Five things I believe to be true.

Steve Jobs wanted technology married to the humanities. Tools that make your heart sing. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, described the actual product in 2017. They built it knowing it exploited a vulnerability in human psychology. His words were “The inventors, creators … understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

The average internet user spends about six and a half hours a day online. A trillion dollar advertising machine runs on that attention. The technology that was supposed to free you became the first thing you reach for in the morning.

The algorithm does not show you what you want. It shows you what you cannot stop watching. Outrage, fear and comparison, on a loop, between ads and content no human made. Orwell imagined a telescreen in every Party member’s home, watching you while you watched it. We built one and pay monthly for it.

Every company that 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 and become a line item.

Instagram was a photography app. Facebook announced $1 billion for it in 2012 and paid $715 million once the stock fell before closing. By 2018 it admitted that up to 87 million people had their data taken. Only 270,000 of them installed the app. The rest were their friends, who were never asked. WhatsApp promised no ads, twice, the second time on the day Facebook bought it for $19 billion. The data sharing came in 2016, and Germany ordered it stopped within a month. The ads came in 2025. The promises went.

When they get caught they do not fix it. They hire lobbyists and pay the fine. Facebook paid a record $5 billion to the FTC in 2019, and the charge was not Cambridge Analytica. It was breaking a privacy order the company had already signed in 2012. Google has paid more than €6 billion in EU antitrust fines while running the same playbook. These are not punishments. They are the cost of doing business, and the fine is cheaper than compliance.

Your behaviour, your location and your conversations cost nothing to collect and sell for everything. Privacy was not taken from you. It was handed over by companies you chose, protected by lawmakers they paid for.

The monetary system the world runs on was a choice. After 1971, when Nixon ended the dollar’s link to gold, governments chose to spend for growth, treat deficits as harmless and print when needed. It rewards borrowing and punishes saving. Inflation is not an accident. It is a transfer from people holding cash to people holding assets, and the people who built the system hold the assets.

The US deficit reached $1.8 trillion in 2025. The CBO projects $1.9 trillion in 2026 and debt held by the public at 120% of GDP by 2036. Interest on the public debt crossed $1 trillion for the first time in 2025, which is roughly $150 billion more than defence. Central banks bought more than 1,000 tonnes of gold in 2022, 2023 and 2024, about double their average over the previous decade, because they watched $300 billion of Russian reserves get frozen in 2022 and understood the risk. By early 2026 mBridge, a settlement platform run by the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, had cleared $55 billion without touching SWIFT.

When an asset threatens the system, the paper market absorbs the demand before the price can move. Gold should price in decades of money printing. Instead London clears close to 17 million ounces a day against the 307 million ounces sitting in its vaults, turning over the entire physical stock roughly every twenty trading days without an ounce leaving the building. Gold is up 35% over the past year anyway. Bitcoin is next. Delay only ever buys time.

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

This infrastructure is being built with money you did not 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 and who gets flagged. ICE has paid Palantir $150 million on one case management contract since 2022, and two task orders inside it, $29.9 million each, built ImmigrationOS, the system that picks deportation targets by cross referencing IRS tax records, Social Security files, Medicaid enrolment and licence plate reads. Amazon Ring has more than 100 million cameras in the field, and told Congress in 2022 that it had handed police footage eleven times that year without a warrant and without the owner’s consent. Orwell wrote it as a warning. They read it as a specification.

Mercor, valued at $10 billion in October 2025 and now raising at twice that, cancelled a project employing more than 5,000 contractors who had been labelling video to train AI, locked them out of Slack, and offered them a new one the next day at $16 an hour instead of $21. Contractors are now suing in federal court, claiming the company reused their recorded interviews to train models without telling them. Hackers broke in that March, and the class action says Social Security numbers, passport scans and interview videos were taken. OpenAI and Anthropic were clients. This gets called innovation. It is extraction from a population with no stake in the outcome, and capitalism requires participants.

Proton has over 100 million accounts. Brave has 101 million monthly users. Signal will not publish numbers, and its president put hers between 70 and 100 million. Google desktop searches per US user fell almost 20% between 2024 and 2025, on Datos and SparkToro clickstream data, though Google says total queries are still growing. In 2017 CNN averaged 379,000 prime time viewers aged 25 to 54; in 2025 it averaged 102,000. Substack writers grossed around $450 million a year as of early 2025, on Sacra’s estimate rather than Substack’s own figure, while almost 40% of American local newspapers have closed since 2005. Apple made apps ask permission to track in 2021, and half the people who see the prompt still say no.

People are not waiting for something better. They are already leaving. Meta ended fact checking in January 2025, and within two days Google searches for how to delete Facebook and Instagram hit the highest level ever recorded. Trust in the media is at a record low of 28%. Confidence in Congress sits at 9%. These institutions are not being reformed. They are being walked away from, quietly and permanently.

What replaces them is already working. Privacy tools, decentralised networks, independent journalism, self custody, local first software. Some people opted out entirely. Most have simply had enough.