The Planetary Bio-Surveillance Grid

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Smartdust

Let's imagine a world where a faulty worldview in a mechanistic reality has given birth to a psychotic technocratic elite that seeks to monitor every aspect of reality in AI "digital twin" systems -- but the public is increasingly showing awareness of (and resistance to!) wearable IoT devices and the surveillance state. What is a future-AI-as-god-worshipping-technocrat to do?

Naturally, preferring asymmetric warfare, you change tactics and attack in an invisible way: synthetic biology. You create surveillance microbes, stage a crisis that demands their mass deployment "for your safety." You flood the zone with them, quickly replacing the natural microbiome across farms, forests, foods, guts, and wastewater. Suddenly, humanity is being monitored from within -- no wearable devices, no microchip implants. You welcome the myriad problems this disconnection from our ancestral microbiome will inevitably create, as each offers a chance to further use biotechnology and tighten your grip.

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In Part One of this series, we explored that genetically engineered microbes have already been deployed across 2% of US farmland, with no oversight or containment.

In Part Two, we saw that the system is reclassifying microbes as “critical infrastructure,” moving both to construct global governance for microbes and to shield the biotech companies who manufacture them from any liability.

Now, we expose what this infrastructure actually does, and in doing so, finally learn what the technocrats mean when they say “biodigital convergence”: the construction of a planetary-scale surveillance grid comprising genetically engineered (GE) microbes that sense and report on their surroundings, be that in soil or grape or large intestine.

We’ll then have a better understanding of just how complete and absolute a technocratic totalitarianism—armed with such a microbial army—really is.

Let’s start by looking more deeply at a principal player in the engineered microbe space: Ginkgo Bioworks.

Ginkgo Bioworks: The Foundry of Synthetic Biology

Ginkgo Bioworks was co-founded in 2008 by a group of five individuals from the MIT synthetic biology scene. Their early funding from NSF and NIH grants helped them secure a contract from DARPA to deliver antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

But in 2014, Sam Altman blogged about the need to invest in “hard tech”¹, inspiring Ginkgo’s CEO Jason Kelly to apply to Y-Combinator’s Silicon Valley accelerator program, usually reserved for tech startups. Ginkgo became YC’s first biotech investment, opening the door to billions more in venture capital investment to develop their “Biological Foundry,” a cell programming platform—a “biological operating system” that allows arbitrary microbes to be designed, deployed, and scaled across industries: agriculture, pharma, defense, cosmetics, and beyond.

Ginkgo seized the opportunity offered by COVID-19 to pivot into biosecurity, creating a product called Concentric which married testing data, wastewater monitoring, and genomic sequencing to offer “real-time pandemic response” for C19—and H5N1 (bird flu). This program was deployed across Puerto Rico and several US states.

This marked the beginning of Ginkgo’s bio-security efforts, which they unapologetically term BIO-RADAR. You know, just in case there was any question about the whole bio-surveillance thing.

In late 2021, Ginkgo went public, bringing in yet more billions.

In 2023, Ginkgo was awarded a DARPA contract for Reimagining Protein Manufacturing (RPM). They designed deployable “lab modules” capable of producing complex proteins at scale, including therapeutics like antibodies, cytokines, and vaccines for “rapid response to chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear threats.”

The Palantir “Takeover”

Palantir already has partnerships with the CDC, NIH, and defense agencies, using their technology to integrate biodigital signals into intelligence and decision-making. Palantir has the AI platform, but they don’t have the data. They need that BIO-RADAR — they need the microbes.

By 2024, Ginkgo had burned many billions of dollars, employees were losing confidence in leadership, and investor sentiment was souring. Many were speculating that Jason Kelly would be removed as CEO. But, perhaps after some back-room dealings, Ginkgo instead engaged in a restructuring effort, cutting $200M from their annual burn. More importantly, Ginkgo also brought on Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, as chairman of their board.

It seems to me that Jason Kelly was either going to be fired, or Palantir would send in their CTO to whip him into shape, ensuring that Ginkgo is building the biodigital surveillance eyes and ears for Palantir’s beast system. Under Sankar’s leadership, Ginkgo has unsurprisingly made a distinct and direct move towards alignment with ARPA-H’s goals and integration with Palantir’s platform.

