The Unlimited Hangout Podcast Ep #02 – Stargate Argentina

In the second episode of The Unlimited Hangout Podcast, Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin discuss their latest investigation into OpenAI’s Stargate Argentina data center and the man behind it Emiliano Kargieman. They discuss how Kargieman is a part of a close-knit group of Argentines sponsored by the American group Endeavor that have blurred the lines between Argentina’s tech sector and Silicon Valley. In addition, they note that his company Satellogic is working closely with Palantir and SpaceX to create a global satellite surveillance network that aims to soon “predict the future.”

The discussion also covers the proposal for Stargate Argentina and how Emiliano Kargieman has suggested that OpenAI may not end up being the ultimate user of the center once built, due to an AI debt bubble. He further seems to suggest that the Argentine State will likely use it as it “digitally transforms” under Javier Milei into an AI-powered surveillance state.

0:00 Introductions

2:50 Discussion Overview

10:31 What is Stargate Argentina?

19:28 Who is Emiliano Kargieman?

26:00 What is Satellogic? Debt From Above Overview

30:00 Early Life: Endeavor, Core Securities, Hacked By Owls, Whuffie Bank

46:20 The Creation of Satellogic at Singularity University

55:15 Ames Research, Pete Worden, Mike Griffin and BlastOff!

1:01:01 DC-X into SpaceX, SDIO and the Private Space Nexus

1:07:01 Merlin: Palantir in Space, AI + SATL = Predictive Surveillance

1:20:00 Stargate Argentina, “A Source of Dollars”, Pax Silica

1:37:01 Bubbles Build Infrastructure, AI and Enron Overlaps

1:47:01 Pre-Crime, Digital Twins

Read the Stargate Argentina article here: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2026/08/…

Read our 2024 investigation into Satellogic, Debt From Above, here: https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/04/…

Become a member of Unlimited Hangout to get early access to all UH content (videos, podcasts and articles) and participate in live Q+As with Mark and Whitney: https://unlimitedhangout.com/join/

Subscribe here on YouTube or elsewhere to help us fight AI impersonation of Whitney and other UH writers and to stop the slop! Follow and subscribe to us on other platforms here: https://linktr.ee/whitneywebb

Intro/Outro Music by MeanTheMusician.bandcamp.com

The post The Unlimited Hangout Podcast Ep #02 – Stargate Argentina appeared first on Activist Post.

The Pangram Paradox: The Problem with AI “Detecting” other AIs

AI-powered “detectors” of AI-authored content have been promoted as a way to protect human writing online in the age of AI slop. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s really happening.

Op-ed: This is an opinion piece published on Unlimited Hangout. Most articles published on UH are not opinion pieces, so we are clearly labeling those that are.

It should be no secret to readers of Unlimited Hangout that I have a very negative view of the impact that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is having on independent media and media in general. As someone who has been impersonated by AI daily on large video platforms for a few years now, I have come to acutely feel that AI is becoming a dangerous force that is making it increasingly difficult for well-meaning readers/viewers to distinguish between what is real and what is false. I don’t mean just for those hoping to view my content, as the personal issue I am facing is a microcosm of a much larger problem.

As a result, one might think that I would have been pleased, if not relieved, to see Substack, a large platform for professional writers, partner with an “AI detection tool.” Not only am I not pleased, but I have now taken the time to write an opinion piece explaining why I think this is bad and to also explain where I think a lot of this is going.

Substack’s new partner and, apparently, the AI detection tool of choice for most major media outlets right now is called Pangram. Pangram was founded in 2023, originally under the name Checkfor.ai, by Max Spero and Bradley Emi. Both Spero and Emi are Stanford graduates who, prior to Pangram, worked for companies like Nuro and Tesla where they both worked on AI self-driving car software (i.e. replacing human drivers with AI software). Both founders “have long been excited about the potential for AI to transform society” and say they created Pangram “to mitigate new issues caused by the proliferation of powerful generative AI models.”

I find it interesting that two Stanford graduates passionate about AI’s potential to “transform society” who then worked to facilitate AI-powered, human-free driving software decided to quickly pivot to “mitigate” issues caused by generative AI. A lot of the issues caused by generative AI were actually predicted years ago by figures like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (Pangram co-founder Max Spero previously did work for Google). Schmidt, in a 2021 book authored with war criminal Henry Kissinger, essentially predicted that AI’s “transformative potential” would cause what he called “cognitive diminishment” in the masses and make it almost impossible for people to distinguish between what is real and what is not on their own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” to this problem was that we become reliant on AI to distinguish for us what is real and what is not –– in other words, to let another AI become the arbiter of our reality.

