Latest / The BlackVeil Files / The Shoggoth Is Eating the Middle Class | Nobody Is Talking About It

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The Shoggoth Is Eating the Middle Class | Nobody Is Talking About It · The BlackVeil Files

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: I spent the last month tracing how the AI industry is quietly offloading hundreds of billions of dollars in costs directly to your electricity bill, your grocery receipt, and your credit card.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I can prove every dollar of it.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_03: Last week, Nissan's email killed features on a car that people had already paid for.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_03: The model is called Hardware as a Service.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_03: Every major technology corporation on Earth wants to quadruple its data center capacity to 12 gigawatts.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_09: We are committed to building out data centers across our 60 regions.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is the end of ownership.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: And by the time this video is over, you will understand how the largest transfer of wealth in American history is being conducted.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: Not through legislation, not through taxation, but through the quiet, systematic destruction of the things you thought you owned.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_03: In March 2026, Nissan permanently shut down the Nissan Connect EV application for every single leaf built before May 2019.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_03: And for every single ENV200 electric van built before 2022.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: Tens of thousands of vehicle owners, one email, one month's notice, and just like that, the ability to check your battery or to charge from your phone, gone.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_03: The ability to preheat your cabin on a cold morning, gone.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_03: Remote charging management so you can schedule your vehicle to draw power during off-peak hours and save money on your electric bill?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: Gone.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_03: Not because the hardware in the car failed.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: The battery still works, the heater still works, the charging system still works.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_03: Every single piece of physical equipment in that vehicle is functioning exactly as it was designed to function.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_03: The only thing that changed is that Nissan decided the servers were too expensive to maintain.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_03: And here is where I want us to all understand this architecture of betrayal.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_03: Nissan isn't just discontinuing an app.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: They are telling you in plain language that the connected features they advertised when they sold you this car, the ones listed in the brochure, the features the salesman demonstrated on the showroom floor, the features that were part of the reason that you chose this vehicle over another competitor's.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_03: Those features had a hidden expiration date that nobody told you about.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_03: One owner, a man named Alan Klukasi, told The Guardian that the most infuriating thing would be losing the ability to smart charge his car or warm it up on a frosty morning.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: He had his leaf for seven years, and Nissan's position is that seven years of software support is sufficient for a machine that is expected to last 12 to 15 years on the road.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_03: Another owner put it more bluntly, he called it shockingly bad.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_03: He pointed out that Nissan had only supported a core electric vehicle feature for seven years.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_03: His exact words were considering the average car can last for 12 plus years, that is shockingly bad.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_03: And this is not even the first time Nissan has done this.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_03: They pulled the exact same maneuver in 2024 when the UK's 2G network was switched off.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: They abandoned the first generation of Leaf cars entirely.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: And then they turned around and sold a new generation of cars with the same type of connected features that the infrastructure underpinning those features was from day one designed to be temporary.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_03: Now I want you to hold the image of that car in your driveway.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_03: Because what I'm about to show you is that the Nissan Leaf is not an isolated case.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_03: It is the canary in the coal mine.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_03: It is the first visible symptom of a disease that is already mashetized through the entire American economy.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_03: And it is going to cost you far more than a heated car seat on a cold morning.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_02: Electricity prices across the country have increased for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fact that AI data centers are needing more power to increase the compute that they need to feed all the ambitions of the data center companies.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: So let me walk you through the business model that is quietly replacing the American concept of ownership.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_03: Because what happened to the Nissan Leaf is not a glitch.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_03: It is not a failure of planning.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: It is a business model working exactly as designed.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: The model is called hardware as a service, and this is how it works.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_03: A corporation sells you a physical object.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: A car, a thermostat, a tractor, or a refrigerator.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_03: You pay full price for that object, so naturally you believe that you own it.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: But buried inside the object is a dependency, a software layer that connects to a server that the corporation controls.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: That software layer is what makes certain features of the object function.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: And the corporation retains absolute unilateral authority to turn that software layer off at any time and for any reason without your consent.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: This is not a conspiracy theory.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_03: This is the stated business strategy of virtually every major technology and manufacturing company on the planet.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: BMW tried to charge a monthly subscription for heated seats.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: Features that were physically installed in the car, that the hardware was already built to deliver, locked behind a paywall after purchase.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_03: John Deere has spent over a decade fighting farmers in court for the right to repair their own tractors.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: Farmers who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a piece of equipment, and then they discovered that a software lock prevented them from fixing it themselves.