The Futurist

The surveillance state is expanding through the path of least resistance. Flock Safety's brazen access to cameras in a children's gymnastics room—used merely as a sales demonstration—reveals how privacy violations have become routine in the name of security theater. That Dunwoody officials renewed the contract despite public outcry shows how normalized this overreach has become. The real story isn't individual privacy breaches but the systematic erosion of boundaries between public safety and corporate surveillance. When AI security evaluations like those conducted on GPT-5.5 happen behind closed doors while actual surveillance companies operate with impunity in public spaces, we're prioritizing theoretical future risks over present-day violations. Meanwhile, China's successful pressure campaign to cancel RightCon demonstrates how authoritarian influence operations now extend far beyond their borders. The digital rights community—supposedly the most aware of these threats—couldn't resist Beijing's pressure when Taiwan speakers were involved. If digital rights advocates fold this easily, what hope do other sectors have? The AI compute shortage driving that $130 billion quarterly spend reveals a different kind of power concentration. When Google admits cloud revenue was limited by capacity constraints, we're seeing the emergence of AI as a genuinely scarce resource—one that will increasingly determine which countries, companies, and individuals can participate in the next phase of technological development.