Papers, Please!

I'm a writer* who spews random text everywhere, as is my right! But apparently that right is getting more conditions attached to it now. I realize this is old news, despite unfolding in real time still. I live in a quiet coastal hermit bubble, I am not tech savvy. Like a whale surfacing for air and finding only farts, I'm popping above the water to express a slightly delayed uneasiness and dissatisfaction!

*Note that by writer, I mean it the same way you are a runner if you go for a run. Let's not get pretentious about titles.

I tried to start this Substack blog the other day to ramble about language, philosophy, tech, and other things. Everything went fine yesterday. First ramble posted about how AI shapes language. Nothing in it unsafe.

Today I couldn't log back in unless I verified my age. This is Australia's "Online Safety Act" at work. I find the pattern interesting in and of itself: that Substack seemed to wait until there's something staked first, an article posted, and only THEN asked for the credentials. Frictionless log-in, set-up and posting experience, followed by the big ask. That's a nice little dark pattern right there! Maybe I'm paranoid. Maybe something was triggered, and a new compliance layer suddenly intervened. Who knows with these opaque systems. All I know is my precious words, most all of them real human-beef-grade beauties, were held hostage! poor things :(

I can understand how this Orwellian shit got under the door in our Country by targeting something like a porn site, by moral panics around "think of the children", but why is a writing platform catching strays here too? I wondered. Ah, because it considers itself social media too not just newsletters, a quick research revealed. They're covering their ass.

I search around reddit and find all kinds of discussion around it. I see other Aussie writers being caught out, unable to even log back into their accounts for a time. I found a youtube video someone had made about it all, and it described their own journeys tracking conversations, many people affected in various ways, or who find it all too much and leave the platforms. I see lots of Australians feeling deeply uneasy. As someone said:

"This is different it feels different, a government forcing the collection (if it wasn't already collected) of peoples identifying documentation along with our entire social and personal lives broken down into algorithmic data [and] not for selling to the highest bidder, not for pushing shitty lifestype ads"

It does feel different to me too. At the same time Substack was locking me out, I could see tech forums and youtube channels lighting pitchforks because apparently open-source Linux is also getting pressured to start layering in OS-level versions of some kind of ID tracking. I can see apple iOS updates that introduce it all. There's justifiable concerns about a slippery slope, about being people who refuse being shut out. There's people forking the software and pushing back of course. There's VPNs and workarounds (which in our country are on the rise it seems). There's a lot of things happening in parallel. It's probably impossible to glimpse the totality unless you're across many different spaces. I can see stuff like this outside my own area of knowledge, but not really understand it. I am just operating on vibes here. But the vibes are not good ones!

Palantir and the broader corpo-state security and surveillance network is under a period of rapid expansion and explosive growth right now, enjoying widespread government support and integration across many countries, including Australia. Some of the most influential people behind these kinds of companies do not believe in democracy. Instead, they believe in safeguarding capitalism, and focus intently on the use of technology to do so.

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible" … "The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."

— Peter Thiel, The Education of a Libertarian, Cato Institute, 2009

AI, Palantir's rise, and Trump's return to office, have all helped elevate Thiel to a broader public consciousness, but anyone who's been following Silicon Valley in the last decades already knew him well. He has a long history of all kinds of statements and projects. A rabbit hole unto himself. The kind of person who can pick a phone and speak with most anyone. Hang outs with a president or a prime minister. Lunches with and mails to Epstein. Worth digging into if unfamiliar. Everyone's watching him now.

Thiel is emblematic, iconic of this all, but hardly operating alone or without like-minded support from equally if not more influential people, some he's helped give a leg up to, like the US Vice President. These people and companies will work their agenda from every angle, both within politics (regulatory and legislative capture) and above/beyond/upstream of it (deep state/network state being two relevant concepts).

It is not a conspiracy though, in the sense that it is not secrecies whispered in back rooms. The very opposite is true. It's an agenda, and it's broadcast. It's been written down in exhaustive detail, formalized in strategy docs and policy recommendations. Stated matter of factly in op-eds and interviews like the one I quoted from, yes, 2009. It's all been demonstrated in repeated actions across long time scales now. Some of this is decades old. The roots, much older still.