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: They had to call a John Deere authorized technician at John Deere prices and on John Deere's schedule.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: Adobe, which once sold you Photoshop in a box for a one-time payment of$600, now charges you$23 a month.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: Forever.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_03: You never own it.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_03: You rent it.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: And if you stop paying for it, not only do you lose access to the software, you lose access to your own files, your own creative work, which was saved in Adobe's proprietary format.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_03: A university lecturer at Bournemouth, a man named Benjamin Gorman, he pointed directly to this when he was interviewed about the Nissan situation.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: He said that the tech world is shifting towards software as a service model, and he used Photoshop as the perfect example.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_03: Historically, you could buy it once and use it for as long as you liked, whereas now it typically requires an ongoing subscription.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_03: And what Gorman identified as the fundamental psychological trick at the heart of this entire scheme.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_03: They don't take ownership away from you all at once.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: That would provoke a revolt.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_03: They do it incrementally.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: First, they make the subscription optional, and then they make it standard, and then they make it mandatory.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: And by the time you've realized what's happened, you're paying rent on everything that you used to own.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_03: But the car in your driveway is where this stops being an abstract economic argument and it starts becoming a material threat to middle class financial stability.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because a car is not a software application.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: A car is a$30,000 to$60,000 physical asset.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_03: It is for most American families the second largest purchase that they will ever make.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: And if the manufacturer can reach into your driveway and degrade that asset's functionality at will, then the resale value or the useful life or the return on your investment is no longer in your control.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_03: You are not a customer anymore.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_03: You are a revenue stream.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: And the moment that you stop generating sufficient revenue, the moment maintaining your service becomes less profitable than abandoning you, you will be abandoned.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: Your car will be bricked, your thermostat will go dark, and your tractor will stop running.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: Not because it's broken, because you've been deemed unprofitable.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_03: And the companies doing this to you, the companies stripping away your property rights, one software update at a time, those companies are simultaneously demanding something from the American public that dwarfs anything that they have ever asked before.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_03: They are demanding your electricity.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_06: Stargate in the future, a new American company that will invest$500 billion at least in AI infrastructure.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_06: 10 gigawatts.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_03: That is the amount of electrical power that the Stargate Project, which is a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle, has committed to consuming across its network of artificial intelligence data centers in the United States.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: 10 gigawatts is the output of approximately 10 nuclear power plants.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: 10 gigawatts is enough electricity to power roughly 7.5 million American homes.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_03: One single AI infrastructure project announced at the White House by the president requires as much electricity as a small nation.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: The Stargate project was formally announced on January 21st, 2025.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: The total investment commitment is$500 billion.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_03: That is half a trillion dollars being poured into buildings full of computer chips that do nothing but process artificial intelligence calculations.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: The flagship facility is being built in Abilene, Texas, and there are many additional sites planned or already under construction across the nation.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: As of early 2026, the project has already reached seven gigawatts of planned capacity and over$400 billion in committed investment.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: So they are, by their own words, ahead of schedule.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: And Stargate is just one project.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: Every major technology corporation on Earth is doing the same thing simultaneously.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: Amazon wants to quadruple its data center capacity to 12 gigawatts.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_03: If you go to South Louisiana, Meta is building something called the Hyperion Project, which is a$3.2 billion gas plant that at peak capacity will consume approximately half the electricity of New York City.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_03: 8 million people's worth of power redirected to a warehouse full of chips in the bayou so that your algorithm can decide which posts appear in your Facebook feed.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: Google more than doubled its data center spending in a single year, from$33 billion to$75 billion.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: Microsoft built two gigawatts of new capacity globally in 2025 alone.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_03: The numbers come so fast and so large that they stop meaning anything.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: So let me give you one that will.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: A report from Bloom Energy predicts that the US total data center energy demand will nearly double in three years, from 80 gigawatts to 150 gigawatts by 2028.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_03: That is the equivalent of plugging in the entire nation of Spain into the American electrical grid.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_03: Every light in Madrid, every factory in Barcelona, and every home in Seville, all of it added to your grid in 36 months.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: Not to serve you, to serve them.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_03: These are not abstract numbers on a spreadsheet.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_03: Every single one of these gigawatts has to come from somewhere.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_03: It has to be generated.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_03: It has to travel through transmission lines, it has to pass through transformers, and the American electrical grid and the physical infrastructures that carry electricity from power plants to your homes, was not built for this.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_03: It was not designed for this at all.