Your privacy is for sale. Not philosophically. Not hyperbolically. I mean literally, physically, legally being auctioned off by corporate goons with dead eyes and thousand-dollar hoodies. You won't get paid for it. You won't even notice it at first. But they'll get you anyway, like a mosquito bite. You won't feel it until the blood's already gone.
It starts soft. Whisper-quiet. Hidden in the shadows behind "user agreements" longer than Soviet novels. Then, like mildew, it creeps in. Robocalls that never sleep. Email ads with your actual name winking back at you, nodding in approval. “How the hell do they know I need a new hair dryer?” you'll ask, hands shaking, pupils dilated. They know where you live. What you eat. Who you're with. How long you run your A/C in the summer. It's not just advertising. It's surveillance disguised as convenience, and you've signed up for it. Jesus. God help us all.
But it really breaks bad when the Men in Black stop being fiction and start showing up at your school, your work, your front porch at dawn with cold eyes and zip ties. No warnings. No charges. Just poof—gone. Vanished like a dissident in some banana republic.
This isn't paranoia anymore. This is the American Dream reverse-engineered into a surveillance state. Smile friend, the cameras are rolling.
Lights. Camera. Action! Top
We've done it to ourselves, but we're not entirely to blame. For the past twenty years, every gleaming slab of circuitry has promised salvation, connection, optimization, liberation! But it's a scam. A long con. And we love it.
We hand over the keys with grinning idiot faces every time we smear our thumbprints across our glossy backlit screens. You're not just using that watch strapped to your wrist; it's watching you. Counting your steps, tracking your pulse, whispering “stand up, pig” when you've sat too long in front of your corporate-issued anxiety machine (which is also tracking your search history, your shopping habits, your porn addiction).
This is Byung-Chul Han's burnout hellscape. No whip-cracking overlords, just the quiet tyranny of self-optimization. We've turned ourselves into corporate wet dreams. Self-monitoring, calorie-counting, productivity-humping freaks, sprinting toward an ever receding finish line. Buy more. Work harder. Burn more calories. You fat bastard, don't you want to live forever? Never mind that the food is poison and the sleep is synthetic and your soul's been liquified and sold by Meta for pennies on the dollar. Just keep your ass in gear, lest you become... lazy!
Welcome to the digital meat grinder. Eat up. You've earned it.
How Doers Get More Done Top
Anyway, Los Angeles has become a war zone. Not in the cinematic sense. This isn't some stylized Michael Bay nightmare with lens flares and bad one-liners. No, this is the real thing: a sweaty, sun blasted, ground zero confrontation between the federal machine and the restless, brown-skinned populace it came to cage like animals. National Guard in jackboots. ICE black-bagging people off the sidewalks like they're snatching up free samples at Costco. Uncle Sam's masked thugs running wild in the streets under the holy banner of Law & Order.
It started at a Home Depot, of all places. The least likely place to find drug kingpins or rapists or whatever other sick cliches they like to attach to migrant workers. Some resentful bald bureaucratic suit from Santa Monica named Stephen gave the greenlight to grab whoever looked “undocumented”—which in America is shorthand for not white enough to stand in front of a store. This was intentional. They're not clearing out the ne'er-do-wells. It's your neighbor working hard for below minimum wage that they're snatching. The woman you hired to watch your kids while you chase productivity dragons. The science major on a student visa before they've been here long enough to develop a cure for cancer. This has nothing to do with your safety, or improving society, or saving the economy, and they know it.
And that's why the thing cracked open so fast. The city boiled over. Protesters flooded in, fists high, shouting loud, rattling the teeth of the Beast. The Guard came next, then the Marines. And still, the protests held—steady, deliberate, mostly peaceful, until the cops decided to go full Inquisition. Streets full of pepper balls, tear gas, and flailing batons. Shoot the protester. Shoot the press. It didn't much matter either way.
Then came the fires.
Fully Autonomous Surveillance Top
Five Waymo cars, sleek little bastards straight from some techno-utopian fever dream, went up like Roman candles three nights ago. If you've never seen one of these things, imagine a robot egg wired with the NSA's wettest fantasies. Cameras in every direction. Not just to navigate. They see everything. Owned by Google, no less. The ghoulish titan that routinely shares your search history with the feds. And these cars? They've been narc'ing for months. Unfiltered access for cops. Zero oversight. And the protesters know that these are rolling confession booths. Fully autonomous surveillance on wheels. So they did the only rational thing to do—they burned them. Torched them like robotic effigies. It wasn't mindless. It wasn't even violent. It was tactical. A message.
But you wouldn't know that if you tuned in to the squawk boxes at CNN or Fox or whatever tentacle of the Corporate Mindfuck you prefer. No context, no nuance. Just the same hollow hysteria: Riots! Looters! Arsonists! The national narrative locked in place like a loaded gun. The revolution televised, sure—but edited for your 24 hour fear injection.
But those burning cars weren't just property damage. They were a sacrament. A symbolic purge of the surveillance state's all-seeing eye. What we witnessed wasn't chaos. It was a funeral pyre for the last illusion of privacy. The flaming out of freedom of assembly. A rejection of the new gospel, where your worth is measured in metadata and your rights are toggled off by some reptilian algorithm in Mountain View.
We've let the techlords sell our lives like pork bellies on the futures market. And they don't need our permission anymore. Hell, they don't even ask. The police, the feds, the execs in boardrooms with their obese pockets stuffed full of shareholder meat—they all operate under the same belief. Your life belongs to them.
They say it's for safety. They say it's to advance society or protect the innocent. But these words are cheap currency now—traded, manipulated, twisted. Yesterday, innocence meant a man with calloused hands trying to feed his kids. Today? It's a felony. A deportable offense.
This isn't justice. It's a filtration system that sorts the wealthy from the expendable. The political elites decide who walks the streets and who vanishes into unmarked vans. They redraw the lines every day, and if you're not standing in the right box, you're gone. Disappeared.
Welcome to techno-feudalism, bub. The digital age of holy paranoia. Grab a helmet, log off, and start running; because the bastards have killer drones and all your data. There's nowhere for you to hide, and you've got maybe fifteen seconds of privacy left.