Tag: ai

Crypto And AI Could Be Dirty Words On 2026 Midterm Campaign Trail

The AI and crypto industries have made headlines over the past year thanks to the impressive war chests amassed by corporate political action committees (PACs).

Profligate spending during the last federal elections in the US has led to unprecedented policy changes favoring the crypto industry, with indications that a full legislative framework in the form of the CLARITY Act is on its way to becoming law. 

But this hasn’t endeared the crypto industry to voters. Recent polls from Politico show distrust of the crypto industry, and the electorate isn’t sold on the benefits of AI.

“Voters across the ideological spectrum are raising concerns,” Michael Beckel, director of money in politics reform at Issue One, told Cointelegraph. “Some candidates on both sides of the aisle are trying to harness that frustration and outrage.”

Voters don’t trust crypto and don’t believe AI benefits them

According to the recent poll by Public First for Politico, most Americans don’t trust crypto and don’t believe in the benefits of AI. 

While Republican voters are somewhat more likely to trust crypto, 47% of Americans overall trust a traditional bank over a crypto platform, while 17% trust a crypto platform as much as a traditional bank. 

The numbers for AI aren’t great either. Some 43% of Americans overall believe that the risks outweigh the benefits, while 33% believe the inverse. 

Currently, most people haven’t heard about the major crypto and AI lobbies. According to Politico, only nine percent have heard of AI Super PAC Leading the Future. Only three percent have heard of pro-crypto PAC Fairshake.

That’s not much compared to public awareness of large lobbies like the National Rifle Association or the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which are practically household names.

Still, association with crypto could be a problem. Ohio Republican Representative Jim Renacci told Politico, “I do think if they see somebody is backed by crypto, that’s always going to be a problem, because, let’s face it, the people that I talk to in Ohio, they don’t understand crypto, and most say they’re not comfortable with [it].”

Improving awareness around crypto lobbies may not help them much. Rick Claypool, research director at Public Citizen, told Cointelegraph:

“Generally speaking, voters are against corporate money influencing politics.”

“Even after Citizens United, the norm had been for big, brand-name corporations not to engage directly. Or when they did engage, they would often contribute through dark money groups that obscure their funding source.”

In this regard, the crypto industry’s spending spree in 2024 was somewhat unusual. Major contributors like Coinbase or a16z weren’t shy about the millions of dollars they put into campaigns.

But even then, “the voter-facing message from Fairshake was never about crypto, which voters never really cared about.” Mailers and ad buys reflected the supported candidates’ positions more broadly, or sometimes attacked those of the perceived anti-crypto candidate. 

Overall, “candidates who are seen as not beholden to corporate interests have an electoral edge,” said Claypool. This was true for populist candidates like US Senator Bernie Sanders and even US President Donald Trump, who claimed during his 2016 campaign that “he was so rich he could not be bought, which is laughable in hindsight.” 

If awareness about crypto — and crypto’s concerted efforts to influence policy — increases among the electorate, it may not shake out well. 

Issue One’s Beckel said, “If voters view an industry as toxic, that can have serious implications for candidates who don’t want to be perceived as too close to a controversial company or industry.”

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Pax Silica, the Gaza genocide, and the crisis of global capitalism

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has for the moment turned international attention away from Gaza as Israel moves from high- to low-intensity genocide.  The genocide may be the horrific culmination of 75-plus years of Zionist settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, but in order to make sense of it we must analyze the radical transformations that have taken place in the Middle Eastern and global political economy in recent decades.

The impulse to genocide has always been built into the Zionist project. But that impulse has been activated by the epochal crisis of global capitalism. The Al Aqsa Flood attack of October 2023 furnished Israel with the historic opportunity for which they had been waiting for decades.  If the Zionists are still in pursuit of their elusive Eretz Israel, the United States has been heading up a much more expansive project, one that places Gaza in the very center of global capitalism and its epochal crisis.  In the game plan of the Washington-Tel Aviv axis, Gaza is now to become an experimental field for a new and deadlier phase of global capitalism.  It is this larger picture that we want to lay out in this article.