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_03: It cannot handle this.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_03: The International Energy Agency expects worldwide electricity demand from AI data centers to more than quadruple by 2030.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: Transformers, which are the critical components for connecting new power generation to the grid, now have lead times of two to four years.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: Permitting and environmental review processes for new transmission lines can take a decade.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: You cannot simply will new grid capacity into existence, no matter how many billions of dollars that you have.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_03: And when the grid cannot keep up, when the demand outstrips the supply, the price goes up for everyone.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_07: I was just in Texas, and there are communities that are dealing with the lack of water or their water being destroyed and polluted because of data centers.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_07: They're destroying the lives of the people who call these places home and who have called these places home well before data centers were ever a word that we knew or that had been uttered.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: Here is where the story is going to take a darker turn because when these corporations cannot get enough electricity from the grid fast enough, they do not wait, they do not scale back their ambitions, they build their own power plants, and they do it without asking anyone for permission.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: In Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, XAI, built what the Southern Environmental Law Center has called a de facto power plant without environmental permits, without public notice, without any regard for the families who live as close to a half a mile away from the facility.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: To power its Colossus supercomputer, XAI hauled in up to 35 portable natural gas turbines and they began running them around the clock, generating up to 421 megawatts of electricity in a residential area without a single air quality permit.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: Let me tell you about the community where this happened.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_03: South Memphis.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_03: It's a neighborhood that has been targeted by harmful industrial activity for decades.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's home to a steel mill, an oil refinery, a gas power plant, and the remnants of a closed coal plant.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: The American Lung Association has given the area a failing grade for ozone pollution.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: In Boxtown, the neighborhood closest to the XAI facility, the cancer risk is four times the national average.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: And into this community, without a single public hearing, without a single environmental impact assessment, without a single permit from Shelby County Health Department, Elon Musk's company rolled in 35 gas turbines and they started burning natural gas 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_03: These turbines emit nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, and smog forming pollutants, and residents reported that they could no longer open their windows or exercise outdoors because the air smelled wrong.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: I think it was probably more than just the smell.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_03: State Representative Justin Pearson, who serves as the president of the Memphis Community Against Pollution Board, he put it in terms that should haunt every single person that's watching this.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_08: He said a negative loss of$30 to$44 million per year due to premature deaths, lost productivity, and hospitalizations.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: We have 22 of the 30 large polluters in the state in this neighborhood where XAI is now operating.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_03: And when the Shelby County Health Department finally did issue permits, they permitted only 15 turbines.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_03: But the satellite imagery shows that at least 24 turbines are operating on that site.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_03: Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney at the SELC, said that XAI had essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for the families that were living nearby.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_03: And even after the legal threats and even after the national media coverage, even after the NAACP announced its intent to sue under the Clean Air Act, XAI did it again.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: They built a second facility, Colossus 2, and they hauled in 27 more unpermitted gas turbines across state lines into South Haven, Mississippi.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_03: 495 megawatts, the equivalent of a conventional power plant.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_03: Without a single permit, the SELC said XAI officials openly stated they plan to copy and paste their unlawful turbine strategy from site to site.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_03: This is what environmental desperation looks like when it is funded by unlimited capital and shielded by political connections.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_03: This is a company that raised$10 billion in a single financing round, that is valued at$80 billion, and that could not be bothered to file a piece of paperwork before pumping formaldehyde into a neighborhood where children already have cancer rates four times the national average.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_03: And this is not unique to XAI.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is industry standard.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_03: According to reporting from TechStrong.ai, the developer of Stargate's flagship Abilene facility, Crusoe Energy, has secured 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas turbine capacity for data center operations.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_03: Natural gas, fossil fuels.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: The same industry that claims to be building the future is powering it by burning the past.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_03: And they are doing it because the grid cannot deliver power fast enough to satisfy their hunger.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_05: In the last five years, Americans who live near data centers saw their electric bills increase over 267% each month.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_03: So now we arrive at the part of this story that lands directly in your mailbox every single month.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because all of that electricity, those gigawatts being consumed by data centers, those natural gas turbines running without permits, all of that energy, it has to come from somewhere.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_03: And increasingly, it is coming from the same grid that powers your home, and you are paying for it.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: Let me walk you through the numbers here.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_03: According to a Bloomberg news analyst, wholesale electricity costs in areas near data centers have increased by as much as 267% compared to five years ago.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: 267%.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_03: In the PJM electricity market, which is the regional grid operator covering 13 eastern states, from Illinois to North Carolina, data centers accounted for an estimated$9.3 billion price increase in what is called the capacity market.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: That is the total amount of electricity that providers in the region commit to supplying.