omniharmonicThe AI Surveillance Endgame: Zero-Knowledge Identity and the Race to Own the Future
How a small network of billionaires is building the infrastructure for total control, and why a different path forward still exists.
I. Two Visions of the Future
In the summer of 2023, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, published an unassuming essay titled “My Techno-Optimism.” In it, he offered a framework he termed “defensive accelerationism,” or d/acc.
The argument was deceptively simple. Technology shapes society. The question is not whether to develop technology but which technologies to develop, and toward what ends. Buterin proposed that we should deliberately accelerate the development of defensive technologies: tools that make authoritarianism more difficult, that protect individual privacy and autonomy, that distribute power rather than concentrate it. Defense over offense. Decentralization over consolidation. Protection over control.
This might sound abstract until you understand it as a direct counter-thesis to the vision being actively implemented by some of the most powerful people in the world.
Peter Thiel has been explicit about his beliefs. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in 2009. This was not a throwaway line. It was an investment thesis. Thiel and Buterin agree on the premise: technological development determines the direction of society. Where they diverge, sharply and consequentially, is on which direction that should be.
Thiel co-founded Palantir, a company whose software now integrates the databases of the FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, and ICE into unified, queryable systems. What once required teams of analysts cross-referencing files across agencies can now be accomplished with a single search. Palantir’s name comes from the seeing-stones of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the orbs that allowed their users to surveil across vast distances, and which corrupted nearly everyone who used them. The reference is not subtle.
His political investments have been equally deliberate. J.D. Vance, Thiel’s protege and funding beneficiary, now serves as Vice President. David Sacks, a longtime Thiel associate from PayPal, coordinates AI and cryptocurrency policy for the administration. Scott Bessent runs Treasury, the department controlling reserve currency policy, financial regulation, and sanctions enforcement, pushing for Thiel’s particular vision of digital currency development. The Rockbridge Network, a coalition of Thiel-aligned operatives, has stated openly that their goal is to shape the architecture of digital currency itself.
The logic is straightforward: control the financial rails and you control who can participate in society.
Elon Musk’s ambitions are older than most people realize. His first company, before it merged to become PayPal, was called X.com. Its purpose was to replace the global financial system with a centralized digital platform: identity, payments, banking, investments, all controlled by a single company. X.com’s early partnership with Barclays demonstrated this was not just an example of Musk’s now-familiar hype machine but a long term, generational business plan.
That vision didn’t die. It waited.
Twitter is now X. Musk has stated publicly that the platform should become an “everything app” modeled on WeChat, the Chinese application that combines messaging, payments, commerce, identity verification, and government services into a single interface. In China, WeChat is essentially mandatory for participation in modern urban life. Users pay bills, book appointments, transfer money, read news, order food, and interact with government services through it. The app knows who they are and tracks everything they do. Leaving WeChat means leaving modern Chinese society.
This is Musk’s stated model.
Starlink is deploying satellite internet to regions covering roughly half the global population, areas lacking terrestrial infrastructure where Starlink will not compete with incumbents but will be the only option. In much of Africa, South Asia, rural Latin America, and Southeast Asia, building fiber networks requires massive capital investment and years of construction. Starlink requires only satellite launches, which SpaceX controls, and terminal distribution. Once deployed, it becomes the de facto internet for billions of people.
The play unfolds logically. Starlink achieves internet monopoly in underserved regions. X becomes the primary application on that network, the portal through which users access services, communicate, transact, and interact with institutions. Account creation requires identity verification. Financial services require KYC. Before anyone notices the walls closing, participation in the network means submission to comprehensive surveillance.
The “Doge” references in Musk’s communications are worth noting. The Doge of Venice controlled centralized finance in the medieval Mediterranean, kingmaker over monarchs, holder of the power that made kings dependent.
Whether Musk and Thiel’s invocations of Doge and Palantir are conscious or intuitive, the parallels are apt.