The contemporary crisis of global capitalism is multidimensional. Structurally it is a crisis of overaccumulation, which refers to a situation in which enormous amounts of capital (profits) are built up but this capital cannot find productive outlets for reinvestment.  This overaccumulation crisis generates intense pressure for expansion as transnational capitalists undertake a predatory search for where to unload massive amounts of surplus capital and open up new spaces for profit-making.  This violent expansion involves the seizure of markets and resources around the world through war, displacement, and repression.  The U.S. state and beyond it, what we will call Global Trumpism, is its out-of-control instrument in this expansionary wave.  At the core of Global Trumpism is the Washington-Tel Aviv axis.

The larger backdrop to the Israeli genocide is the transnational integration of capital over the past half century and the radical restructuring of global class relations and power blocs that capitalist globalization has brought about. Globalization in West Asia region began in the 1980s and accelerated with the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that followed the establishment in 1997 of the Middle East Free Trade Area (MEFTA) and a host of related bilateral and multilateral regional and extra-regional free trade agreements, structural adjustment programs and IMF-supervised austerity.

This integration unleashed a cascade of transnational corporate and financial investment in finance, energy, high-tech, construction, infrastructure, luxury consumption, tourism and other services.  It brought Gulf capital, including trillions of dollars in sovereign wealth funds, together with capital from all around the world, involving the EU, North and Latin America, and Asia, inextricably enmeshing them all in emerging global circuits of accumulation.  In this way, nationally-oriented Arab bourgeoisies transmorphed into transnationally-oriented bourgeoisies as the entire region became incorporated into the globally-integrated production, financial, and service system that came into being over the past half century.

Israel, far from remaining excluded, integrated into these expanding regional and transnational capitalist networks on the heels of the Oslo “peace” accords, signed in 1993, as the Israeli and Arab bourgeoisies began to develop common class interests.  In 2020 the UAE and Bahrain, along with Morocco and Sudan, signed the Abraham Accords, joining Egypt and Jordan in normalizing relations with Israeli, an opening that allowed Gulf investment groups to pour billions of dollars into the Israeli economy.  The October 2023 Al Aqsa attack and the subsequent Israeli siege placed further normalization on hold.  The new U.S.-Israeli strategy revolving around the “Board of Peace” (henceforth, Board of Genocide) seeks to bring the Arab and other states in the region back into the Abraham architecture.

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Was Amazon’s Tokenmaxxing Fiasco Behind Claude’s $500M Mystery Bill?

Axios reported this week that an unnamed Anthropic enterprise client managed to run up roughly $500 million in Claude charges in a single month after failing to put usage limits on employee licenses.

The company was not named, but we suspect Blue Origin might not be the only thing that blew up for Jeff Bezos this month.

Just as the Axios report landed with the $500M tidbit, Amazon was shutting down an internal AI-usage leaderboard after employees reportedly began “tokenmaxxing” – routing unnecessary work through AI tools to inflate their usage scores. The result was a perfect case study in what happens when corporate America turns AI adoption into a metric, then acts surprised when employees optimize for the metric instead of the work.

Whether or not Amazon was the mystery Claude whale, its internal AI experiment shows exactly how a runaway enterprise AI bill can happen.

The $500M Claude Mystery

The Axios item was brief, but extraordinary:;

An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees. 

So, oops to every CFO who recently approved “AI adoption” as a corporate priority.

In the old software world, when true nerds roamed the land, a bad rollout usually meant paying for licenses employees barely touched. The waste was real, but at least it was mostly static. In the new agentic AI world, a bad rollout – or simply adopting AI for everything – can quickly become devastating: thousands of employees – or autonomous agents operating on their behalf – prompting, testing, summarizing, refactoring, retrying, and spinning up new tasks on usage-based pricing.

That is the heart of the current enterprise AI hangover. Companies spent the past year foisting AI on employees, often without a clean way to separate productivity from dashboard-friendly activity. And now the hangover is here. 