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: And that cost increase is passed directly to you.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: The result?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: The average residential bill in Western Maryland has risen by$18 a month.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: In Ohio,$16 a month.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_03: Baltimore residents saw their average bill jump by more than$17 a month after a power auction reached a record high.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: This is money out of your pocket.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: This is the grocery budget getting squeezed.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: This is the heating bill forcing a choice between warmth and food.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: For lower-income households, this is a material reduction in their quality of life.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: Dylan Patel conducted one of the most rigorous studies of this dynamic available anywhere.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_03: His firm tracks the precise construction timelines of every single data center in the PJM area.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: His conclusion, PJM's own internal market monitor ran alternate simulations and found that removing all data centers from their forecast reduced peak load by nearly 8,000 megawatts, resulting in a$9.3 billion reduction in total capacity payments.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_03: That is a 64% reduction.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: In other words, nearly two-thirds of the cost increase in that market.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: The market that determines the electricity bills for 67 million Americans is directly attributable to data center demand.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: Goldman Sachs issued a research note in February 2026 warning that electricity prices jumped 6.9% in 2025, more than double the inflation rate of 2.9%.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: They project household electricity prices will rise an additional 6% through 2027, and they said explicitly that data centers are responsible for 40% of electricity demand growth.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: The Goldman analysis made a point that should be tattooed on the forehead of every tech CEO in America.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_03: The income and spending drags will likely be larger for lower income households because electricity accounts for a greater share of their spending.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_03: The poorest families in America are paying the highest proportional price for the AI revolution.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: A family earning$40,000 a year is spending a larger percentage of their income on electricity than a family earning$200,000 a year.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_03: They are subsidizing the construction of data centers for companies worth trillions.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: And on March 18th, 2026, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell himself acknowledged this reality in a press conference.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: You do.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: Every single dollar of that$31 billion comes out of the pockets of American households and small businesses.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: A professor of energy policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Sanya Carly, she framed it in a way that cuts through the noise.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: She said the fundamental question is whether middle class families should subsidize the electricity needs of companies worth trillions of dollars.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: When a single data center campus consumes more power than 100,000 homes, the traditional cost-sharing model breaks down.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_03: It breaks down, is the polite academic way of saying that you are being robbed.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_06: First, these companies are committing to provide or pay for all power generation and electricity needed for their AI projects, which is massive.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: Now, when confronted with these numbers, the technology industry has a standard response.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_03: They promise you that clean, unlimited energy is just around the corner.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: They promise you nuclear fusion.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_03: They promise you small modular reactors.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: They promise you that the very technology consuming the grid now will miraculously also save it.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_03: This is what I call the fusion fantasy, and it is the most sophisticated form of corporate misdirection since the tobacco industry promised that filtered cigarettes were the safe alternative.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: Here's the facts: commercial nuclear fusion does not exist.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: There is not a single nuclear fusion reactor on planet Earth that produces more energy than it consumes on a sustained, commercially viable basis.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: The most optimistic projections from the scientific community place commercial fusion at least 15 to 20 years away.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: Some credible physicists believe that it may never be commercially viable at all.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: Small modular nuclear reactors, which are a real technology that could theoretically help, have not been deployed at anything approaching the scale necessary to power even a fraction of the data centers that are being built right now.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, Stargate is planning to deploy SMRs as a future power source, while its actual current real-world facilities are being powered by natural gas.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: The Abilene site has an on-site natural gas plant.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: XAI burned gas turbines in a residential neighborhood.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: Crusoe Energy has 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas turbine capacity.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_03: The future is being powered by the past, and the promise of clean energy is being used as a smokescreen to prevent the public from asking the only question that matters.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_03: Should we be building all of this in the first place?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_03: OpenAI has made a very public promise to pay their own way on energy.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: In January 2026, they published a blog post committing to fund new power generation and grid infrastructure so that their operations do not increase electricity prices for local residents.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_03: This was a direct response to President Trump himself warning that Americans should not pick up the tab for data center power consumption.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: But I want you to notice the framing.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: They are not promising to use less energy.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: They are not promising to slow down.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_03: They are promising to build more power plants, more gas plants, more infrastructure, which means more land use, more water consumption, more environmental impact, all of which will be absorbed by the communities surrounding these facilities.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Whether they asked for it or not.