Bloomberg noted that Sur Energy was entirely unknown in the sector and had exactly zero assets in the country. OpenAI later clarified that Sur Energy was instead “the energy and infrastructure developer” of the project, not the provider.

Reports have suggested that the majority state-owned nuclear power firm, Nucleoeléctrica, may play a role in the project. Significantly, Milei’s government announced its efforts to privatize Nucleoeléctrica just weeks before Stargate Argentina was announced. Forbes pointed to the involvement of Nucleoeléctrica’s former president, Demián Reidel, in Stargate Argentina. Reidel, prior to leading Nucleoeléctrica, had been a top advisor to Milei and an architect of his administration’s policies on AI and nuclear power. In that role, he had controversially claimed that Argentina, Patagonia in particular, was ripe for AI development, but that its main problem was that it was too populated with Argentines.

It was later revealed that Sur Energy had signed two memorandums of understanding with two other Argentine power providers prior to announcing the project in October of last year. Those companies are Central Puerto and Genneia. Central Puerto is the formerly state-owned power provider of the Buenos Aires area, which was privatized in the early 1990s and has since expanded to several other areas of the country. The second, Genneia, is an interesting company to explore in this context, as it shows how Milei’s administration has become entangled with the network supporting Milei’s ostensible worst enemies.

Genneia was created in 1991, initially operating as a natural gas distribution company under the name Emgasud. It rebranded to Genneia in 2012 following a pivot to renewable energy. This pivot was driven by the introduction of a new crop of shareholders, namely Argentine businessman Jorge Horacio Brito, his son Jorge Pablo Brito and his long-time business partner and brother-in-law Delfín Jorge Ezequiel Carballo, all of whom joined the company’s board a year prior to the rebrand in 2011.

Brito was the long-time head of Argentina’s Grupo Macro, which includes and was built around Banco Macro. Brito’s early banking enterprise was initially launched as a financial company during the 1970s, when Argentina was under dictatorship. His company was closely related to figures who would later become top officials in the government of Raúl Alfonsín, after Argentina transitioned away from dictatorship and toward “democracy.” One such figure was Mario Brodersohn, who was Alfonsín’s Treasury Secretary when Brito and Banco Macro were granted banking licenses in the late 1980s. Brito allegedly used his close ties to the government for privileged access to information. In one notorious example, his bank bought 3 million dollars prior to the Alfonsín government’s disastrous “Spring Plan” (Plan Primavera) that saw the Argentine peso sharply devalued. He was investigated, but never charged.

Under the subsequent government of Carlos Menem and a wave of privatizations, Brito again received preferential treatment. When the province of Salta had its regional bank privatized, Brito’s Banco Macro was the only buyer put forward. Other provincial banks were privatized in a similar fashion, netting Banco Macro millions of taxpayer dollars annually just in payment for its maintenance of provincial bank accounts.

During the Argentine economic crisis of 2001, Brito’s Banco Macro came out on top, buying up collapsing banks and expanding its footprint. Meanwhile, the bank participated in the notorious “corralito,” a government policy whereby depositor funds were essentially frozen for over a year and Argentines could only withdraw $250 a week from domestic banks. During that time, the Argentine peso was, again, sharply devalued, and depositors lost a significant portion of their wealth.

Brito subsequently became extremely close to the political power center of Argentina yet again under the “center-left” Kirchner political dynasty. This coincided with Brito’s appointment to chair ADEBA, the Association of Private Banks of Argentine Capital. Brito was again a major beneficiary of Kirchner-era policies, including the decision to have ADEBA banks manage pension pay-outs. He was also investigated for his apparent role in moving suspect funds in one of the worst corruption scandals of the Kirchner era, the Ciccone Case. He was allegedly involved in several other corruption scandals that plagued the Kirchner presidencies, but was never properly investigated. His coziness with political power even continued under the “right-wing” government of Mauricio Macri, leading some media outlets to call Brito “the banker friend of political power, who never loses.”

However, it seems that Brito’s strategy to be as close to political power as possible was not only about making massive profits, but also about preventing investigations into his apparent criminal dealings. Banco Macro, under Brito, was an avid money laundering enterprise. When Argentine authorities began fining banks for violating anti-money laundering (AML) practices in 2010, Banco Macro was fined for just that five times in less than a year. A few years later, in 2015, Banco Macro had some of its activities temporarily suspended by Argentina’s National Securities Commission (CNV) for continuing to fail to enforce even the most basic AML practices. The bank then issued a short press release (without providing evidence) that it had, in fact, complied and, thanks to Brito’s political connections, the suspension was lifted after just one week.

