John Carlos Baez on Nostr: [Photo of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk et al looking uncomfortable at Trump's ...

[Photo of Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk et al looking uncomfortable at Trump's inauguation.]

This image, some of you in this room might know these people. I call it tech bros in hostage situations. It's a message to you. This is Putin's playbook. He allows a business elite to make untold riches in exchange for absolute loyalty.

Some people are calling this oligarchy, but it's actually bigger than that. These are global platforms. It's broligarchy.

There is an alignment of interests that runs through Silicon Valley to what is now a coming autocracy. It's a type of power that the world has never seen before.

Follow the data. It's always the data. It's the crack cocaine of Silicon Valley. You know, the first thing that Elon Musk did was to send his cyber troops into the US Treasury to get access to the data. That is not a coincidence. It's a hack. That data is now feeding AIs that are choosing who to sack and who to replace - Sorry -- eliminate fraud and waste.

When we broke the Cambridge Analytica story about the harvesting of 87 million people’s Facebook data, people freaked out, rightly. That is chicken feed compared to this. But it is the blueprint. It's always the data. Which is why it's so important that you start thinking about your private life. The broligarchy doesn't want you to have one.

This is the old headquarters of the East German secret police. They kept detailed files on almost one in three of their citizens. That is nothing compared to what Google has on every single one of us, and hundreds of other companies.

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