Thiel and Musk are loosely cooperating in the near term: shared political allies, complementary policy initiatives, regulatory capture. But they are competing in the medium term for ultimate dominance. For now, their strategies reinforce each other. Thiel builds the surveillance-analytical layer. Musk builds the network-infrastructure layer. Together, they are constructing something unprecedented.
This is one vision of the future. Buterin’s defensive accelerationism offers another: that we can develop technology deliberately aimed at making such concentration impossible. The race between these two visions is not theoretical. It is happening now, in code being written, in standards being set, in infrastructure being deployed. And the outcome will shape the conditions of human life for generations.
II. The Machine
To understand what is being built, and what must be built to counter it, we need to understand the distinction between surveillance and the actuation of control.
Surveillance is collecting and analyzing information about human behavior. It has existed throughout history: Roman census records, Stasi informant networks, the NSA programs Edward Snowden revealed. Surveillance produces knowledge. It tells the watcher what the watched are doing.
Control is the capacity to enforce consequences based on that knowledge: to reward, punish, include, or exclude based on what has been observed. Surveillance tells you someone posted a controversial opinion. Control freezes their bank account.
Throughout most of history, the gap between surveillance and control was bridged by human labor. The Stasi might identify a dissident through their informant network, but enforcing consequences required physical intervention. Police had to make arrests. Bureaucrats had to process paperwork. Jailers had to maintain prisons. Each step required human decision-making, human resources, human attention.
This created natural limits. Even the most totalitarian states could not actuate mechanisms of control against everyone simultaneously. The friction inherent in human-mediated enforcement meant that most people, most of the time, fell beneath the threshold of intervention. You were protected by the sheer inefficiency of persecution.
That friction is being eliminated.
The East German Stasi employed 91,000 staff and maintained files on six million citizens, the highest informant-to-population ratio in modern history. Yet their files were paper-based. Analysis required human readers. Cross-referencing required physical labor. The bottleneck was not willingness to surveil but capacity to process what they collected.
The NSA after 9/11 could intercept communications at scale that would have been inconceivable to previous eras. But making sense of what they collected remained labor-intensive. Analysts reviewed flagged communications. Pattern recognition relied on predefined queries. They collected everything but could analyze only a fraction. Citizens were protected by what you might call anonymity through volume: data captured but lost in a mass too large for comprehensive human review.
Large language models have eliminated this bottleneck entirely.
A single LLM instance can process thousands of profiles simultaneously. Instances and inferences can be parallelized indefinitely. The constraint is no longer human attention but compute cost, and compute cost decreases exponentially with each passing year. With federal funding for new AI data centers, what once required roomfuls of analysts working for months can now be accomplished in seconds.
More significantly, the data systems that these AI agents will utilize and create will soon integrate all data types: financial transactions, travel records, medical histories, communications, audio, video, and location data flow into unified analysis. Pattern recognition operates across dimensions invisible to human observation. Behavioral prediction algorithms do not just analyze what someone has done; they model what someone might do.
Pre-AI, even targeted individuals could not have all their content analyzed comprehensively. A team might review a suspect’s emails for specific keywords, but reading and contextualizing every message, understanding evolving relationships, tracking sentiment shifts over years, was impossible. Now it is trivial.
When investigation was resource-constrained, probable cause served as a filter: limited resources went to individuals with specific indicators. When resources are effectively unlimited, the filter disappears. Everyone can be investigated simultaneously. The concept of “innocent until proven guilty” becomes operationally meaningless when guilt is assessed continuously, automatically, for the entire population.
This is not more surveillance. It is a different mode of organizing society.
III. The Constitutional Breach
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is explicit: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
This language reflects hard-won understanding. The founders knew what it meant to live under a government that could search anyone, anytime, for any reason. The British writs of assistance, which allowed customs officers to search any home or business without specific cause, were among the grievances that sparked revolution. The Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent exactly this: mass, suspicionless intrusion into private life.