Jorge H. Brito (left) and his son Jorge P. Brito (right) in an undated photo – Source

Brito was eventually forced to step down from Banco Macro following his role in the Ciccone Case, the aforementioned Kirchner-adjacent corruption scandal, as well as money laundering concerns. He returned to lead the bank in 2020, once he and his associates believed the fallout from the scandal had died down, only to die in a bizarre helicopter crash a few months later. After his death, his son Jorge Pablo Brito took the reins of his business interests along with Delfín Jorge Ezequiel Carballo, who was Jorge Brito’s long-time partner and brother-in-law.

When Javier Milei ran for Argentina’s presidency, he ran against what he called a political “caste” that included, not only politicians, but the businessmen who enabled and often benefited from brazen acts of political corruption. Banco Macro, under both Britos, has been a key financial enabler of this political caste, with some former Argentine politicians calling it “the bank of Argentina’s [establishment] politics” because of its long-running and often insidious relationship with national politicians. The Brito family and Banco Macro are arguably a key financial node that has allowed this political “caste” to function and metastasize. Milei has even privately referred to Jorge Pablo Brito, chairman of the board of Genneia, as one of the main financial backers of his party’s opposition.

Nevertheless, under Milei’s government, Brito’s Genneia has been given preferential treatment compared to other domestic energy companies and given million of dollars in government contracts, undermining both Milei’s supposed commitment against the entrenched “caste” of Argentine political corruption as well as his supposed commitment to free market competition. Perhaps Brito’s and Milei’s shared interest in turning Patagonia into an AI “hub” was enough for Milei to look the other way.

However, even the deals with Genneia, as well as Central Puerto and Nucleoeléctrica, may not be enough to power Kargieman’s Stargate Argentina. According to press releases and reports, Stargate Argentina is planned to have a capacity of up to 500 MW “to support advanced artificial intelligence computing.” This means that the data center will use roughly 500,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) every hour, and thus roughly 4.38 billion kWh annually. As a result, Stargate Argentina, once it is fully operational, would aim to use a supply of electricity roughly equivalent to 3.4% of all electricity currently produced in the entire country annually. In contrast, in the United States, all data centers, AI-related and otherwise, use roughly 4-5% of domestic electricity production annually. Kargieman himself has said that Argentina “generates and consumes approximately 14 gigawatts of energy in terms of capacity”, and that, with his data center alone, “Argentina would go from consuming 14 to 14.5 gigawatts.” Kargieman himself acknowledged this jump is a “significant percentage.”

On top of that, Stargate Argentina has claimed it will only use renewable energy sources, which currently represent slightly under half of Argentina’s total energy production. Some Latin American news outlets have noted that Stargate Argentina’s ambitions will be difficult to achieve given that, in order to have the advertised capacity, all existing renewable energy sources in Argentine Patagonia –– from the flared gas of Vaca Muerta in the Neuquén province to the wind and hydro plants of its southernmost regions –– will not be enough to meet its demands.

A data center corridor in the Neuquén province proposed by its local government. Some have speculated that Sur Energy will choose this location for Stargate Argentina – Source

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the project is infeasible. For instance, the Neuquén province in particular has the promise of generating much more energy over time, though increased energy production would likely have to precede Stargate Argentina’s full build-out, as currently planned. Indeed, in a recent interview, Kargieman has alluded to this, stating that Sur Energy is planning “to build the infrastructure for the generation and distribution of energy to supply the data center,” but that it planned to partially rely on existing power infrastructure. In addition, the Milei government has made it a point to attract AI-related investment, including data centers, through its new tax incentive scheme known as RIGI, which provides tax benefits for large, often foreign investments in the country. Stargate Argentina is a known beneficiary of the RIGI scheme. This, coupled with Milei’s deregulatory bent, could allow data centers to quickly colonize Patagonia, particularly given that data center construction and operation is almost entirely unregulated in Argentina (e.g. they face essentially no legal obstacles related to their potential impact on the environment or local inhabitants).

