Thesis

The internet was stolen from us.

Steve Jobs said technology should be married with the humanities — tools that make your heart sing. Sean Parker, Facebook's founding president, said in 2017 they built it knowing they were exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. His words: "We understood this consciously. And we did it anyway."

The average person spends over six hours a day staring at a screen. A trillion-dollar ad machine runs on your attention. The technology that was supposed to free you became the cage.

The algorithm doesn't show you what you want. It shows you what you can't stop watching. Outrage, fear, comparison — on a loop, between ads and content no human made. You can't tell the difference anymore. Orwell imagined a telescreen in every home, watching you while you watched it. We built one and called it a phone.

They lied. They lobbied. They paid the fine.

Every company that ever had your trust eventually needed money. Venture capital first, then more. Then an IPO or an acquisition. The moment they take the public's money, you stop being a user. You become a line item.

Instagram was a photography app. Facebook bought it for $1 billion in 2012. By 2018, 87 million users had their data harvested without consent. WhatsApp promised no ads and end-to-end encryption. Facebook bought it for $19 billion. The ads came. The data sharing came. The promises went.

When they get caught, they don't fix it. They hire lobbyists and pay the fine. Facebook paid $5 billion to the FTC in 2019 for the Cambridge Analytica scandal — a record fine — and changed nothing. Google has paid billions in EU antitrust penalties while running the same playbook. These are not punishments. They are the cost of doing business. The fine is cheaper than compliance. Lobbying is cheaper than accountability.

Your behavior, your location, your conversations — it costs nothing to collect and sells for everything. Privacy wasn't taken from you. It was handed over by the companies you chose, protected by the lawmakers they paid for.

Bitcoin is the exit.

The monetary system the world runs on was a choice. After 1971, when Nixon ended the dollar's link to gold, governments chose Keynesian economics — spend to grow, deficits don't matter, print when needed. It rewards borrowing. It punishes saving. Inflation is not an accident. It is a transfer — from people who hold cash to people who hold assets. The people who built this system are the people holding the assets.

The US deficit reached $1.8 trillion in 2025 — one direction, no ceiling. The CBO projects $1.9 trillion in 2026 and the national debt hitting 120% of GDP by 2036. Interest payments crossed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025. Central banks bought over 1,200 tonnes of gold that year — the most in modern history — because they watched Russia's $300 billion in reserves get seized in 2022 and understood the risk. In 2024, Saudi Arabia ended its exclusive commitment to pricing oil in US dollars. By early 2026, a China-UAE-Saudi payment platform had settled $55 billion in transactions without touching SWIFT. They are hoarding wealth and cutting labour through AI — and they think this holds. It doesn't.

When an asset threatens the system, Wall Street papers it over. Gold should price in decades of money printing — instead, futures markets and unallocated positions create synthetic supply without moving a single ounce of physical metal. Paper claims to gold outnumber real gold by over 100 to 1. Gold is breaking out anyway. Bitcoin is next. The same derivatives playbook — shorting a fixed-supply asset with paper. They have done it to oil during periods of active conflict — physical supply risk should be sending prices higher, but paper contracts hold them down. Any asset that offers a real exit gets suppressed. Every time. It just buys time.

Bitcoin is not a bet. It is an exit. 21 million coins, hard cap, no committee. The rules are written in code. Nobody changes them overnight. That is the entire point.

AI should work for people. Not on them.

This infrastructure is being built with money you didn't consciously agree to give — sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, public capital. Your money is building systems that decide who gets hired, who gets a loan, who gets flagged. Palantir has a $96 million contract with ICE cross-referencing passport records, tax data, Social Security files, and facial recognition to build deportation target lists. Amazon Ring put cameras in millions of homes and hands police access without warrants. Orwell wrote it as a warning. They read it as a blueprint.

Mercor — valued at $10 billion — hired skilled people to teach AI to do their jobs, then fired them in mass layoffs and rehired them at lower pay. They recorded job interviews and used the footage to train models without telling anyone. 40,000 contractors had their Social Security numbers and biometric data exposed in a breach. OpenAI and Anthropic were clients. This is being called innovation. What it is is extraction from a population with no stake in the outcome. That is not capitalism. Capitalism requires participants.

Goodbye big tech.

Proton has 100 million accounts. Signal has 70 million monthly users. Brave has 82 million. DuckDuckGo handles 100 million searches a day. Between 2024 and 2025, Google searches per user in the US dropped 20%. Cable news audiences are down 50% since 2017. Substack writers earned $450 million in 2025. 40% of local newspapers are gone. Two thirds of people opted out of tracking the first time Apple asked.

People are not waiting for something better. They are leaving now. Facebook deletion searches spiked 67% in a single week in January 2025. Instagram, 42%. College enrollment is declining. Trust in government, banks, and media is at the floor. These institutions are not being reformed. They are being walked away from. Quietly. Permanently.

What's replacing them is real: privacy tools, decentralized networks, independent journalism, self-custody wallets, local-first software, mutual aid. Some have opted out entirely. A good percentage has simply had enough.