For most of American history, the amendment’s protections were reinforced by practical limitations. The government could not search everyone because searching everyone was physically impossible. Each search was a distinct, physical intervention, clearly and effectively bound by court orders and warrants. Constitutional rights and technological constraints pointed in the same direction.
This alignment is now broken.
The government cannot, under current interpretation, conduct warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens. But private companies can. And the government can purchase, subpoena, or otherwise obtain what private companies have collected. When Google knows your location history, Amazon knows your purchase history, your phone carrier knows who you call, your ISP knows what sites you visit, and data brokers aggregate all of this into comprehensive profiles available for purchase, the constitutional protection becomes procedural rather than substantive. The government cannot search you without a warrant, but it can buy the search results from someone who already did.
The deeper problem is structural. The constitutional framework assumes a distinction between government action and private action. When the government searches you, constitutional protections apply. When a private company collects your data, you have (in theory) consented through terms of service. But this distinction collapses when government and private surveillance become integrated, when the same data flows through both, when the government can access what it could not constitutionally collect by simply purchasing it from those who could.
Big Tech’s partnership with government creates a constitutional bypass. The companies build the surveillance infrastructure. The government accesses it. The Fourth Amendment, designed to protect citizens from their government, becomes irrelevant when the government can obtain through commercial channels what it cannot obtain through its own direct action.
Recent agreements between federal agencies and Oracle, OpenAI, and Palantir accelerate this integration. The technical capacity for comprehensive, population-scale surveillance now exists. The legal framework restraining its use was designed for a world where such surveillance was impossible. We are living in the gap between constitutional principle and technological reality.
IV. The Control Layer
Understanding the transformation in AI-enhanced analytical capacity is only half the picture. The other half is what happens after analysis: the mechanisms by which AI-enabled surveillance translates into real-world consequences.
These mechanisms already exist and operate at scale in Western democracies.
In 2022, following the Canadian trucker convoy protests, the government invoked emergency powers to freeze bank accounts of individuals associated with the demonstrations. No charges were filed. No trials occurred. Accounts were frozen based on participation in a political protest, executed by financial institutions on government direction within hours. The precedent: financial access can be severed for political reasons, automatically, without legal process.
The No Fly List maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center contains an unknown number of names, estimated between 16,000 and 100,000, with individuals added through processes that remain largely opaque. Those on the list discover their status only when attempting to fly. No trial, no formal accusation, no presumption of innocence. Challenges have succeeded in court, but only after years of litigation by those with resources to pursue legal action.
When AWS terminated hosting for Parler in 2021, the platform ceased to exist overnight. The decision was made by a private company based on its own terms-of-service determination. No government order, no judicial review. Background check companies aggregate data from multiple sources and assign risk scores that determine employment. Algorithmic scoring systems determine access to insurance, lending, and housing, incorporating social media activity, purchasing patterns, and location data.
While these examples highlight enforcement actions against primarily conservative people or organizations, the common thread and its implications for all of our civil liberties should give pause to even the most partisan Liberal. No judicial process. No trial, no charges, no presumption of innocence. Consequences imposed automatically based on algorithmic determination. The affected individual may have no knowledge of why they have been targeted, no access to evidence used against them, no effective mechanism for appeal.
What prevents this infrastructure from achieving comprehensive coverage is fragmentation. The bank that might close your account does not automatically know about the social media post that might prompt closure. The background check company does not necessarily access your travel records. Systems exist in silos, connected imperfectly, not integrated into a seamless whole.
Centralized digital identity changes this equation entirely.
When a single identifier links all activities across all contexts, correlation becomes automatic. The bank does not need to investigate whether you participated in a disfavored protest. It queries your universal ID against the relevant database. The employer does not piece together your social media from fragments. It accesses the comprehensive profile associated with your identifier.
This is not speculation. China has been running this system for over a decade.