I have written before about this Schmidt-Kissinger book and its predictions. There, I noted that these predictions and warnings –– given the power networks in which both men are/were enmeshed –– were more likely to be disclosure of what had already planned with respect to AI rather than warnings about what might happen upon the mass adoption of AI. Nevertheless, the Schmidt-Kissinger “warnings” were unusually prescient. In addition, their proposed solution is very similar to what Pangram is currently offering –– in that Pangram uses AI to recognize AI vs. human writing. Pangram thus becomes the currently preferred AI arbiter of what is real human writing and what is not.

There has certainly been a successful marketing campaign to convince us that Pangram is the “most accurate” AI writing detection tool on the market. Headlines of articles promoting Pangram essentially communicate that it will definitely tell you whether AI wrote something. If you read past the headline, which many don’t, you will see the fine print that Pangram will also mark something as AI generated even if AI was only used to edit a human-generated piece of writing. Pangram’s AI-generated label doesn’t really distinguish between the two, even though, as co-founder Max Spero acknowledges, that label “changes how people approach the text.”

The fact that Pangram can’t meaningfully distinguish between a text fully generated by AI or one simply edited by it reveals that it is not an “AI detector” at all. As noted by Tim Requarth back in April:

The term AI “detector” is a bit of a misnomer, as tools like Pangram don’t scan a database of known AI text for a match; they make a guess about likely authorship based on differences in patterns between AI-generated and human-generated text. Rather than a detector, thinks of it as an “AI inferencer” or more colloquially, an “AI best guesser.”

As an inference tool, Pangram is vulnerable to everything that makes inference so difficult: small sample sizes (a single article rather than a corpus), small effect sizes (as the statistical distance between human and AI writing shrinks), and confounds (a human who reads and mimicks AI-generated text before writing her own).

Indeed, the way Pangram works is by making inferences about whether a given piece of writing features enough of the words, phrases, sentence construction, etc. that are currently common in AI-generated text. However, many human writers, long before generative AI, used a lot of those words, phrases, etc., too. As a consequence, we now have writers who are altering their entirely human writing style in order to please the Pangram gods and hope they won’t be falsely labeled as AI slop purveyors.

A good example of this was recently discussed in a piece by Alex Kirshner for Slate. In that article, Kirshner writes:

Whatever the future holds for the accuracy of A.I. detectors, I am unsettled by what both the A.I. writing and the detectors are doing to me right now. I worry about how A.I. writing and efforts to sniff it out are changing fully human writing. I write all week, every week, and can feel this story’s arsonists (LLMs, particularly when used the wrong way) and firefighters (A.I. detectors) weighing on my process in negative ways.

Like many journalists, my writing style comes from the books, news articles, blogs, and (yes) social media posts that have latched on to my brain over the years. A.I. writing is now in my water supply, whether I can identify each new gulp or not. It feels inevitable that I’ve started to internalize its tics, even the most infamous ones, like incessant em-dashing and overreliance on the “It’s not x but y” structure. For one thing, I fear this will make me a worse writer, dragging a talent that was good enough to get me hired here (and elsewhere!) back toward the A.I.-generated median. Scarier yet, it’s possible that someone—or, heaven forbid, some A.I. detector—might mistake my text for ChatGPT’s. I have started to self-police against this outcome. A few times lately, I’ve caught myself modifying my own work to sound “less like A.I.” In the process, I’ve probably picked words I wouldn’t have settled on otherwise. It feels dystopian—and I doubt I’ve succeeded. 

I would go a step further than Kirschner and say that this outcome is definitely dystopian. It becomes more so when one considers that the supposedly “telltale” patterns of AI-generated text change as new, improved models are released, particularly as they are literally ripping through mountains of obscure, human-written books to train them to write more and more like humans. Meanwhile, the actual humans, to keep a job in a world where the pool of writing jobs is already shrinking rapidly, are scrambling to not sound like something that is rapidly being trained to sound like them as much as possible. Perhaps by design, this is not a game that humans are meant to win and, as I will explain later on, that means it is a game that writers should quickly stop playing.