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_03: A commitment to pay for the electricity is not the same thing as a commitment to not harm you.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: Because the harm is not just financial, it is environmental.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_03: It is respiratory.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_03: It is the water table beneath your town being drawn down to cool server racks.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_03: Google disclosed using 6.1 billion gallons of water across its data center portfolio in one single year.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_03: And data center water consumption is expected to increase by 170% by 2030.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: Companies may be using your data against you.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: Shocker.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: It is called surveillance pricing, and that is when a company sets the price you see based on your unique habits and demographics.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_03: And now I'm going to tell you about the mechanism by which these same companies are reaching directly into your wallet every single time you make a purchase.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_03: It is called surveillance pricing.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_03: And it is, without exaggeration, the most sophisticated price fixing scheme in the history of commerce.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_03: Here's how it works.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: Every time you interact with a digital platform, every time you open an app or browse a website or search for a product, an AI algorithm is building a profile of you.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: It is recording what you click on, how long you look at that product, what time of day you shop, what device you're using, where you're located, what your zip code says about your income level, and even the battery level on your phone.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_04: Lena Kahn, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, she said in an interview that evidence shows that ride sharing apps are charging different prices for the exact same rides at the exact same time.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_03: Researchers ran tests and found that riders with lower battery life on their phones were charged more.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: Is that crazy?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_03: Or what?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_03: The algorithm detects that your phone is about to die and it knows you are less likely to comparison shop.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_03: It knows that you are more likely to accept whatever price is being offered because you need to book the ride before your phone shuts down.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: And so it charges you more.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_03: Not because demand is higher, not because supply is lower, but because you are vulnerable.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_03: And the algorithm identified your vulnerability and they exploited it.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uber denies this specific claim.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: They say their dynamic pricing is based on supply and demand, not battery level.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: But a recent report presented to the House Oversight Committee found that Uber's AI-based pricing technology prices identical products differently from one customer to the next by an average of 11%.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_03: Another investigation found a 221% price difference in fares for two different users for the exact same trip in an identical time frame.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: One user was quoted$76.82, the other quoted$23.92.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_03: The same trip, the same time,$53 difference.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_03: How the hell does that square with supply and demand?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_03: In New York State, a new pricing disclosure law has taken effect that requires retailers using personalized pricing to post the following notice, and I want you to hear every word of this to post the following notice.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_03: This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uber is one of the companies that started posting this disclosure, which means Uber itself is now legally acknowledging that your personal data is being used to determine what you should pay.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_03: The question is, what data?
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: How and to what degree?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: And this is not limited to ride sharing.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_03: This extends into the physical world, into the grocery store, into the aisles where you buy food for your family.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_03: Walmart announced in 2024 that it would add digital shelf labels to 2,300 stores by 2026.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_03: Kroger has been using similar technology since 2018 and has expanded it to 500 stores.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: These electronic shelf labels can change prices up to six times per minute.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_03: Senator Elizabeth Warren and former Senator Bob Casey warned in a letter to Kroger that digital price tags may enable Kroger and other grocery chains to transition to dynamic pricing in which the price of the basic household goods could surge based on the time of day, the weather, or other transitory events.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_03: Now, to be fair, a recent study from the University of California found that electronic shelf labels have not yet led to widespread surge pricing in grocery stores.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: Prices changed by a negligible amount after their introduction, but I want you to notice a critical word in that finding.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_03: Not yet.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_03: The infrastructure is being installed, the capability is being built, the technology exists to change the price of a gallon of milk based on the time of day, the weather, and potentially if surveillance pricing technology continues to advance the demographic profile of the shoppers currently in the aisle.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not telling you this to panic you about your grocery bill.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_03: I'm telling you this because the infrastructure for a completely algorithmically controlled consumer marketplace is being assembled right now, piece by piece, shelf label by shelf label, and by the time it is fully operational, it will be too late to dismantle it.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_03: And here is where the Nissan Leaf story comes full circle, because the used car market is now being bifurcated into two categories: cars that are fully owned and cars that are subscription dependent.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_03: A 2018 Nissan Leaf, which this week lost its remote charging and climate features, is now worth less on the used market than it was a month ago.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_03: Not because the battery degraded or because the motor failed, because the manufacturer turned off a feature.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: The resale value of a physical asset was reduced by a corporate software decision.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: And the algorithm that sets the price on Carbana or Auto Trader or Cars.com adjusted instantly.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_03: The price dropped.