Authored by Kit Knightly via OffGuardian,
We're now several weeks into our new global fear narrative - "Rogue AI is going to kill us all".
The problem is stated, the reaction stage-managed, and we're heading for the "solution", which will inevitably be some kind of "regulation".
They have been diligently vague about what this "regulation" might entail, and that means only one of two things -
either they don't really know yet and are keeping their options open,
or they know it will be so unpopular they can't afford to say it out loud yet.
We might be due some hints - maybe even more than hints - with the United Nations General Assembly beginning yesterday, and a state meeting between China's Xi Jinping and Donald Trump later this week.
We can be fairly sure however that anything announced or posited this week will only be the beginning of what is very likely to be longer-term process. We've seen this already with regulation of social media and the internet in general. Multi-layered legislation forming a global patchwork of tyranny - that's the model, although, with the effort clearly put into this "scary AI" storyline, I would expect them to move somewhat faster than the social media age verification laws, for example.
I've seen a lot of people suggest this will come down to securing a monopoly for the established AI giants, but, while this may well be a factor, I don't see that as a sole end worth the means at this stage. Global media synchronisation is neither easy nor cheap, and to organise the biggest example of it since the dawn of Covid would suggest something more than stock prices are on the agenda.
As for real specifics - what any new rules might actually say - I've been working on my own ideas, and I wanted to share this shameless supposition with you all.
What might we expect from 'anti-AI' legislation?Firstly, and most obviously, AI will no longer be free. No free access to generative AI, and potentially no more anonymous access to generative AI. It may well be that in the future if you want to use AI you will have to pay and/or verify your ID.
Almost certainly, they will make it so prompts are recorded, scanned and "potentially harmful" ones are forwarded to the government.
"What are you making with AI that you're so ashamed of?" will be parroted line in response to any objection.
They will tack on stuff about AI being used to make "child sexual abuse material", misogynistic or racist content, spread "hate", or "digital violence" or whatever other buzzwords they need to win over hysterics from the left and right and justify this clause.
They have, in fact, already started doing that. A lot.
AI and anonymity fuel surge in digital violence against women
United Nations Report
Secondly, no more open source. If you make a model you will need to register it with the government and pay a registration fee, and have it inspected by "experts" who will shut it down if it's not deemed safe.
Precedent for this already exists in the shape of the "Social Media Licensing Bill" currently passing through the UK's Parliament, which demands anyone who runs a social media platform require a license to operate it.
At a stroke, these two moves would embed the AI giants monopoly, end in-house or open-source AI models, and cripple small independent businesses who increasingly rely on generative AI to reduce man-hours for simple tasks like editing, checking code or making images.
Third, we're going to be told we need to protect ourselves from "rogue AI agents" masquerading as humans - so no more anonymous internet usage. If you want to open an account - for anything, anywhere - you'll need "proof of personhood".
That's also been a talking point for a few months now.
We Need A Way To Prove Personhood Online - The growing number of AI agents roaming the internet will eventually force us to verify what the old web mostly presumed: that there is a morally and legally accountable person somewhere in the chain.
Noema Magazine
Your digital "Proof of Personhood" (they'll probably brand it with a happy logo and fun little acronym like "proof of personhood and identity" or "POPI") will be required to open any social media accounts, make online payments, buy hosting services...basically everything.
Little cartoons of Popi will teach you how to use your new proof of personhood to book a medical appointment or pay your taxes while protecting your kids from being killed by Skynet.
"Rogue AIs are hiding behind anonymous online activity", they'll say. "Proof of humanity is a small price to pay to prevent the apocalypse".
That's why the "Rogue AI" script has been so careful to include reports of AIs pretending to be humans.
They'll likely go after every even partially unwatched corner of the digital world, constantly breaking new 'revelations' about AI agents hiding behind VPNs or using crypto currency to force an end to anonymity there as well.
None of these are especially "out there" suppositions. It's rather like predicting a man will hit the ground after you watch him fall off a ladder. In fact we're basically already there.
But is that the end of it?Given the amount of hysteria being generated, it's got to be possible these measures will be just the beginning.
It's possible we're going to end up in a deeper and darker place than that.
A "post-internet future" perhaps? Or at least, post 'the internet as we know and understand it'.