Every Chinese citizen is assigned a unique Resident Identity Card number, required for virtually every interaction with formal institutions: banking, travel, housing, education, medical care, social media. All activities linked to this ID flow into integrated databases: financial transactions, social media posts, travel records, legal history, employment, and associations. AI systems analyze the aggregated data and assign scores. Scores determine access. Individuals with low scores find themselves unable to purchase airplane or train tickets. Their children may be denied admission to preferred schools. They may be unable to obtain loans. Their photos may be displayed on public screens as “untrustworthy.”
By 2019, Chinese courts had banned over 23 million people from purchasing plane tickets and 5.5 million from purchasing train tickets based on social credit assessments. This is not a pilot program. It is population-scale control.
The mechanism is more elegant than crude coercion. Traditional authoritarian enforcement, secret police and mass arrests, is expensive, visible, and generates resistance. The social credit approach produces compliance through steady erosion of alternatives. No arrests, no confrontations. Just gradual constriction of possibility. Citizens self-censor to maintain their scores. Family members pressure each other toward conformity. Social groups police their own members. The state need not monitor every conversation when citizens monitor themselves.
The claim that “it cannot happen here” rests on a misunderstanding. The argument is not that Western democracies will adopt the rhetoric of “social harmony.” It is that the technical infrastructure being deployed (universal digital ID, comprehensive data collection, algorithmic analysis, automated enforcement) creates the same operational capacity regardless of rhetoric.
V. The Trap Already Laid
Centralized identity infrastructure will not be imposed by decree, at least not initially. It will spread through forcing functions: conditions that make non-participation increasingly costly until resistance becomes impractical.
The functions escalate in intensity.
Convenience incentives are the gentlest pressure. One-click purchasing, seamless authentication, premium features for verified users. Biometric identity verification services like CLEAR and much of our digital economy already operate this way: frictionless experiences for those who consent to data collection, deliberate friction for those who resist.
Financial incentives add material stakes. Worldcoin pays people to scan their irises in exchange for cryptocurrency, the explicit logic of much digital participation made visible. Lower transaction fees for verified accounts. Access to services requiring verification. Early-adopter rewards.
Cost penalties turn opt-out from inconvenient to actively punishing. TSA’s Real ID requirements penalize those without compliant identification. Higher insurance rates for those declining data sharing. Exclusion from efficient service pathways. These penalties remain modest but establish precedent: participation in centralized, biometric identity collection is normal, non-participation is penalized.
Monopoly lock-in is the function most often underestimated. When a network achieves sufficient dominance in a necessary service, it need not wait for law. If Amazon requires its identity system for purchases, that is coercion without legislation. In much of the US, there is nowhere else to buy. If Starlink is the only internet provider in a region and requires X account verification, the logic is complete without any government mandate.
Laws can be fought through organizing, litigation, electoral change. Monopolies cannot be fought through opt-out because there is nowhere to opt-out to. When a single provider controls access to a necessary service, compliance with that provider’s requirements becomes a condition of existence.
Legal requirements formalize what has already become practical necessity. KYC for financial services is already universal. Age verification expands under child protection legislation. Real-name policies spread under justifications of combating harassment. Government services migrate online. Each requirement justified independently; cumulatively making anonymous participation impossible.
Universal mandate is the endgame: the same identity required across all contexts, interoperability becoming inescapability, refusal meaning exclusion from economic and social participation.
The trap is now explicit. Option A: Accept centralized digital identity and enable the surveillance-control infrastructure. Option B: Refuse and accept exclusion from banking, employment, commerce, services, and social participation.
Both options are unacceptable. This is why opposition to centralized identity is insufficient. The solution must be an alternative architecture providing legitimate identity verification without enabling control infrastructure.
VI. The Counter-Strategy: How Zero-Knowledge Proofs Actually Work
Data collection cannot be prevented. The sensors are too numerous, collection too distributed, commercial incentives too powerful.