Indeed, soon thereafter, in 2025 Ginkgo was awarded a $29M ARPA-H contract for a (Wheat-based High efficiency Enzyme and API Technology (WHEAT), using their “lab modules” to synthesize enzymes that will assemble arbitrary molecules. The contract is specifically to use this method to manufacture pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) to “reduce America’s dependence on foreign manufacturing”, but the bottom line is that the biotechnology manufacturing infrastructure — those on-demand “lab modules” — is being built out now that can rapidly be reprogrammed to produce, well, anything. That’s what Kelly means when he says:

“What computers did for information, biology will do for the physical world.”

— Jason Kelly, CEO of Ginkgo, 2021

Ginkgo is still burning through cash, and has also received multiple grants this year from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for global health biosecurity and pathogen detection, deepening their connections with the GAVI / WHO scene.

In fact, Ginkgo now looks a lot like Moderna pre-pandemic. Despite massive funding and years of development, there is still no consumer product. There is only the pre-deployment of a “platform” poised to become indispensable — once the right crisis hits.

The Right Crisis: Bird Flu?

If one is so inclined to engage in high octane speculation, then it is indeed noteworthy that Ginkgo’s BIO-RADAR biological surveillance network is being used to detect H5N1.

It is significant that Ginkgo is already working with ARPA-H, and with the CDC, whose former director openly announced in 2022:

“It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic.”

— Robert Redfield, former CDC Director, 2022 (source)

It is relevant that Ginkgo is receiving grants for pathogen detection from the Gates Foundation, who heavily funded gain of function research on H5N1 (see my 2022 report here).

It is stunning that the infrastructure not only exists to rapidly create custom (antibiotic-resistant) microbes at scale, but is already deployed, ready to be re-programmed at a moment’s notice to produce … anything! Ginkgo is positioned as the go-to guy for all the bespoke microbes the technocrats.

All that is needed to activate this infrastructure is a crisis—but far be it from me to speculate as to what that might be.

Irreverence

There is one other thing. You can call me old-fashioned. But when I watch Jason Kelly drop F-bombs in his talks, or see Sam Altman quoted saying "With biology, sometimes shit just doesn't work," I don't see cool tech hipsters using AI to save the world. I see anti-social accelerationists who refuse to play by the rules.

A CEO of a multi-billion dollar company that's playing in ethically very murky water with extinction-level consequences who refuses to conduct himself appropriately, is thumbing his nose at tradition and showing a complete lack of respect. That behavior signals he is equally willing to go against all social norms and standards when it comes to deciding whether to re-format our microbiome against our will.

It reflects an absolute irreverence for humanity — and for God.

The Total Surveillance Grid

Ubiquitous sensing & reporting microbes (like those defined in the DoD’s Tellus project) are absolutely the most important, albeit least visible, component reporting into Palantir’s command and AI control platform.

But a goal of “total awareness” demands a strategy of sensors everywhere. These microbes are the keystone in that strategy, embedding into every environment and living system and providing high-resolution real-time data on human health and environmental state. But there are many other sources of data; I have covered other examples of this agenda to turn every medium into a data stream, including:

• Al Gore’s Climate Trace initiative: AI + Satellites real-time monitoring of emissions across the planet (Climate Lockdown, September 2020)

• 5G + Blockchain + AI Supply Chain (Architecting the Beast System, June 2020) and bio-engineered spores for unique tracking (Bio-Barcodes: GMO Spores to Track Supply Chain, April 2021)

• Trash/Recycling as data (Spying on your Trash: AI + Dumpster Cams for the Circular Economy, July 2021)

• The WEF’s agenda to surveil forest/rural areas (WEF's "Invest in Forests" Exposed: Global Surveillance Grid, June 2021)

… not to mention the wastewater surveillance, the wearables, and of course online spaces, social media, video games, and all the other wonderful surveillance being discussed.

Bio-surveillance is, however, not just another data stream. It is the irreversible replacement of natural biology and the instrumentalizing of life itself into the technocratic control grid.

The question is now: will humanity, once aware of this, allow it to continue? Thoughts welcome below.

They want to measure it all. Alex Karp told you: he wants you to be afraid.

Don’t be afraid. Be immeasurable.

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1. This is a 2016 revised version of that post — I’m not able to find the 2014 original on web or archive.org.