Before we get there, there are a couple of other things to note about Pangram and other AI “detection” companies. One is the issue of false positives. Yes, it is true that Pangram is considered by ostensibly independent researchers (and also itself) to have the smallest false positive rate in the industry. For the purpose of this example, let us use Pangram’s claim that only 1 in 10,000 Pangram-generated labels regarding AI or human authorship are false positives, meaning the text is labeled AI generated when it is not. On Substack, which now has Pangram embedded within it, we do not know exactly how many posts on average are made a day, as Substack does not disclose, but we can guess. The site itself claims that over 1 million posts are “discovered by potential subscribers in the app every day.” The site has over 2 million active publications, most of which publish at least weekly. Let us say, for the purpose of this example, that those 2 million publications do publish weekly. Then, 200 of them, per Pangram’s rate, will be marked as false positives every week. Over a year (52 weeks), we get over 10,000 Substack articles that are falsely labeled as AI, even though they are not. While this figure is still certainly smaller than what Pangram’s competitors offer, if we assume that those 10,000 false positives affect different publications, that could be 10,000 human writers being falsely labeled as AI slop, thereby affecting their reputation, revenue and, perhaps most crucially, their trust with their audience over that calendar year. I see it as a push to outsource trust about a writer’s authenticity from being between a writer and their audience to being between Pangram and a writer’s audience.

While these are statistics used by Pangram and its partners for marketing purposes, behind those numbers are real human writers facing an accusation from Pangram’s AI that could ruin their business. As this effect stacks over years, it could theoretically make the pool of human writers whose work has not been labeled as AI by Pangram smaller and smaller as time goes on. It is also fair to say that the false positive rate that Pangram cites is also the lowest one that has surfaced in research about its product, and it is cited most frequently because the company considers it most favorable to its interests. It is entirely plausible that the actual false positive rate is higher. There is also the added issue that if you run the same text through Pangram more than once, you’re likely to get highly variable –– as opposed to consistent –– results, making Pangram’s verdicts look more based on the luck of the draw than any meaningful “detection” of AI use.

Another important angle to explore with respect to Pangram is the potential for this tool to be deliberately wielded as a weapon for the purpose of censorship and/or discrediting a given journalist or outlet. Max Spero, Pangram’s co-founder, has notably been accused of using his Twitter account to call out specific outlets and journalists for using AI, which has –– in recent months –– generated major headlines and controversy. I don’t really think it’s relevant for the purpose of this article to investigate whether the claims levied against those journalists and outlets are true or not. As recently noted, Pangram does generate false positives, but it is also possible that these journalists did use AI in some way but did not disclose it. However, what is relevant here is that Spero in particular has used the verdict of his company’s AI “detector” to make weaponized claims against specific journalists and outlets.

As a long-time writer in independent media who has consistently written about controversial topics before it later became safe to do so (see my early work on Epstein’s Israeli intelligence ties, Peter Thiel and Palantir, among other topics), I am not a fan of mainstream or “legacy” media. On more than one occasion, they have either defamed me or used my research and writing without citing me. A good part of my career has also been spent picking apart the often misleading narratives they promote. As a result, I tend to be skeptical about the authenticity and veracity of the articles published by many of the same large outlets that Spero has targeted. However, there is another Spero quote that may get your attention if you have been closely following independent media over the past ten years.

In an article published by TechCrunch about Pangram’s recent raising of $9 million from investors, Spero discussed wanting to start Pangram to mitigate new issues that emerged following the public release of generative AI tools. As an example of what types of new issues had emerged as a result of AI’s growing use, Spero offered “LLM-powered Russian disinformation campaigns and UAE-influenced campaigns on Twitter.”

Perhaps you remember the time, beginning roughly ten years ago and continuing for many years since, that any piece of reporting from independent media that was deemed inconvenient to the powers that be (particularly about US proxy wars abroad) was falsely labeled as “Russian disinformation.” Perhaps, more recently, you may remember pro-Israel influencers and media outlets similarly claiming that criticism of Israel in recent years has allegedly been driven by funding from Qatar, as opposed to public outrage over Israel’s live-streamed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Or what about the newer claim that LLM-powered bot accounts from China that had no reach whatsoever are really secretly behind Americans’ growing distrust of Big Tech and discontent over data centers?