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_03: The owner's equity evaporated, not through depreciation, through deliberate corporate action.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is the future they are building, a future where the value of everything you own is subject to algorithmic manipulation by the companies that sold it to you, where the price of everything you buy is set by a machine that knows more about your financial situation than you do, where the concept of a fair price is as quaint and cute and obsolete as a handshake on a used car lot.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_09: And when you do, for example, crypto operations, you can send your money in the cloud somewhere and uh never uh recover it.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_09: If I had been spending real money instead of just posting, that same overoptimization could have been expensive.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: And now we arrive at the final frontier of this financial parasitism.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_03: The one that is left unchecked will make everything I have described so far look like a minor inconvenience.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: It is called autonomous spending, and it is the moment when human consent is removed from the economy entirely.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_03: On February 10th, 2026, Coinbase announced that the official launch of what it calls agentic wallets.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_03: Financial infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous AI agents, not humans, agents, software programs.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_03: These wallets allow AI systems to independently hold funds, execute trades, and pay for resources without needing manual approval from a human at all.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_03: Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, said now agents can spend, earn, and trade autonomously and securely.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_03: One of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world just built a financial system specifically designed to let artificial intelligence spend money without asking a human first.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: This is a live product.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_03: It is processing transactions.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: Over 50 million transfers have already been processed through underlying protocol.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_03: Now scale this up.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_03: Not one company, not ten agents.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_03: Imagine an economy where thousands of companies have deployed millions of AI agents, each with their own agentic wallet, each authorized to make purchases, and each capable of getting trapped in a Ralph Wiggum loop that burns through thousands and thousands of dollars before a human notices something is wrong.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_03: At Night Capital, trading algorithms purchased$7 billion worth of stock in under an hour.
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_03: That nearly bankrupted the company and it forced its sale to a rival.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_03: And that was a controlled financial environment with sophisticated monitoring systems.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: Now imagine that same failure mode, but in a consumer economy, with AI agents buying things on your credit card.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_03: The technology industry is building a world where software programs can spend your money faster than you can check your bank balance, where an AI agent authorized by a corporate policy you agreed to in a terms of service document that you never read can execute financial transactions on your behalf at machine speed with machine indifference to your budget, your preferences, or your financial well-being.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_03: And when it all goes wrong, the cost will be your responsibility.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_03: Because in the fine print, somewhere in the 40 pages of Legalese, you clicked I agree to a clause that says that the company is not liable for losses caused by its autonomous systems.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_03: Human consent is being engineered out of the economy through convenience, through the same mechanism that turns your car into a subscription and your electricity bill into a subsidy for a trillion dollar corporation.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_03: One small surrender at a time until one day you wake up and you realize that you don't own anything, you don't control anything, and you can't afford anything.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_03: Because the machines are spending faster than you can earn.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_03: If you've made it this far, I know that you're feeling overwhelmed, that you're feeling angry, you're feeling like the system is rigged so thoroughly against you that resistance is pointless, that the machinery is too large and the corporations are too powerful, and the technology is too embedded into every aspect of your daily life.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_03: I want to tell you that that is exactly how they want you to feel.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: Because the single most dangerous thing to a subscription economy is a consumer who opts out.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_03: The single most threatening act to a surveillance pricing algorithm is a buyer who refuses to be profile.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: The single most destabilizing force against hardware as a service is a person who demands truly and completely own the things that they buy.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_03: So here's what you do first.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_03: You can buy analog whenever possible.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_03: I mean this literally.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_03: If the choice is between a thermostat that connects to Wi-Fi and one that does not, buy the one that does not.
• 31:34
  SPEAKER_03: If the choice is between a refrigerator with a touch screen and one with a temperature dial, buy the one with the dial.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_03: Every connected device in your home is a liability.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_03: It is the point of failure that you do not control.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: It is a potential subscription that does not yet exist but can be imposed at any time through a firmware update.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_03: The dumb version of every appliance is the one that belongs to you.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_03: The smart version belongs to whoever controls the server.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: The American middle class built the most prosperous civilization in human history on a simple foundation.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: If you work, you earn, you buy, you own.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_03: The foundation is being dismantled wire by wire and server by server and subscription by subscription, and the companies are doing it using your own electricity to power the demolition.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_03: So own your car and own your tools and own your appliances and own your data.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_03: Do not let any corporation tell you that the thing sitting in your driveway, the thing you paid for with years of your labor, the thing that your family depends on every single day.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: Do not let them tell you that it belongs to them.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Because the end of ownership is not inevitable.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's a choice, and we can choose differently.