Microsoft has reportedly started canceling most Claude Code licenses and steering developers toward GitHub Copilot CLI. Uber reportedly burned through its entire 2026 AI coding-tools budget by April, with COO Andrew Macdonald saying it was “very hard to draw a line” between rising Claude Code usage and useful consumer-facing output. Meta killed an employee-created “Claudeonomics” dashboard after workers competed to rank among the company’s top AI token users.

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Beware, AI cameras in the classroom filming your children and gathering personal data

There’s a new and dire threat to privacy that parents of school children need to be aware of and be prepared to fight against.

AI surveillance in the classroom.

Frank Landymore of Futurism.com reports, in a May 18 article, on a sinister plan hatched by the University of Washington to film pre-school children during class time. If this is going on in Washington, you have to believe it’s going on, at least in the planning stages if not already happening, across the 50 states.

The article reports that a planned University of Washington study would’ve had preschool teachers wear cameras to “record first-person footage of everything in the classroom,” including the children they were instructing, and use that footage to train AI models.

Remember, those behind the global technocracy movement believe the only value a human being will hold in the new society they are trying to create, is the data sets they produce. This was stated in the wide open a few years ago by World Economic Forum adviser Yuval Noah Harari. Without your personal data to be stolen, manipulated, and sold for profit, you are nothing to them but a useless eater.

Part of the plan is to create a “digital twin” of every person on earth as an anchor to the new digital control grid.

So why wouldn’t the Epstein class of entitled billionaire elites who harbor perverted, twisted views of children, want a daily video record of everything your child does in school? Every word uttered. Every facial expression. Every action and reaction. Year over year for comparison’s sake. Then they can use this data to create algorithms that predict everything your child will grow up to become before he or she is 10 or 12 years old?

Harari, an Israeli historian and chief adviser to the WEF, has said that if he had access to artificial intelligence when he was younger, he believes he would have discovered he was a homosexual at age 11 or 12 instead of at 17. In fact, a Newsweek article from September 8, 2017, made the case that AI can predict “with startling accuracy” whether a person is gay or straight.

But this particular story, in the case of Washington State, has a positive outcome. It exemplifies the kind of parental awareness and bold activism that is needed to shut down the illegitimate use of AI technology in the classroom.

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Q-Day Won’t Look Like Armageddon — Which Is Exactly Why It’s So Dangerous

For years, “cyber apocalypse” talk sounded like the tech version of a guy on a street corner holding a cardboard sign predicting the end times. Y2K came and went with barely a flicker. The Mayan calendar became a punchline. Even most ransomware attacks, destructive as they’ve been, still operated within recognizable rules. Servers go down. Companies panic. Bitcoin wallets light up. Insurance adjusters start chain-smoking.

Q-Day is different. Not because it’s flashy. Because it’s boringly mathematical. And math always wins. The term “Q-Day” refers to the moment quantum computers become powerful enough to crack the encryption that currently protects virtually everything in modern civilization: banking systems, military communications, corporate intellectual property, classified government files, satellite systems, supply chains, cloud infrastructure, medical databases, and the tiny little authentication handshake your phone quietly performs a thousand times a day without you noticing. Experts increasingly believe the timeline is accelerating dramatically. 

The public still hears “quantum computing” and imagines some glowing sci-fi cube floating in a laboratory while a guy in a turtleneck explains particles. Meanwhile, cybersecurity professionals are staring at this development the way meteorologists stare at a Category 5 hurricane forming offshore. Because here’s the ugly part nobody wants to say out loud: many organizations aren’t remotely prepared for what comes after the encryption era.

A shocking number of businesses still treat cybersecurity like a compliance chore instead of a survival function. They’ll spend millions on branding consultants, executive retreats, and office espresso machines that look like they belong on a Formula One car, then leave sensitive intellectual property sitting behind outdated endpoint protection and legacy encryption standards that are aging like unrefrigerated milk.