If you have been following long enough, you may have noticed a trend whereby critics of certain power structures are routinely and falsely labeled as state-sponsored propagandists or “bots” as a way to discredit, not only the critics themselves, but also to discredit the broader concern –– be it the impact of data centers or imperial wars. I do not know if Spero’s intent with Pangram is to similarly weaponize his company’s product in a similar way, but it is certainly possible.

However, the fact that Spero’s Pangram is partnered with Newsguard certainly increases that possibility. As I wrote back in 2019, Newsguard is a dubious “fact checker” that was initially created to discredit independent media outlets critical of US foreign policy, while giving admitted US propaganda organs like VOA a pass. It is also worth mentioning Newsguard’s national security connections — for example, it originally counted the former heads of the CIA and DHS under George W. Bush among its advisors on determining what is “fake news” and what is not. One of their top investors is the founder of Kroll Associates, often referred to as the “private CIA,” Jules Kroll. Now, with Pangram, Newsguard is determining what is “AI slop” and what is not and has used Pangram to launch a “real-time ‘AI content farm’ detection” service.

What better way to digitally nuke a group of reporters and any accompanying wave of public sentiment than by using a now “trusted” AI detector to label both the writers and the sentiment as inauthentic and machine-generated. The potential is for Pangram to become a new way for censoring human-authored, yet inconvenient content, particularly if content labeled AI-generated eventually becomes algorithimically demoted over what Pangram labels as human-generated. The public will be told that the “AI slop” is being buried, when — in reality — it is dissent.

The way it looks to me is that Pangram is currently in the phase of normalizing the ubiquity of its product and building “trust” with those who use Substack or any other platform (or browser plug-in) that integrates Pangram. During this period, readers will be trained to see a Pangram label and trust its results with no further information needed. This is how a company like Pangram can raise $14 million in financing (including from one of Anthropic’s main investors) for a product that it is available for free. As has been said before about online products, if the product is free, then you are the product. In this case, I think that training you to outsource your “trust” to Pangram from the person or outlet you are reading is the product. Once you trust an AI “detector” tool, you will trust its verdicts, perhaps even over the writer you had grown to trust.

Pangram’s co-founders did not make Pangram to protect human-generated writing and speech. Pangram’s co-founders have long been excited that AI will “transform society,” and immediately prior to Pangram, were developing algorithms to replace human drivers with AI. As noted above, they created Pangram to stop what they referred to as state-sponsored influence operations among other “issues” that emerged upon the public release of generative AI tools. With their former Big Tech employers having public sentiment move against them, whether on data centers or “smart” glasses or something else, Pangram’s co-founders may offer a new way of doing away with accounts deemed too critical of AI’s “transformation” of society. Maybe not, but forgive me for being skeptical.

To conclude, I would like to again return to the Schmidt-Kissinger book on AI and its predictions. In independent media, many warn of the Hegelian dialectic, also known as “problem-reaction-solution.” That is, the powers that be first create the problem, then wait for the public to react and finally offer the public the policy outcome they always wanted as the solution. It certainly is convenient that Schmidt and Kissinger, two very terrible people who both helped create this mess in different ways, presciently predicted that AI would make it so people could no longer tell what was real and what was not. Now their prediction has become our reality and, right on cue, the company Pangram has stepped in to solve the AI slop problem (from which its own investors profit) by offering us what was also the Schmidt and Kissinger’s preferred “solution” –– people relying on an AI arbiter to tell them what is real and what is not.

As I wrote earlier, the obvious way out of this dystopian game is not to play it. Do not trust Pangram’s AI just because it looks “authoritative” and has had some positive PR. It is not a “detector” as it claims to be and its results for the same text are rarely consistent. If you are a reader, ask the writers you are reading to disclose their use of AI. Trust should be built between writers and their readers directly, without an AI middleman and arbiter of authenticity or “humanness.” At Unlimited Hangout, we never use AI for writing, research or editing of our articles. This is made clear in our AI use policy, which you can read on our “About Us” page upon the imminent launch of the newly redesigned Unlimited Hangout website (In the meantime, you can read it here). We created this policy after helping create the IMA AI Transparency Pledge, which encourages independent journalists and outlets to voluntarily disclose if you choose to use AI and how.

Just like any other human writer, all I can offer to my readers is my research, my sourcing and my authentic analysis and, in the case of this article, my opinions. I am not going to run my articles obsessively through Pangram hoping for a “100% human-generated” result. I am not going to let fear of an unfavorable Pangram result change how I write and make me afraid of using words like “delve” or “profound” because Pangram might punish me. I know I write without AI and I have enough trust with my readers that they know I don’t use it in my writing either. Not unlike the entities that have labeled inconvenient reporters as Russian/Chinese “bots,” Pangram assumes that you can’t determine what is authentic and inauthentic on your own and that you need them to tell you.