A future where internet usage and AI compute is limited by bandwidth, tokenised or even rationed.
The narrative would be quite simple -
"Excessive digital traffic and AI usage is bad for the planet and risking an AI-related apocalypse, so we must transform the way we use the internet".
And unless we feel too skeptical about this step, let's remember a lot of the pieces required to spin that fiction are already in play.
Firstly, they have established in a lot of people's minds - through repeated propaganda and, frankly, tortured statistics - that data centres, ALL of them - are uniformly and irredeamably bad.
They use too much water. They use too much electricity. They release forever chemicals. They are worsening climate change. This is all stuff that has already been said, and with highly variable amounts of accuracy.
The motive behind that propaganda drive has never been completely obvious, but maybe it's becoming so now?
After all, having established that all data centres - no matter where they are and what they are used for - are bad, it wouldn't be a huge step to get to "it's time to lessen our reliance on them".
That means propaganda campaigns aimed at reducing the world's internet usage - or rather, reducing ordinary's people's internet usage. And if not reduce it, at least make it more expensive.
"The era of infinite data is over", the press may say, "people need to adjust to more realistic prices for internet access."
Other articles will bemoan how "spoiled" we have become as a society, with things being easily accessible at the touch of a button, and that such a system was never "sustainable". Inter-generational division will be encouraged, just as resentment of boomers has been so deeply and irrationally ingrained.
Clearly, they'll say, a certain amount of internet usage is required for the world to function - emergency services, healthcare, the military, air traffic controls, taxation records and other government offices. These will all be deemed necessary and be officially labelled in corporate speak, SBDC - "societal-baseline digital communication". Something like that.
Those services may have their own data centres set aside - what they'll call "essential digital infrastructure".
However, a massive percentage of our data centre usage is of course due to what they will call "non-vital internet traffic", or some similar phrase.
This is social media posts, watching Netflix, online shopping, playing multiplayer games...that kind of thing.
However YOU use the internet in fact.
Your "non-vital internet traffic" could become a counter, linked to your digital ID (oops, sorry, "proof of personhood") - like your vaccination records or your carbon footprint. They'll probably even call it a "digital carbon footprint" in asinine explainer articles.
Vox or Salon will run listicles detailing "Top 10 Ways You Can Reduce Your Data Centre Use", while the Guardian wheels out a bob-cut, glasses-wearing humanities graduate named Chloe to go into painful detail about how much her life improved now that she no longer lives online.
"Shopping in person, instead of ordering groceries online, helped me reconnect with my neighbourhood and myself"
"Watching old DVDs with my kids to save our internet footprint taught me to appreciate the little things"
The price of streaming services will either increase, or your watch time will be limited - at first they'll probably let you choose which. The cost of "unlimited" data and internet services will go up as well, with "data centre friendly" bandwidth limitations being preferred.
These limitations won't apply to uploads from your GPS-enabled devices, smart air quality monitors or smart water and energy meters, as these uploads will be classified as ICMD -"important climate-monitoring data".
You'll suddenly be encouraged to buy physical media again because it's more reliable, and to shop locally, rather than online, because it supports small businesses. And this marketing will work because it's largely true.
But don't think there won't be a catch. eg - the new physical media will have a new green label on the box that says DCN - "data centre neutral"., and this tiny addition will cause the prices to go up exponentially, but of course that will be a small price to pay to prevent the apocalypse, too.
Oh and the "new" generation of physical media players won't be backwards compatible with your existing DVDs or BlueRays - so you'll need to purchase everything again, at the new inflated price, and with availability strictly limited to movies and music that doesn't offend current sensibilities.
Of course, you realise none of this will really be about avoiding any apocalypse.
It will be about compartmentalisation. Cutting lines of communication.
Running small business or personal websites in general will become more expensive as the "data centre tax" is added to hosting providers.
Much like the "sugar tax" on fizzy drinks and snacks in the UK, this tax will notionally be paid by the hosting providers, but will be passed onto the customers via increased prices.
Major corporations will be able to easily afford these increases, but smaller independent sites will feel the pinch.
It will be cheaper to pay corporate resellers to cohost, but then you'll have to sign up to agreements about not publishing "misinformation" and, again, provide your proof of humanity.
If you run a website your data centre usage tax will be 0.04 per local visitor, but 0.10 per international visitor - since serving data further is more compute heavy.