AI-powered analysis cannot be prevented. The capabilities exist and improve continuously.
What can be affected is the infrastructure connecting surveillance to control, most critically, the identity layer, the final bulwark against cheap, automated enforcement at population scale.
Zero-knowledge proofs offer a mathematical solution. Not a policy promise or institutional guarantee, a mathematical and cryptographic property capable of providing verifiable credentials that meet the real demand for digital identity verification while making extraction of additional information impossible.
To understand why this matters, you need to understand how zero-knowledge proofs actually work.
Zero-Knowledge: The Principle
The core problem is simple: verification has always required revelation. To prove you know something, you show what you know. To prove a fact about yourself, you reveal documents containing that fact plus dozens of others. The act of proving has always leaked information beyond what was necessary.
Zero-knowledge cryptography breaks this assumption. It lets you prove a statement is true while revealing literally nothing except the truth of that statement.
To understand why this is possible, you need to understand one-way functions.
Consider a basic example: multiplication is easy, but factoring is hard. Anyone can verify that 7 x 13 = 91 in seconds. But if I hand you 7,387,420,193 and ask “what two prime numbers multiply to make this?”, you face a genuinely difficult problem. The operation flows easily in one direction and painfully in reverse.
Cryptography is built on these asymmetries. There are mathematical operations where computing forward is trivial and computing backward is functionally impossible, not just difficult, but requiring more time than the universe has existed.
Zero-knowledge proofs exploit this property. You perform a series of mathematical operations on your private information, operations that produce outputs I can verify but cannot reverse. I can confirm the computation was done correctly. I cannot work backward to discover what inputs you used.
Imagine I claim to have solved an enormous maze. You want proof, but I do not want to show you my solution. So we agree on a test: you will name a random point somewhere in the maze. I will describe the path from the entrance to that point, and separately, the path from that point to the exit. If my two path-segments connect properly at your randomly chosen point, I probably know the full route. If we repeat this a hundred times with a hundred different random points, and I succeed every time, you become statistically certain I have the solution. Yet you never see the complete path, only fragments that prove its existence.
This is the essence of zero-knowledge: I demonstrate possession of knowledge through responses to random challenges, responses that could only be correct if I possess what I claim, but which do not themselves reveal it.
Modern zero-knowledge systems compress this interactive process into a single mathematical object: a proof you can verify without any back-and-forth. The proof is small (often just a few hundred bytes), fast to verify (milliseconds), and carries the same guarantee: correct verification means the underlying statement is true, but the proof itself contains no extractable information about why it is true.
Why This Matters for Identity
When you present a traditional credential, you hand over a document. The document exists. It can be copied, stored, aggregated, sold, hacked, subpoenaed. Your protection relies entirely on policies, promises that institutions will not misuse what they have collected. Policies can change. Databases can be breached. Promises can be broken.
Zero-knowledge credentials do not work this way. When you generate a ZK proof that you are over 21, no document changes hands. The proof is a mathematical object demonstrating that your cryptographic credential (signed by the DMV, stored only on your device) satisfies the condition “birthdate before 21 years ago.” The verifier checks the math and learns the answer: yes, this person is over 21.
But here is what the verifier does not have: any artifact they could store, sell, or aggregate. The proof itself reveals nothing. There is no name to record, no birthdate to log, no identifier to cross-reference. The information is not hidden behind a policy. It does not exist in a form that could be extracted, because the mathematics make extraction impossible.
The protection is architectural, not procedural. No policy change can expose what was never collected. No database breach can leak what was never stored. The guarantee is not “we promise not to misuse your data” but “the data was never in our possession to misuse.”
What zero-knowledge identity accomplishes
It raises the cost of correlation by orders of magnitude. Without ZK, correlation is essentially free: a shared identifier links activities automatically. With ZK, each interaction generates a separate proof that cannot be linked. Correlation requires expensive inference: AI analysis to probabilistically match behavioral patterns. Possible for determined adversaries with substantial resources, but vastly more expensive than automated linking.