While critical thinking may be in low supply in the age of AI, don’t let it be. You don’t need another AI to “help” you determine what does or doesn’t feel or seem authentic to you. You don’t need it to tell you what you should or shouldn’t read and who you should or shouldn’t trust. It’s never a good idea to outsource your critical thinking and your opinions to others, especially a non-human AI.

The post The Pangram Paradox: The Problem with AI “Detecting” other AIs appeared first on Activist Post.

How “Argentina’s Elon Musk” Is Bringing Technocracy To Patagonia

Javier Milei’s administration has been showcasing Patagonia to Silicon Valley executives, culminating in OpenAI’s ‘Stargate Argentina’ announcement. The focus of this piece, Emiliano Kargieman, is the man actually developing OpenAI’s Argentine project and boasts significant ties to United States’ military and intelligence, NASA, Palantir and the Silicon Valley stalwarts who helped privatize space.

Patagonia, positioned at the tip of the South American continent, has long been valued for its dramatic landscape, its pristine waters and its unique wildlife. However, for some, the value of Patagonia’s natural treasures has shifted. No longer are its majestic glaciers and temperate rainforests to be protected. Instead, it is now being proposed that Patagonia, with its brisk climate and abundant water resources, become home to a new animal –– the data center.

The proliferation of data centers has become a huge political issue in recent months, particularly in the United States, largely due to concerns about their gargantuan appetite for local resources –– driving up utility prices for everyday consumers and endangering communities where some of those resources were already scarce. Many have been outraged about how their local governments, elected to ostensibly protect their interests, have rolled over for data center developers, promising jobs that rarely manifest and –– if they do –– largely evaporate after the center is built. Meanwhile the technology many of these data centers power, Artificial Intelligence (AI), has also sparked its own set of concerns, nominally focused on AI’s usurpation of human jobs and human creativity while generating generous returns for the ultra-wealthy and dubious benefits for the rest of us.

The predation of Patagonia by data center developers has been greatly facilitated by the policies of Argentina’s president Javier Milei. Milei has made it a point to partner with Silicon Valley, as well as the current U.S. administration –– itself colonized by Silicon Valley to an impressive and unprecedented degree. He has also developed generous tax benefits schemes for foreign U.S. Big Tech firms to operate in the country, while offering those that seek to park their data centers in the country next to no regulation regarding their construction or operation. Earlier this year, Milei wrote an editorial in the Financial Times where he “invite[d] AI to free itself” and proposed allowing AI-run companies with no humans involved to operate in his country. While some pointed out that these statements seemed to value AI activity over human activity, this is not an isolated incident. For instance, one adviser in Milei’s inner circle, Demián Riedel, has controversially argued that humans are, in fact, Argentina’s biggest problem, particularly in Argentine Patagonia, because they present an obstacle to AI infrastructure and development in the region.

Riedel was notably involved in brokering a major deal for what will become a truly massive data center in his country: Stargate Argentina. Stargate Argentina is the newest constellation of OpenAI’s Stargate project, which was initially launched in January 2025 “to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.” A few months later, in May 2025, OpenAI announced with little fanfare that it planned to internationalize its Stargate project via its new “OpenAI for countries” initiative. Not long thereafter, and with the direct involvement of Milei and his top officials, Stargate Argentina was born.

While OpenAI is now a well-known name, virtually unknown was their partner in Stargate Argentina –– a company called Sur Energy. Not only was Sur Energy unknown internationally, it was also unknown within Argentina, despite being billed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman as one of Argentina’s “biggest energy companies.” Lurking behind this company, which appears to have no real assets in the country aside from letters of intent, is a man who may be slightly more familiar, at least in Argentina.

Emiliano Kargieman is the face of Sur Energy, but it is only his latest venture in a series of companies that have sought to complement the growing influence of Silicon Valley corporations over the public sector. As will be explored in this article, Kargieman’s previous ventures, particularly the satellite surveillance firm Satellogic, not only boasts close ties to current and former top figures in the Trump administration, but has become an increasingly important part of the AI surveillance grid that the U.S. intelligence contractor Palantir has been amassing. In particular, the company is due to enable –– within the next year –– what was once Palantir’s most implausible ambition –– predictive policing of the entire planet in real time via AI-powered satellite surveillance, i.e. total information awareness.