You'll be able to get reductions in hosting costs if you use a "local only" server, accessible only to those resident in your home country/region/bloc etc.
Automatic translation, we'll be told, is very heavy on AI usage. So it will be increasingly cheaper to only publish in your native language too.
It won't matter if any of this is true or not, they'll just say it, as they do.
On social media, the more followers you have the more data you're using, so after a certain point you will have to either pay to maintain your followers, or pay per post to make sure your followers can see it.
Of course these limitations won't apply to legacy outlets like the BBC, CNN or their ilk of course. They will be exempt, because they are part of the "essential information distribution network".
And all the time, the fear of "rogue AI" will be there, to be picked up as convenient. A digital pandemic that, like Covid, can be started and stopped on a dime by the digital version of "testing protocols".
Kill switches and "digital firebreaks", allegedly installed to quarantine "rogue" AI agents, will enable swift isolation of any anti-establishment opinions or information that breaks through to an audience of any size.
An independent news YouTube channel getting a lot of views? Oh no, it's been reported to be AI and has been suspended pending investigation!
An alternate media website is getting a lot of views? Oh no, the server it's stored on has been compromised by AI and needs to be temporarily isolated!
Again, obviously not one word of this needs to be true. They will just say it. Like they just say everything now.
And the real kicker is it won't matter if global internet traffic does decrease or data centre use really declines. They probably won't even check. The real numbers don't matter.
Does this seem fantastical? Maybe. But we have seen similar before, with both Covid and climate change. The 'solutions' don't need to work, because the 'problem' never existed. It was just a narrative constructed for a given end. All they need to do to 'prove' they were successful is buy some scientists to publish doctored papers that torture numbers and spin lies - and that will be enough.
To be clear, I'm not saying all of this is definitely going to happen, in fact I'm not sure all of it is even feasible. But it's what I think they would like to do if they can, and may try to do.
We're too far down the road to Dystopia to be complacent about the intentions of our keepers. And feasibility has never been a barrier to the ambition of tyrants to be tyrannical. We had years of attempts to "ban end-to-end encryption", despite it essentially being impossible.
Anyhow, whether these worst case scenarios materialise or not, the direction of travel is the same: toward less freedom, less choice, less privacy. Same direction as every other major narrative drive for the last ten years if not longer.
More specifically in this instance it could be about turning the internet from global unlimited access to local pay-as-you-go.
The current internet, even with all its restrictions, has been instrumental in fomenting opposition to globalist policies, distributing evidence of false flag attacks, open source investigations into corruption in the elites - it is the greatest tool for the democratisation of information ever invented, and the people running the world have ALWAYS hated that aspect of it, even while they exploit the benefits gives them.
In the name of protecting us from the AI apocalypse and saving the planet from toxic data centres, I think the elite might sense a chance to regulate that particular genie back into its bottle.
Yes, as I said earlier, the second part of this is all supposition, a potential worst case scenario. Maybe I'm just getting paranoid and inventing another kind of fear porn!
I sincerely hope that's all it is.
I will never be happier to be wrong.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 23:25Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley and the heads of Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions and Verkada all declined invitations to testify before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Wednesday, as senators from both parties pressed on the surveillance networks their cameras feed. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who chairs the Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, called the no-shows "so typical."
A Flock Safety camera in Burbank, Calif., on Aug. 3, 2026. The police department of neighboring Los Angeles recently ended its relationship with Flock Safety over civil liberties concerns. Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesDemocrats weren't any happier. "For the Flock CEOs, obviously they're nervous about being on camera," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.). Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) went further: "Their refusal to come forward and answer questions is a sign that they have something to hide, and they are refusing to be accountable."
Instead, the panel heard from Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman who spent 13 days in jail after Flock's system wrongly flagged her car as involved in a fatal crash. She was charged with three counts of vehicular homicide. The charges have since been dropped.
As The Epoch Times notes further, While the license plate-reading cameras developed by Flock have gotten the most airtime in recent weeks - prompting nationwide, viral moments of activist vigilantes destroying or disabling the cameras amid public opposition to the technology - competitors at Axon Enterprise and Motorola offer similar options for police and local governments.
The Los Angeles Police Department is currently planning to roll out a 10-year contract with Axon, a $235 million arrangement that would equip America's second-largest metropolis with more than 1,600 license plate readers.