Right now, criminal groups and hostile nation states are already harvesting encrypted data with the intention of decrypting it later once quantum capabilities mature. The phrase in security circles is “harvest now, decrypt later.” Translation: your stolen secrets may already be sitting in somebody’s vault waiting for the locks to become obsolete. 

That means Q-Day isn’t really one day. It’s a countdown. And a lot of executives are acting like the clock is decorative. The fantasy some companies cling to is that governments will somehow protect them when things get ugly. They won’t. Or more accurately, they can’t. Governments can barely protect themselves.

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Even Therapists Have Become a Data Mine

There was a time when people could still speak privately. You could sit across from a therapist, talk about your marriage falling apart, your depression, your fears, your finances, or the darkest moments of your life believing those conversations would remain between two human beings. That world is dying rapidly because everything now must be digitized, stored, analyzed, and monetized.

A woman using the therapy app Talkspace discovered that transcripts from her therapy sessions ended up being produced in court during litigation involving her former employer. Let that sink in for a moment. These were not vague notes scribbled down by a therapist. These were detailed digital records discussing her personal life, emotional state, relationships, and finances. The machine remembered everything.

This is what society has become. They tell people to seek help, open up, trust the system, use the apps, go digital, and then they quietly turn human vulnerability into searchable data.

People still fail to understand the danger because they continue believing these technology companies are merely offering services. They are not. They are harvesting human behavior at industrial scale. Every click, every message, every location, every search, every emotional breakdown becomes data to be stored forever.

Talkspace executives reportedly bragged to investors about building one of the largest mental health data banks in existence containing roughly 140 million exchanges between patients and therapists. Human suffering itself is now an asset class. Depression has become data. Trauma has become machine learning material. Your private thoughts are now inventory sitting on corporate servers.

When someone went to therapy, the therapist might keep handwritten notes locked away in a cabinet somewhere. Those notes were incomplete, temporary, and human. Today every word can be transcribed, archived, searched, copied, subpoenaed, breached, or fed into artificial intelligence systems. The conversation never dies because the machine never forgets. And people wonder why society feels colder and less human.

What happens when people realize their darkest thoughts may someday appear in court? What happens when employers, insurance companies, governments, or AI systems can gain access to deeply personal psychological information? You destroy trust itself. People stop speaking honestly. They stop trusting institutions. They begin living cautiously because they know every word may someday be weaponized against them.

This is where the entire digital age has been heading from the start. First they harvested shopping habits. Then browsing history. Then location data. Then biometrics. Now they are harvesting the individual’s inner psychological life. Nothing is sacred anymore because everything has a price.

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Big Tech’s Rural Land Grab: Hyperscale Data Centers Spark Nationwide Backlash and 2026 Political Earthquake

In the wake of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement which spent decades uniting voices around informed consent, medical freedom, vaccine safety, and environmental chemicals a new grassroots surge appears to be emerging from rural America.

This one feels eerily similar in its urgency and cross-aisle appeal: fierce opposition to the explosive growth of AI data centers. What began as scattered local gripes has coalesced into a national reckoning over energy takeovers, water concerns, and corporate overreach that threatens communities while delivering questionable benefits.

Although lesser versions of ‘data centers’ have been around for sometime with small, narrow-focused footprints, hyperscale data centers are now dominating the market and driving an unprecedented infrastructure boom led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and others.

Driven by generative AI and cloud adoption, hyperscaler-led capital expenditures and capacity are on a record-breaking trajectory. The market is expected to surpass $350 billion by 2034.

The freight train is led by “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure” and “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” two President Trump Executive Orders fast-tracking the buildout of energy and water hungry AI data centers on federal and private lands.

It’s worth noting this energy and environmental corporate-government push is being delivered on the back of decades of ‘climate change’ public programming aimed to teach people scarcity and sustainable anti-consumption behavior change.

The most recent numbers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory project hyperscale data centers to consume between 60 and 124 billion liters by 2028.

The current flashpoint is Utah’s Stratos (or Stratus) Project in Box Elder County, a proposed hyperscale data center complex backed by investor Kevin O’Leary’s O’Leary Digital. Spanning more than 40,000 acres—twice the size of Manhattan—the facility would consume up to 9 gigawatts of power at full capacity, equivalent to lighting up an entire state’s worth of homes, businesses, and factories.