“A Source of Dollars”

Like in many other countries, Argentines are wary of AI and, as a consequence, local and federal officials have touted the build-out of data centers, particularly in Patagonia, as projects and investments that will create significant employment opportunities for locals. For instance, the Planning Minister of the Patagonian Neuquén province, Ruben Etcheverry, has claimed that a proposed data center “corridor” in Neuquén will “open new economic opportunities for the local population.” Meanwhile, Argentine president Javier Milei, proclaimed earlier this year that, while “many fear that there will not be enough work in the Argentina of tomorrow,” these new industries –– e.g. energy, mining, critical mineral processing, digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence –– “will more than meet the demand for labor withdrawn by the old industries, and with much better salaries.”

Screengrab of Kargieman’s recent interview with La Nación with the headline reading: Emiliano Kargieman: “An AI data center is not a source of employment for Argentina. It is a source of dollars” – Source

However, the main figure behind Stargate Argentina, Emiliano Kargieman, apparently disagrees. Last December, Kargieman, in an interview with La Nación, claimed that AI data centers, including his own project, “are not a source of jobs in Argentina.” Instead, he posited that they are, in actuality, “a source of dollars.” More specifically, Kargieman stated that:

“For construction, data centers require employing thousands of people. For its subsequent operation, it employs about a hundred people. It is not a direct source of employment. [. . .] That is not the way this investment is going to contribute to the country [. . .] The development of AI infrastructure contributes to the country not only by generating a line of income from exports of computing services, dollars. It also allows us to position ourselves strategically and improve the competitiveness of companies and the efficiency of the State.”

Kargieman’s claims that data centers are not a direct source of employment is supported by local and regional investigations. One such investigation, jointly written by Brazilian and Argentine media outlets, found that data centers in South America “do not create local job openings and much of the investment funds [destined for job creation] instead go to technological teams, which are generally imported.”

Thus, even Kargieman has acknowledged that projects like Stargate Argentina are not about creating jobs for locals. Given this admission, it is worth mentioning again that a key architect of Milei’s AI policy and his alliance with Silicon Valley –– Demián Riedel –– had previously claimed that local Argentine populations were the main obstacle to AI infrastructure development.

Javier Milei and Argentina’s Digital Transformation

Once Stargate Argentina is up and running, who is likely to benefit most of from this massive Patagonian data center? Per Kargieman, it may not be his main partner in Argentina –– OpenAI. In his recent interview with La Nación, Kargieman noted that OpenAI’s Sam Altman has acknowledged to him (and also publicly) what many investors have been warning more feverishly in recent months, that there is an AI market “bubble.” Kargieman says that such a bubble existing is “normal,” adding that “all the major industrial revolutions were accompanied by bubbles.” In the case of those who invested in factories or other infrastructure in past bubbles linked to past industrial revolutions, Kargieman stated that “whoever invested in that building goes bankrupt, but someone ends up using the building.” Thus, he sees it as irrelevant whether Stargate Argentina is ever used by OpenAI or not and, in his words, seems to imply that OpenAI itself may disappear after an inevitable market correction.

Sam Altman (left) and Javier Milei (right) during Milei’s trip to Silicon Valley in the U.S. in May 2024 – Source

From Kargieman’s point of view, it doesn’t matter “whether it is OpenAI or not [using Stargate Argentina’s projected data center], what matters is the long-term demand of the sector.” In response to that statement, his interviewer said: “So, if OpenAI does poorly, there will be others looking to use this type of infrastructure.” Kargieman responded in the affirmative and stated that “the infrastructure is going to be used for something regardless of whether it is OpenAI or not.”

While Kargieman seems to imply that OpenAI may not be the ultimate user of Stargate Argentina, but rather a corporate accelerator of its construction, he does hint at one of the actors he thinks will ultimately be using Stargate Argentina and for what purpose: the Argentine State. Kargieman stated in that same interview that the State would be among the main beneficiaries of Stargate Argentina because, over the next decade, “States will transform to be more efficient using AI.”

Kargieman then added the following:

“This can only be done if citizens’ data is handled in an environment over which the State has jurisdictional control. A data center of this type in Argentina gives the country its initial stepping stone for a profound transformation of the efficiency and transparency of the State’s operation, based on data control. These things are not minor. It is a long-term strategic function.”

Open AI itself has a similar view. For instance, one of OpenAI’s press releases about Stargate Argentina stated that:

“In addition to developing the infrastructure needed to power AI, we are discussing opportunities with the Argentinian government to drive AI adoption across Argentina, as part of our OpenAI for Countries initiative [of which Stargate Argentina is part], starting within the government itself.”