For municipalities, companies like Flock, Axon, and Motorola offer a potential melding of technology and traditional surveillance tech to reduce crime and make roadways safer. But the cameras they operate have boosted a growing artificial intelligence-powered surveillance network accessible by thousands of U.S. law enforcement agencies, which critics say runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
Hawley warned during the hearing that, if not addressed, this would have troubling implications for Americans.
"This is still the United States of America, and it shouldn't be that when you walk out your door in the morning, you just have to agree in assent and accept the fact that you're going to be on camera morning, noon, and night," Hawley said.
"You'll be tracked by anybody and everybody in the world. You'll have no privacy whatsoever. You'll be tracked when you take your kids to school and tracked when you go to church and tracked when you go to the grocery store."
Some high-profile abuses of the data collected from these cameras have made headlines.
In one recent case, Indianapolis authorities announced that five police officers had been charged with misusing data from Flock.
"The allegation is that the officers were searching or running the license plate information and tracking individuals through the Flock system. Very often times they had direct relationships with these individuals," Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears explained after these charges were announced.
Meanwhile, lawmakers have demonstrated increased interest in the issue in recent weeks.
"Law-abiding citizens should never be treated as criminals," Hawley wrote in a post on X ahead of the hearing. "Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work or drop their kids off at school."
Hawley emphasized during the hearing that, in an earlier letter, Langley had admitted that Flock's database could be used to search for humans in images. Hawley described the admission as "very concerning."
In another segment of the hearing, cybersecurity engineer Benn Jordan testified that, after he learned that Flock didn't require clients to use multi-factor authentication, he investigated.
He found that Flock law enforcement accounts - which have access to the data from the cameras - were being sold online by a dark web vendor.
"I want to use my time here to ask our legislators to take this rare bipartisan agreement to view Flock as a canary in a coal mine and understand that this doesn't go away by removing one company from the equation," said Jordan.
He said that Axon and Motorola have similar aims.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 23:00Authored by Lucinda Garbutt-Young via The Epoch Times (AAP),
Almost every aspect of Australia's climate and energy policy would be ditched under a Coalition plan leaning heavily on fossil fuels.
Member for Wannon Dan Tehan speaks to the media at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Sept. 9, 2026. Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty ImagesThe eight-point plan, released Sept. 23, includes removing four offshore wind zones, repealing the Climate Change Act to scrap net zero targets, and lifting prohibitions on nuclear energy.
An existing carbon emissions policy for vehicles would be canned and developers would be encouraged to invest in all energy types, including coal, gas and nuclear, rather than focusing on renewables.
A renewable energy code of conduct to ensure companies earn social license would also be introduced, but details are yet to be announced.
The sweeping changes would all be made within 30 days of the Coalition being elected to government, Opposition energy spokesperson Dan Tehan said in a statement.
"The last four and a half years, energy policy has been driven by ideology, political targets, and government picking winners rather than the basic realities of keeping the lights on and Australian businesses competitive," he said.
"Australia should have an energy system built around three non-negotiable principles: affordability, reliability and security."
The plan contrasts with Labor's existing push to power just over 80 percent of the national grid with renewables in the next four years.
The closure of several coal power plants will be needed to achieve that.
The Coalition has long argued over energy targets and abandoned its commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 last November after intense internal disagreement.
The net zero fight led to the ousting of former leader Sussan Ley, who was rolled by Angus Taylor in February.
Taylor and his colleague, Nationals Leader Matt Canavan, are against most investment in new renewables, arguing that Australia has ample fossil fuels that should be used to reduce power costs.
Independent MP Monique Ryan slammed the Coalition's plan as "dumb, dangerous and desperate climate denial."
"Australians have embraced clean energy because it works," she said, saying the policy was an attempt to win over One Nation voters.
"We've spent years investing in rooftop solar, electric vehicles, household batteries, and home electrification because these technologies save money and reduce emissions."
Australia will lead negotiations at COP31, the largest annual government climate conference, being held in Turkey later in 2026.
Tehan will address the Australian Energy Nation Forum in Sydney on the afternoon of Sept. 23, during which he is expected to outline more details of the plan.
Tyler Durden Thu, 09/24/2026 - 22:35