86 Comments
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Julianne's avatar

Wow. Very comprehensive - and very depressing to see how far their madness has already gone. We have to find and create ways to avoid capture. Thank you for explaining your experiences and insights.

Mikaela Bell's avatar

So depressing. And I wish there was some kind of comprehensive guide to "how to act online in the age of mass surveillance." Do I withdraw from all social media? Privilege some over others (which??)? But then how to use them to send the world the messages we want to send? Social media has enabled me to learn so much...and how to get away from companies lile Google when we depend on them for everything? I've never been a tech-savvy person. All this scares me and I don't know what to do.

Juan Sebastián Pinto's avatar

this is where our focus will be at Ziggurat for the rest of the year, especially with our upcoming project: Offline Underground - stay tuned for more 🙏

J Mac's avatar

Thank you for your bravery @juan Sebastian pinto

Hazel's avatar

I'm not an expert, but I want to encourage you to look into even just basic cybersecurity. VPNs, the Tor browser, metadata, et cetera. I've also changed my email provider to Proton instead of Gmail.

Nicole's avatar

https://www.optoutproject.net/

Another helpful step-by-step guide for disentangling

Dan Vie's avatar

EFF's guide is helpful. Look also for 'security culture' resources.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) is EFF's online guide to defending yourself and your friends from surveillance by using secure technology and developing careful practices. In addition to tutorials for installing and using security-friendly software, SSD walks you through concepts like making a security plan, the importance of strong passwords, and protecting metadata. https://www.eff.org/pages/surveillance-self-defense

Rocket Cat's avatar

Especially Substack. Quality information about mass surv is hard to find.

Fleur Salizane's avatar

Always appreciated your perspective on the situation with Palantir and such but reading this really laid out the stakes here and helped me understand more about your journey in this. I'm more concerned about the present and future now than I was before reading this, and I should be. Stay well!

Fleur Salizane's avatar

I'm also certainly interested in future projects and initiatives you might suggest. A lot of the surveillance going on has me feeling inspired to take a more "butlerian" approach to things in the way I work with people.

Rev. Shunryu Garvey's avatar

Such a solid post, inspiring work, keep it up. Hope to join you in the struggle. 合掌

Synthetic Civilization's avatar

Much of this essay is framed as a struggle over truth, morality, and intent who knows, who lies, who enables harm. That framing assumes those are still the primary levers shaping outcomes.

What seems more determinative is a breakdown in governance capacity under information-dense, real-time systems. When institutions can no longer coordinate action, oversight, and accountability at the speed of surveillance and conflict, they substitute narrative control for operational control across media, security, and technology.

That’s why the same tools migrate from foreign theaters to domestic use, why moral language intensifies while accountability thins, and why dissent increasingly gets processed as a risk signal rather than a political claim. Until coordination catches up with system complexity, this convergence of surveillance, narrative management, and coercion will keep recurring regardless of who is in power.

Nicole's avatar

Thank you 🙏

And this piece on Venezuela and the US maps out the last decade or so. Disturbing account of the use of Venezuelan citizens to do the ground work for AI technology.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thedreydossier/p/the-fatherboard-venezuela-and-ai?r=ql8jr&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay

With Feeling's avatar

Remarkable writing and "wake up"! information Juan Sébastien Pinto. Thank you for your courage and talents.

Bowman's avatar

And everyone worried about the new world order brought in by liberals🤣

Rocket Cat's avatar

Just found your stack and wanted to say thank you for your bravery and your writing.

Zanzibar9CH's avatar

Thanks for this piece, translated in French here : https://zanzibar.substack.com/p/mon-dernier-message-avant-detre-inscrit

Juan Sebastián Pinto's avatar

thank you for the translation

The Librarian's avatar

If I were you, I’d make sure to drive an old vehicle, preferably one that doesn’t use a transmission dial or modern infotainment integrations. There have been assasinations made against people like you using their vehicles.

Untitled's avatar

Your courage and commitment to humanity is very admirable and inspiring. Thank you.

Rambo X's avatar

Thank you so much for this, I recently began to dig into all this to understand what’s been going on and while I have been slightly successful this put it all together in a way I feel I never would have.

Bea's avatar

Thank you for this. I’m going to use this in my work in sharing how general public can navigate engineered propaganda in their day to day feed. Because it’s not just infrastructural anymore. No wonder cybersecurity was almost intentionally made a second thought and just as we made slight progress, AI was being implemented without secure structures in place.

Michael Tracy-Ireland's avatar

Amazing article! I passed it along to our union which has an AI committee that is supposed to inform the New York State legislature about AI regulation. Hopefully, the committee will take into consideration the concerns raised here.

Mary Catherine Redmon's avatar

As an arthritis patient who uses the microphone, I find the unrequested AI instantly makes up its mind what I have to say. I HATE IT. And God forbid I start to type d i g (as in dignity) and AI jumps in with digital.

It’s an interesting game to play with this handheld computer. IT IS NOT MY FRIEND AND IT IS DEFINITELY NOT ALL-KNOWING.

V Warren - nee Bicunas's avatar

I use a search engine called perplexity and I think it is pretty darn good. I do not sign into it though because then they keep your information although they still might be keeping some of it without it but who knows...