It breaks the sensor-to-consequence pipeline. The surveillance-analysis-control chain requires identity linking at each step. ZK fragments the pipeline at the identity layer, forcing expensive manual intervention to reconnect pieces.
It forces attackers to target individuals rather than populations. Mass control requires cheap per-person cost. When control is expensive, only targeted investigation is feasible. This restores the practical protections that constrained historical surveillance states.
What zero-knowledge identity does not accomplish must be stated with equal clarity.
It does not prevent LLM-based correlation across contexts. AI can analyze writing style, behavioral patterns, and timing correlations. Sophisticated attackers can probabilistically link identities even without shared identifiers. ZK makes this harder and more expensive, but not impossible.
It does not eliminate surveillance. Data collection continues regardless of identity architecture. ZK affects what can happen with the data, not whether it exists.
It does not solve the problem by itself alone. Technical solutions deployed without policy engagement will be outlawed, circumvented, or made irrelevant by monopoly control.
The strategic reframe is essential: the goal is not “prevent surveillance” (impossible). The goal is “make control expensive enough that it cannot scale.”
VII. The Critical Distinction: Mass Surveillance vs. Targeted Legal Process
Critics may argue that privacy-preserving systems enable criminals to escape justice. This concern is legitimate but based on a misunderstanding of what zero-knowledge identity actually proposes.
Zero-knowledge identity does not mean that criminals cannot be investigated. It means that everyone cannot be investigated simultaneously, automatically, without cause.
Under a properly designed ZK identity system, courts retain the power to issue warrants and subpoenas. When law enforcement has probable cause to believe someone has committed a crime, they can obtain a court order requiring that individual to reveal the private keys underlying their identity proofs. This is a targeted investigation with judicial oversight, exactly what the Fourth Amendment requires.
The architecture matters enormously here. In a well-designed system:
Private keys remain with the individual. Your cryptographic identity is stored on your device or with a custodian you control. The system does not include a master key held by government or corporations that can unlock everyone’s identity simultaneously.
Legal process can compel disclosure. Courts can issue orders requiring individuals to produce their private keys, just as courts can currently compel production of documents, testimony, or physical evidence. Failure to comply with a valid court order carries legal consequences.
Bulk access is architecturally impossible. There is no database that, if accessed or hacked, reveals everyone’s identity linkages. The protection is mathematical, not policy-based. Even a corrupt insider cannot expose the population because the information does not exist in that form.
This is the critical distinction: the difference between mass surveillance (watching everyone, all the time, without cause) and targeted legal process (investigating specific individuals based on probable cause, with judicial oversight).
The constitutional framework assumes this distinction. Probable cause, warrants, judicial review: these are not obstacles to law enforcement but filters ensuring that the immense power of state investigation is directed appropriately. When those filters disappear, when everyone can be investigated simultaneously at near-zero cost, the constitutional framework becomes hollow and decorative rather than truly protective of human liberty and freedom.
Zero-knowledge identity restores the possibility of a free and open society on the internet. Making compliant identity systems possible while making mass investigation impractical. The FBI can still investigate suspects. What they cannot do is investigate everyone and sort by suspicion afterward.
VIII. The Coalition
Technology deployed independent of government will lose.
This contradicts the instincts of much of the Web3 community. The crypto ethos emphasizes technical solutions, cryptographic guarantees, code as law. These instincts are understandable. They are also strategically inadequate.
Governments control violence. The entity with monopoly on legitimate force can make privacy-preserving technology illegal. They can prosecute developers, imprison users, seize infrastructure. The fate of Tornado Cash developers, facing criminal charges for writing software, demonstrates this is not theoretical.
Governments can mandate centralized identity. Financial access, travel, and employment can be legally conditioned on identity verification that non-compliant systems cannot satisfy.
