Power and Control

States, ideology, surveillance and control: how systems keep populations useful and quiet, and what AI does to that bargain.

• 2026-10-02 — Tote Bag Tier Your $200 AI plan is the tote bag tier. The money funds a model that trains the next model, with fewer humans in the loop each quarter.
• 2026-07-01 — Soft Delete Population control moved from hard delete to soft delete: ideology, economics and status games that quietly shrink the educated classes.
• 2026-07-01 — Idle Hands Governments fear idle hands above all: Weimar's 30% unemployment, 1789's bread prices. The 40-hour week is a control mechanism.
• 2026-06-28 — Possession In five to ten years frontier AI runs on home hardware and the state loses control of inference. So it does what it did with drugs.
• 2026-06-25 — Whoever Wants the Whip Beware anyone who only wants equality. The only equality you can manufacture is the downward kind, and someone has to hold the whip.
• 2026-04-25 — Boxed The AI box experiment asked if a superintelligence could talk its way out. The real question turned out to be who ends up inside the box.
• 2026-02-20 — Involuntary Monk Socialism fails not only economically but humanly: its advocates live by a restraint they never chose. An involuntary monk isn't a monk.
• 2026-01-10 — Controlled Burn People march for culture-war causes and stay silent about the economics quietly burning down their future. A controlled burn, set from above.
• 2025-10-13 — Voluntary Panopticon Digital ID isn't just another database entry. It ties identity, payments and permission to one switch, and people will line up to install it.
• 2025-09-27 — Rome 2.0 Bread, circuses, debt and decline: modern Western life read as the late Roman Empire, only with wi-fi.

Other topics: AI and Jobs · Corporate Life · Money and Ownership · School and Conditioning · Agency and the Midwit

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