AI Shock Troops at Trillion Dollar Scale

Disposable PsyOp Machines Now Prop Up the US Economy

There’s something funky about these AI companies.

And I mean beyond the Adderall-fueled rants of Palantir CEO Alex Karp and the trillion-dollar valuations.

Recently, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion (with a B!) to settle a copyright claim from a group of authors. Anthropic will compensate authors around $3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement, clearing the way for their AI model to continue ripping off human creativity and intellectual property for the rest of time. When you think about it, it is quite literally a steal.

The Superbowl — one of the most widely viewed sports events and long known for its hyper-expensive advertising slots — was a prime vector in 2026 for injecting AI awareness into the zeitgeist. Even CNN noted that AI companies were disproportionately represented in those slots this year, clocking in at 23% of the ads (15 of 66):

Among those expensive ads, one from Amazon subsidiary Ring has made a splash. Their ad announced a new feature called ‘Search Party,’ described as a wonderful way to use AI across their network of doorbell cameras to find lost dogs (yes, really). The ad depicted a distributed neighborhood surveillance network and AI recognition:

Even the insouciant Superbowl audience raised eyebrows at this. A company that can identify and track dogs in the neighborhood can just as easily track you. When you leave in the morning, who you visit, how long you stay, how often you order pizza… It didn’t help when 404 media leaked emails from Ring’s CEO admitting that dogs were just the beginning, and that their neighborhood surveillance system would ultimately “reduce crime to zero.”

There was a bit of backlash. The EFF screamed, and even congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi wrote a letter demanding details. Ring scrambled and cancelled their partnership, but fundamentally, the damage was done: millions of eyeballs saw our reality sliding into a technocratic panopticon — and many of them shrugged.

But where do these companies get that cash to burn hundreds of millions on advertising to shift our perception of reality — which is the very definition, may I remind you, of psychological warfare — or drop $1.5 billion in the largest copyright claim settlement in history? It flows from the valuations bestowed upon them by investors, usually the technocratic elite themselves, and by their stock prices, inflated by markets known to be dominated by big banks’ HFT algorithms. Trading volume, the vast majority of which is algorithmic (i.e. trades made without any human direction), is now at record levels, exceeding a trillion dollars of turnover every day:

These “elite” investors — and the investment banks behind them — are the very WEF partners authoring the technocratic agenda being advanced by their investments.

And they are getting a fantastic return on their investment. One that is measured not in fiat dollars (they already have plenty of those!), but in how effectively the public’s perception can be shifted.

In truth, these companies are shock troops in the culture war: they are sent in before a main invasion force to break resistance and secure an area, usually absorbing heavy casualties.

Eat ze bugs!

This playbook is drawn from other agenda-pushing sectors — just at a larger scale. Years ago I observed that Beyond Meat was taking down huge sums of investment money at insanely inflated valuations and burning that stack of cash not on creating sustainable, profitable avenues to fake meat and organically growing the market, but on purchasing shelf-space at retailers (called “slotting fees”) to ensure that fake meat got right there in your face at the supermarket. They also poured money into marketing, with some $20M on advertising spend in 2022 alone. The company owes $1 billion in convertible bonds come due in March 2027 and is not expected to be able to pay them off (hence those bonds trading at 17 cents on the dollar). It’s still walking, but already dead — a zombie company. This was never designed to be a profitable company; it was a shock troop: sent in as a vehicle to spend gobs of money normalizing the idea of fake meat, then kicked to the curb once the needle was moved culturally.

Similarly, advancing the ideas of the gig economy and elimination of private car ownership, Uber used their insane valuation (nearly $100B pre-IPO) to deploy into numerous markets — even those where it was clearly illegal to do so. In Portland, for example, they paid over $70,000 in fines for operating illegally — chump change given their funding. In NYC, they operated illegally for years as they threw money at politicians, lobbying for regulatory changes. It worked. In 2013 NYC’s Taxi and Limousine Commission paved Uber’s path to compliance by altering their rules around “e-hail,” allowing operators (including Uber) to use app-based dispatching — and making Uber the first participant in their pilot program.

Enter a market, create chaos, clear out old regulations to secure the space.

There is a human cost to these operations: a medallion (the license needed to operate a taxi) was valued around $800,000 before Uber barged in on the scene in 2011. By 2018, medallion prices had collapsed to ~$150,000. Drivers, including many who had purchased their medallion on credit, saw the market on which they had bet their livelihood destroyed by this rogue technology company with an abundant war chest.

If the technocrats will fund Uber to destroy the livelihoods of NYC taxi drivers, there is no question that they are funding OpenAI and Anthropic to supplant every other line of work as we speak.

The US Economy as a PsyOp Engine

These companies, bestowed with such absurd valuations, are driving insane capital expenses and investments, much of which is merely flowing in a meaningless circle. For example:

• Nvidia invests $100B in OpenAI

• OpenAI agrees to buy $300B of cloud capacity from Oracle

• Oracle agrees to buy $40B of GPUs from Nvidia

This isn’t real innovation. It’s hype and circular, self-reinforcing investment — and it’s at unprecedented levels. Just this one cyclical example is responsible for nearly 1% of the US GDP last year. Analysts at Apollo have pointed out that the capex from Google/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft is responsible for roughly 2% of the entire US GDP:

Source: Apollo

In other words, these aren’t just the most expensive PsyOps in history — they have literally supplanted huge chunks of human productivity. Folks have long uttered suspicious platitudes, “It’s all a sham,” but now we can quantitatively say: Yes, our entire global human economy has literally become an engine of the technocratic elite’s psychological operations. This becomes undeniable when one considers also green tech/decarbonization, the healthcare and pharmaceutical “industry,” biotechnology companies as “Big Ag”, the finance “industry” rushing to tokenize everything in nature, and the defense “industry.”

The opportunity cost of these agendas masquerading as economic activity is staggering. How many life-improving inventions, free energy technologies, nature-based cures, and regenerative agriculture projects are starved for resources while this well-financed engine spews forth the technocratic agenda?

This is why we must opt out of the technocratic system and build instead our sovereignty, our communities, and create real-world value. We must implement new systems that obviate the need for the technocrats and starve them of our most precious of resources: our time and attention. Where are you investing those today?

---

I very much welcome your thoughts — comment below. 🙏

• Connect with me: on X @UnshadowedShow | On Telegram

• If you value this work, consider subscribing or supporting me via Patreon.