If Argentina’s government is to be one of the likely ultimate users of Stargate Argentina, it is important to examine what its government is already using AI for and how else they plan to use it.

While much has been written about Milei’s laissez faire policies with respect to AI and corporations, including allowing for AI-only companies with no humans involved to operate in the country, it is his government’s use of AI that has been largely overlooked.

One of the Milei-led government’s earliest domestic policies with respect to AI came in 2024, when former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich announced that the government would surveil Argentines’ social media activity with AI in order to “predict future crimes.” To do this, Milei’s government created a new subagency of the Security Ministry called the AI Applied to Security Unit (La Unidad de Inteligencia Artificial Aplicada a la Seguridad). The new Unit works to “patrol open social networks, applications and internet sites,” in order to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or predict riots.” The Unit also uses AI to “analyz[e] security camera images in real time in order to detect suspicious activity or identify wanted people using facial recognition” while also “patrol[ling] large areas using drones, provid[ing] aerial surveillance.” This aerial surveillance would also be fed into the AIs used by this new subagency. The Unit also identifies “suspicious financial transactions or anomalous behavior that could indicate illegal activities” through its automated surveillance activities, while also “us[ing] machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data and thus predict future crimes.” The program is remarkably similar to a U.S. proposal that was made under the first Trump administration in 2019. That program, known as SAFEHOME, sought to use AI analytics on Americans’ social media posts to identify potential “warning signs” of individuals who may commit acts of violence, allowing those individuals to be “disrupted” by the government before they could commit an illegal act.

Around the same time that the AI Applied to Security Unit was created in Argentina, it was also reported that the Milei-led government planned to replace human government workers and organizations with AI, further underscoring Milei’s commitment to the Argentine State’s “digital transformation.”

More recently, in May of this year, Milei’s government announced a new AI public policy “innovation” – the creation of a “digital twin” for every Argentine based on their online activity, as surveilled by the State. This “twin” would then be cross-referenced with other government databases and then used to create predictions that would then inform public policies. This, notably, is quite similar in some ways to the concept of futarchy, which seeks to use prediction markets to dictate public policy. In announcing the policy on X (formerly Twitter), Milei remarked that “Argentina anticipates the future, because the future does not wait” and treated this new policy “innovation” as a global milestone.

In announcing the policy, the Argentine government stated that: “a State that not only observes reality once the problems have already occurred, but also has the capacity for anticipation, simulation and prevention.” It then described a “digital twin” as “a tool aimed at transforming data into prediction capacity and strategic design of public policies.” The video Milei posted to X when he announced the policy noted that this use of a “social digital twin” would allow the State to “predict the future” from a person’s childhood until “autonomy” (i.e. adulthood) in order to “anticipate the impact at each [life] stage.” One image shown in that video shows Argentina’s Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, talking to officials from the United Nations and European Union as part of the project. It also displays the logo of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a CIA contractor, suggesting that they would also be involved in the project. However, the Ministry later clarified that “no external companies” would be involved in the development of the system.

An image from the “digital twin” announcement video Milei posted to X showing Sandra Pettovello talking to UN and EU officials as part of the new policy – Source

Notably the concept of the “digital twin” was developed in the 1960s by NASA, which –– as previously explained –– played a major role in Kargieman’s past and his decision to launch his company Satellogic. As previously noted, Kargieman’s company is now shifting gears to offer “Persistent Global Intelligence” by remapping the planet daily with satellite surveillance at high resolution for its clients, most of which are intelligence and defense agencies. Notably, NASA has more recently argued that digital twins are important for “predictive maintenance” of complex systems. When applied to Argentine society at large, the proposed digital twin system is likely to synergize with the Security Ministry’s new AI unit, which already focuses on “predictive policing.”

As previously noted, Satellogic’s soon-to-be-launched satellite constellation, Merlin, which will have AI-native capabilities will, per Kargieman, “allow us to do things we never though possible” such as “begin to predict the future” using AI-powered planetary surveillance. Satellogic and Kargieman are not alone in this endeavor, as industry publications have recently noted that “space-based predictive analytics” will be a “gamechanger.” One top executive at a Canadian satellite surveillance company was recently quoted as saying:

“Predictive analysts is going to be more important going forward. Be it in terrorism or nature in terms of wildfires, predictive analytics will aid the earth in a completely new way.”