Private monopolies are not bound by voluntary adoption. If Amazon requires centralized identity, users of alternative systems simply cannot buy from Amazon. Market power creates compliance requirements independent of law. Only states can prevent private monopolies; if states are captured by monopolists, no external check remains.
The implications are stark. There is no viable path that does not include government engagement. Privacy-preserving infrastructure must be legal to deploy, compatible with legitimate regulatory requirements, and protected against monopolistic capture. Achieving these conditions requires political action, not merely technical development.
But the moral case for privacy, though correct, is insufficient to build the necessary coalition. Moral arguments persuade those already inclined to agreement. They rarely move those whose interests point elsewhere.
What can attract those interests is recognition of a shared threat.
Most of us do not benefit from techno-feudal consolidation. Many of the existing order’s most powerful actors, wealthy, influential, commanding significant resources, are positioned to lose if any single player wins the race to the bottom of AI-enabled surveillance. While many may see themselves as fellow winners alongside Thiel and Musk in the accelerating corporate-state merger, they too will be at the whim of those who control the digital architectures that we’ll soon be locked into. Their rational self-interest aligns, at least for now, with the preservation of a free and open society.
Consider companies not positioned to win. If comprehensive AI systems become the decisive competitive advantage, every research institution not controlling such a system faces obsolescence. If one platform owns identity infrastructure, all competitors become subordinate, dependent on the platform owner’s tolerance for their existence. Any company not positioned to win a winner-take-all race should rationally work to prevent anyone from winning. This is not altruism. It is survival.
Most investors will not own the new reserve currency. Most capital holders will not control the central planning AI. In a techno-feudal regime, their wealth becomes subordinate to whoever controls the platform layer. The wealth conferring power today would depend on continued favor of infrastructure controllers.
The coalition to prevent consolidation consists not just of idealists committed to human flourishing, though such people exist and matter, but of rational actors who recognize they will not be winners if winner-take-all dynamics play out at this totalizing of a civilizational scale. They do not want someone else to become king. They do not want their own information in potentially hostile hands. They recognize their current wealth and power depend on competitive markets that consolidation would destroy.
The investment thesis follows directly from this realization. Surveillance technology concentration means market destruction for everyone outside the winning platform. Privacy technology means preserving competitive markets. The crypto VC investing in privacy infrastructure is not making a charitable donation to civil liberties. They are making a calculated bet that their entire portfolio depends on preventing AI surveillance consolidation.
IX. The Window
So, how long will the current window remain open?
Currently, digital identity is useful but not universally required. One can still function without comprehensive digital identification. Standards are still being debated. International bodies are deliberating. National programs are in pilot phases. The EU’s framework is rolling out but not yet universal. The U.S. has various initiatives but no unified system.
Flock Safety does not publicly disclose an exact count of its cameras in the US, but recent estimates place the network at around 80,000 to over 100,000 devices as of late 2025. These solar-powered surveillance cameras operate in over 5,000 communities across 49 states, capturing more than 20 billion vehicle scans monthly through machine learning. Law enforcement, HOAs, and businesses lease access, with growth fueled by partnerships with ICE and local law enforcement agencies, a $7.5 billion valuation and partnerships like Amazon Ring, enabling law enforcement using Flock’s platforms to request video footage from Ring users via the Neighbors app.
This small sample of accelerating dynamics indicates that the timeline ought to be measured in years, not decades. 2024-2025: standards being set, pilots launching. 2025-2027: broad deployment beginning. 2027-2030: universal adoption likely. Within five years, the architecture will be locked in.
Path dependency operates with particular force in networked systems. Once enough services require the same digital identity, alternatives become impractical. Network effects driving adoption also drive lock-in. The first system deployed becomes permanent because switching costs are prohibitive.
Every expansion of surveillance capacity has been justified as temporary, emergency, and necessary. No expansion has ever been rolled back. Post-9/11 infrastructure was never dismantled. Each crisis ratchets capability higher. The infrastructure, once deployed, is permanent.