Water use for cooling and supporting natural gas power plants to run the center could reach 2 to 16 billion gallons annually.

Approved via a 3-0 vote by county commissioners, no referendum happened for taxpayers footing the indirect costs.

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Pope Leo Calls for AI Weapons to Be “Disarmed,” Warns of Threat to Humanity

In a sweeping address, Pope Leo XIV has issued a stark warning about artificial intelligence, cautioning that the technology risks eroding human dignity, accelerating global conflict, and placing life-and-death decisions in the hands of unaccountable systems.

The warning came in his first major encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), a wide-ranging document that places AI at the center of a broader moral and civilizational crisis.

At more than 40,000 words, the document represents one of the most comprehensive statements yet from the Catholic Church on the role of technology in modern life. It also signals a growing concern that rapid innovation is outpacing ethical reflection.

The Pope’s central argument is this: technology, he insists, must remain subordinate to the human person—not the other way around.

“Technology is never neutral,” Leo wrote, emphasizing that it reflects the values of those who design and deploy it. That insight forms the foundation of the document’s broader critique.

While acknowledging the benefits of technological progress, the pontiff warned that AI is increasingly being shaped by forces disconnected from moral accountability. Chief among these are large corporations and geopolitical actors.

The encyclical highlights what Leo calls a dangerous shift. Power, he argues, is moving away from democratic institutions and into the hands of “major economic and technological actors.”

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How The Deep State Weaponizes AI To Control The Narrative

The Deep State just upgraded from clunky human fact-checkers to AI that scales narrative control at lightspeed.

As Tony Seruga wrote on X:

No more paper trails, subpoenas, or exposed biases – just seamless manipulation.

Automated Shaping at Scale

AI floods zones with thousands of subtly varied “organic” rebuttals in seconds.

Pre-bunks emerging stories before they trend.

Detects your writing style, reasoning patterns, and source chains to dynamically throttle—no crude bans needed.

Infrastructure Already Live

CISA’s old “election security” coordination with platforms?

Content-agnostic and ready for new “harm” definitions.

Palantir, CrowdStrike & intel partners embed AI trained on classified data into commercial tools.

WEF’s “whole-of-society” push demands exactly this AI governance.

The Upgrade

Old fact-checkers left audit trails (funding, revolving doors).

AI is a black box: “The algorithm decided.”

Trained on curated data that associates inconvenient truths with “low quality.”

Plausible deniability baked in.

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Homeowners Face Eminent Domain Bulldozers As Data Centers Demand Ever More Power

Georgia Power isn’t negotiating anymore. The Southern Company subsidiary is seizing dozens of homes and hundreds of easements across Coweta and Fayette counties to ram through a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line that will feed at least four massive AI data centers. Project Wansley is just the latest flashpoint in a backlash that has been building for months.

At least 20 to 30 homes face outright demolition. Another 300-plus properties will get permanent easements for towers planted in backyards and next to pools.

But residents like Ansley Brown are fighting back. Her mother bought their family home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. Now the utility wants the property for the corridor. Brown’s viral TikTok exposing the lowball offers (she says $70,000 to $100,000 below market) has racked up millions of views and drawn state lawmakers into the fight. 

Georgia Power says the line is essential.

The company is racing to add roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with executives openly stating that  about 80% of that power will go to data centers. Meanwhile, transmission has become the bottleneck, and utilities are turning to eminent domain to clear the path.

This isn’t happening in isolation. We’ve been pounding the table on data center resistance, from Northern Virginia counties rejecting new substations to Texas communities suing over water drawdowns and power rate spikes. The pattern is the same: hyperscale demand collides with local infrastructure limits, and the costs get socialized while the profits stay private.

Electricity prices are already feeling the pressure. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied directly to data center load growth. Georgia Power’s own filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the bill for transmission and generation built primarily for big tech. 

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