But it's also "just" a structure (in the sense that colonialism or patriarchy is 'just' a structure). Thiel is an opportunist and so is his crowd, he's someone whose wanted their way for a long time. His role isn't evil puppermaster genius like breadtube videos sometimes portray. Not imho. Less of an orchestrator, more of an instigator. A deep-pocketed accelerator, more than master manipulator. And as far as opportunists go, his crowd has been having a really good run lately.

I write this fully conscious that I am inside some kind of digital panopticon right now, one that already closely tracks me. A sense of ever-present surveillance is part of our shared and lived reality in 2026. Despite much of this being an old problem, some things are relatively new.

We're entering an era where AI makes some previously-intractable surveillance problems suddenly more scalable and workable. It does not seem unreasonable to relate this to the meteoric rise of Palantir and companies like it. Similarly, I note how Anthropic was recently in serious conflict with the US Department of Defense/US govt, and in their statement regarding this, they singled two things out. One worth quoting in detail below:

"Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI."

— Anthropic

That's Palantir's deal, basically. They provide the infrastructure and technical know-how to make exactly that kind of thing happen, and governments like mine aren't building our own version of this tech, we're renting this same thing. Surveillance-as-a-Service, and for a colony like Australia, cancelling that subscription isn't exactly feasible.

The idea of "individually innocuous" information nonetheless being valuable/useful is key too, I think. It's not about having something to hide, posting unsafe shit, or visiting sites meant only for adults. It's not even about money. It's not even in a way about surveillance. It's about enforcement and bureaucracy and blunt instruments, I think. That's the previously-intractable problem, the patchworking together of "innocuous" things, and the current response (AI might pattern match it).

It captures the mosaic effect. One data point (an age check) is innocuous, perhaps. But combine it with my substack posts, my VPN, my location, my internet usage, my site history, and the rest of the digital footprints I leave, and that is becoming a high-resolution portrait. My fear isn't getting caught doing something wrong, it's more like a fear of being mapped, scanned, pored over.

The bureaucracies, the governments and corporations, will lean towards over-verification to cover their ass, minimize liability, and so on. Again, not a conspiracy, just a structure. Not even the execution of an ideology at this point. Just money driving it. Bureaucracy and inertia. That's how we get blunt instruments like the age checks (that don't even work at times, that are easily worked around for tech-savvy people, that create data leaks and new exposure risks, etc).

Lots of internet-based enforcement couldn't be done at scale. As Anthropic describes above, AI and automated identification systems could change that. Laws haven't necessarily changed much, but capabilities to enforce them could. That's the layer ideology can enter in. If you are a Thiel type, you operate in a sphere of influence capable of shaping legislation and regulation. What is being enforced can change. If you are likewise capable of shifting media perception, the same applies without even needing necessarily to change laws.

And compounding this, once a verification infrastructure exists, it becomes available for other uses. Fraud prevention, liability management, content moderation, access control. The narrowness of a given implementation often says nothing about the technical capability more generally, or how it can change in the future. Though the abuse of this technology is not inevitable it is, historically speaking, entirely predictable.

So yeah, when redditor quoted above, and myself, wonder why this is going on without obvious commercial incentives, it seems reasonable to conclude, alongside a recent very high-profile pushback from a major AI lab, that perhaps this is at least partially connected to the pressing issue of mass domestic surveillance and the advent of new surveillance capabilities. Part of it is structural inertia, ass-covering, and other more mundane things. But part of it is this spying shit. Some of that is scary and new. Some of it is so old I can find a 16 year old YouTube vid that hasn't aged a day. I remember watching it back then, and feeling it even back then, so you know. We'll see.

I don't mean to suggest the assemblage of a surveillance state is the only, or even primary, goal. Only that it is a consequence worth watching carefully. It's not like the internet is shutting down. But the era of anonymous mass participation on large centralized platforms that I have known all my life, that I personally cherish, is absolutely appearing to me like it's under increased systems pressure. Technically, legislatively, and in terms of how it's covered by media (or not). As one redditor in a Linux forum put so well: 'All these "solutions" do is give the surveillance state ideas. They were looking for a hammer and these clowns are making a special one for them.'

I can more than understand why people would be reluctant to hand over personally identifying information in such a climate.

More mundanely, it feels like a closing act in the gentrification of the internet. Once a place full of masked lunatics, now it is a ticketed, monitored 'venue'. It makes me sad. The old warehouse I used to rave in now sells used government furniture.