Why can we still win?
Public concern is growing. Privacy has become salient across the ideological spectrum. Distrust of Big Tech crosses partisan lines. Neither left nor right trusts the current trajectory.
The defensive technology is production-ready. ZK proofs, decentralized identity protocols, and verifiable credentials exist and can be deployed. The constraint is coordination and adoption, not technological readiness. The Zcash blockchain has operated with ZK-based privacy since 2016. zkSync and other Ethereum Layer 2 solutions like Aztec use zero-knowledge proofs routinely. Verification is now possible on low-power devices.
Political opportunity exists. Distrust of concentrated power creates unusual coalition possibilities. The libertarian suspicious of government surveillance and the progressive suspicious of corporate monopoly arrive at compatible positions through different reasoning.
Economic interests are alignable. The coalition of the threatened has enormous resources that can be directed toward alternatives if the strategic case is made clearly.
The strategy: front-run the oligarch deployment. Provide viable alternatives before centralized systems achieve critical mass. Make open standards the expected default before lock-in settles the question.
This is defensive accelerationism in practice: not opposing technological development, but deliberately accelerating the development of technologies that protect rather than control.
X. The Call
The race between these two visions of the future is not metaphorical. It is a competition measured in lines of code written, standards and policies adopted, infrastructure deployed. The outcome depends on choices made now, by specific actors, in specific contexts.
For the Ethereum ecosystem and Web3 technologists: Make privacy-preserving identity a primary development goal. The existing network effects are the only viable path. The speed required cannot wait for new networks to emerge. Develop decentralized identity capable of fulfilling all functions of state-issued digital ID. Build zero-knowledge infrastructure for all verification types. Create federated architectures achieving network effect benefits while maintaining decentralized control.
For investors: Recognize the thesis. Surveillance concentration means market destruction for everyone outside the winning platform. Divest from surveillance technology. Invest in privacy-preserving infrastructure: ZK development, decentralized identity, open protocol research.
For policy engagement: Push for market regulation preventing monopoly in networked markets. Advocate for laws preventing sale of user data. Demand that government data from separated powers run on physically separated systems. Require intact courts between intelligence gathering and enforcement action. Defend the constitutional principle that mass surveillance is unreasonable search, regardless of whether conducted by government or its corporate partners. Consider a new Digital Bill of Rights that enshrines the original intent of the framers for the digital age.
For individuals: Adopt privacy-protecting technology where available. Boycott surveillance technology where viable. Engage politically: pressure representatives, vote for candidates favoring privacy and separation of powers. Improve personal security literacy.
The convergence of comprehensive data collection, AI-powered analysis, and automated control infrastructure creates the technical capacity for population-scale behavioral control without historical precedent. The race to own this infrastructure is underway. The actors are identifiable. The strategies are public. The timelines are short.
It would be comforting to dismiss this as paranoid. It would be reassuring to believe democratic institutions or market competition will prevent the worst outcomes. But the evidence is not speculative. It is drawn from public statements, documented investments, announced strategies, and observable deployments.
Peter Thiel believes freedom and democracy are incompatible. He may be right, if the technologies that shape society are technologies of control. But there is another path. If the technologies we build are technologies of defense, technologies that make surveillance expensive and control impractical, technologies that restore the privacy that protects human autonomy, then freedom and democracy can coexist with technological progress.
This is the core insight of defensive accelerationism: the future is not determined by technology in the abstract, but by which technologies we choose to build. We can build systems that concentrate power in the hands of those who would rule without consent. Or we can build systems that distribute power, that protect the individual against authoritarian rule, that make techno-fascism technically infeasible rather than technically easy.
The window is open. It will not remain so indefinitely. The architectural decisions made in the next few years will shape conditions of human life for generations.
The race is on. The exponential curve just kicked in. Whether privacy-preserving, defensive technologies accelerate faster than offensive authoritarian ones is the only question that remains or matters.