However, more recently through his efforts alongside Sam Altman to create Stargate Argentina, Kargieman has revealed some hidden truths, not just about the data center he hopes to build, but about the data center build-out at large. As will be detailed in this article, Kargieman has casually admitted that Stargate Argentina is not about bringing jobs to locals (despite what some Argentina politicians have claimed), but about generating dollars. Perhaps more revealing of all, he revealed that it is likely that his partner in Stargate Argentina, OpenAI, will not be ultimate end-user of this massive data center, suggesting that the prominent AI firm will collapse under the inevitable popping of an AI debt bubble. In stating this he notes that, whether OpenAI or not, someone will be using this data center. If so, who will use it and what for? Based on Kargieman’s statements and the available evidence, we have attempted to answer those questions, revealing increasingly likely possibilities that will have implications far beyond Argentina.

A Questionable Past

Raised in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires, Emiliano Kargieman’s childhood was characterized by his early obsession with computers and a rebellious streak. For instance, he learned how to repair computers at age 10 and was also kicked out of school for filling the principal’s office with toilet paper. At 15, he claims to have created his first software company. By this time, as a teenager, he had also become part of a hacking collective called “Hacked by Owls”, or HBO. According to Matt Travizano, Kargieman’s long-time friend (and later his co-founder at Sur Energy), some of the HBO members used their technological prowess to spy on the conversations and communications of Argentine Congressmen. Though HBO seemed adversarial to State interests, with its members claiming to espouse “anarchist” ideals, many of its members –– including Kargieman –– simultaneously worked for the Argentine government.

For instance, while Kargieman has declined to disclose this in media interviews, one of his old CVs lists him as working for the Argentine government’s Special Information Security Research Group from age 14 to age 17, overlapping with his time at the HBO collective. This group was part of the DGI (Dirección General Impositiva), Argentina’s General Tax Directorate. This is notable given that, while working for this State agency, Kargieman’s hacking collective was also allegedly spying on elected officials.

In 1997, when Kargieman was 20, he and the broader HBO collective began working directly for Argentina’s AFIP (Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos; in English, Federal Public Income Administration). That year, the DGI, which had employed Kargieman as a teenager via the Special Information Security Research Group, was placed under the AFIP’s authority. Shortly before then, in 1996, Kargieman had created a cybersecurity company that would later become known as Core Security Technologies. He did so with five of his friends, including Gerardo Richarte, Lucio Torre, and Jonathan Altzszul, who had previously worked at the Special Projects Office at Argentina’s AFIP.

Richarte, Torre, and some long-time employees of Core Security, such as Norberto Kueffner, later followed Kargieman to Satellogic, the satellite surveillance company he would later create. Notably, Kueffner is now Director of IT for Javier Milei’s administration. Another veteran of Core Security, Ariel “Wata” Waissbein, is now the head of Argentina’s Federal Cybersecurity Agency (AFC). Yet another Core Security veteran who also went to work for Satellogic was Aviv Cohen, a former Israeli intelligence officer who was, for a time, Satellogic’s head of “special projects.”

In 1998, a year after becoming entangled with Argentina’s AFIP, Kargieman’s firm Core Security began focusing expressly on the U.S. Market. Shortly thereafter, it attracted significant attention from U.S.-based businesses, such as Apple and Lockheed Martin, and the public sector. Core Security’s main U.S. public sector clients soon included the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.S. military’s DARPA, NASA and the NSA.

The same year, in 1998, Core Security was named an “Endeavor Entrepreneur” by the Endeavor Foundation –– a non-profit organization founded the year prior by two Americans, Linda Rottenberg and Peter Kellner. While much can be said about Endeavor, which features prominently in a previous investigation from Unlimited Hangout, their affinity for a small Argentine software company should be of little surprise given the organization’s intimate relations to the South American country. For starters, Rottenberg and Kellner met while in Argentina. Long before the likes of Edgar Bronfman Jr., Reid Hoffman, and Pierre Omidyar had donated vast sums of money to the entrepreneurial evangelicals, Endeavor’s first success story was Marcos Galperin’s MercadoLibre. Galperin became Argentina’s richest man –– on paper, anyway –– due to his firm’s success, before joining Endeavor’s board when the once-non-profit added a new venture capital component to their organization. Endeavor, now advised by Galperin, eventually funded Kargieman’s later company Satellogic, and Galperin now serves on Satellogic’s board.