Thus, Kargieman –– whose Stargate Argentina is slated to serve as an essential data repository for these type of AI predictive programs with national security applications –– is also committed to predictive analytics through his other main venture, Satellogic. Notably, Satellogic and its imminent predictive capabilities are being marketed largely to the U.S. national security apparatus and its web of private contractors. With Argentina a signatory to the U.S.’ new and highly secretive Pax Silica agreement, both Argentina under Milei and Kargieman’s affiliated business interests are seeking to make Argentina a critical node of U.S. power projection with respect to emerging technologies and the often Orwellian applications of those technologies for population control and the suppression of dissent.

As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, a network of former counterterrorism and surveillance projects once hosted by the U.S. Military’s now shuttered Information Awareness Office (IAO) at DARPA were privatized after garnering significant public controversy due to extreme privacy concerns in the early 2000s. The privatization of this network of programs was largely made possible by one man –– Peter Thiel. One of Thiel’s companies, Palantir –– the privatized version of IAO’s Total Information Awareness program –– is closely partnered with Kargieman’s Satellogic, as previously mentioned. Total Information Awareness was explicitly created to target “terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks, but treated everyone as a suspect. Its goal was to use predictive analytics to stop “terrorists,” or anyone they defined as such, before they could commit any attack.

As noted earlier in this piece, Satellogic appears to be part of another, related nexus of companies born out of the effort to privatize major aspects of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO) or “Star Wars” project of the Reagan era, a project which was also closely linked to the architect of DARPA’s IAO, John Poindexter. As noted in previous Unlimited Hangout reporting, Poindexter was also a key figure in Thiel’s efforts to privatize Total Information Awareness as Palantir. Today Palantir offers predictive analytics with applications for national security and law enforcement, with the ultimate goal of preventing crime and terror events before they occur –– just like Total Information Awareness.

Peter Thiel recently made the decision to move to Argentina, largely due to the governance strategies, public policies and ideology of Javier Milei. Shortly before Thiel met with Milei and top government officials, the Argentine government announced its “social digital twin” initiative, leading some international and domestic media outlets to speculate about a connection between Milei’s meeting with Thiel and the project’s announcement. Many of those outlets made note of Thiel’s role as both a co-founder of Palantir and as the current chairman of its board. Palantir, unsurprisingly, offers digital twin functionalities as part of its product suite for both national security and corporate applications.

Thiel is, of course, also well known for his controversial political views. While often publicly posturing as a libertarian, Thiel clearly has no interest in defending the civil liberties of the general public, if his business record is any indication. His political views are better classified as neo-reactionary, as he is now known to be a central figure in the growing nexus of Silicon Valley “techno-optimist” billionaires who are overtly transhumanist and seek to balkanize and privatize the public sector into “smart” city-states. Milei, similarly has publicly postured as a libertarian and freedom maximalist, while his governance decisions –– particularly those related to AI –– show that he is functionally a freedom minimalist with respect to the Argentine public. His “chainsaw” approach to shrinking the government has been heavily applied to those agencies that had provided social benefits, while the size of the government agencies dealing with surveillance and “security” has ballooned.

It is quite clear from the evidence that what is emerging in Argentina under Milei is a beta test for what will likely become a global model for techno-authoritarianism, where AI-powered capitalism (likely with minimal human involvement) enjoys complete freedom while human beings enjoy essentially none. Herein lies the potential for a disturbing return to the data-sharing operations that were used to hunt and murder dissidents during the era of CIA-backed South American dictatorships, such as Operation Condor, in which Argentina’s dictatorship enthusiastically participated. In that context, it is worth pointing out that Argentina’s dictatorship had attempted to create “paper twins” of its citizens by collating its surveillance data (e.g. wiretapped phone recordings, etc.) in order to predict their likely behavior and if they might present a threat to the dictatorship. These primitive data-based dissident elimination programs were closely associated with the disturbing and extensive crimes of those dictatorships against their own citizens.

With the technology of today, Milei’s “digital twin” efforts and other AI-powered programs could rapidly resurrect and improve the infrastructure of atrocity from Argentina’s dictatorial past, allowing them to commit crimes against humanity and against human freedom faster than ever and at much greater scale. In these efforts, Milei has no greater ally domestically than Stargate Argentina’s Emiliano Kargieman, who is building both the planetary surveillance grid and the terrestrial data depository that will make it all possible.

How “Argentina’s Elon Musk” Is Bringing Technocracy To Patagonia.