By 2001, Kargieman’s Core Security also gained the attention of Pegasus Capital. As noted by iProfessional, Pegasus –– beginning in February 2001 –– began “collaborating” with Core in the development of Core’s business model, growth strategy, organizational design and much more. Pegasus Capital was created by Craig Cogut, a key figure in the “junk bond” financial scandal at the now defunct bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. Drexel’s junk bond department, led by Michael Milken, engaged in blatantly illegal activity and used junk bonds to help fuel the takeovers of major corporations by the era’s infamous “corporate raiders” prior to the bank’s collapse. More specifically, Cogut was the lawyer who advised the Milken-run and scandal-ridden junk bond department on the legality of its transactions, including those that saw Milken become a convicted felon. Following Drexel’s collapse, Cogut teamed up with a group of Drexel alumni led by Leon Black –– now best known for his close association with the deceased sex trafficker and Black’s “financial adviser” Jeffrey Epstein –– to co-found Apollo Advisers (now Apollo Global Management) in 1990. Cogut left Apollo to found Pegasus in 1996. Pegasus has since became a key player in several UN-supported “green” finance initiatives, including some which have directly involved Kargieman’s other company Satellogic.

In 2006, Kargieman created Aconcagua Ventures as a joint venture with Pegasus Capital. This firm ostensibly “focused on investing in high-tech startups in Latin America to develop them as global businesses.” By 2009, it had only invested in Core Security as well as the company Popego, where Kargieman served as both CEO and director in 2007. Popego was described around this time as an artificial intelligence (AI) software company.

Popego, as well as Aconcagua Ventures, backed a non-profit organization that launched in 2009 with the goal of creating a virtual currency related to one’s online reputation. That organization was called The Whuffie Bank and Emiliano Kargieman is listed as one of its founders. The Whuffie Bank, which launched at a TechCrunch conference in 2009, aimed “to promote change in the web by rewarding users with a positive impact on the web with this karma-like digital currency.” This “non-profit” planned to closely surveil social media users by “monitor[ing] [their] activity across various websites, including things like comments, posts, and more.”

As TechCrunch further explained:

“When you complete positive actions, you gain Whuffies, and you lose them when you do something that the organization deems to be detrimental. [. . . ] The algorithm takes into account ‘public endorsements’, or the number of times a user’s tweets are retweeted, or a Facebook post is Liked. It also takes into account who is making the endorsement, and the content in the messages that are being posted.” 

The Whuffie Bank website noted that the goal of the organization was to drive “social change” through its virtual currency, while another Whuffie Bank co-founder, Santiago Siri, has described its goal as “rethink[ing] the future of money.” Siri, while working at the Whuffie Bank, was named a World Economic Forum Global Shaper for his efforts to advance digital, reputation-based money that rewards or punishes users based on their online activity and speech. The Whuffie Bank represents an early effort to link digital currencies to the digital behavior and reputation of its users, efforts which continue today in other forms and have raised concerns about ascendant “social credit systems.”

While the Whuffies went extinct, Kargieman’s next venture Satellogic quickly placed him shoulder to shoulder alongside the very pioneers responsible for digitizing the U.S. financial system, e.g. former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (previously the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, the largest dealer of government securities in the country). Before his low Earth observation satellite firm took off, former NASA contractor Kargieman found himself in Northern California, at the very Air Force base where Silicon Valley unofficially took hold of the country’s space program –– taking what was once the pride and joy of the US government firmly into the private sector for good.

Satellogic’s Launch Pad

According to the earliest iterations of its website, Satellogic was founded in 2010 by “two graduates of the NASA Ames-based Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program” in order to build “shared low earth orbit infrastructure to open real-time satellite data to a new generation of application developers.” Emiliano Kargieman and his co-founder, Andrew Fursman, came up with the “concepts that would become Satellogic” while enrolled in that graduate student program. The program took place at Northern California’s Moffet Federal Airfield –– one of the most prominent locales for NASA’s extensive collaboration with the private sector.

The airport was formerly a US Naval facility. Right up until the year Satellogic was founded, it had housed the Air Force’s 21st Space Operations Squadron. Today, the airport is served by the California Air National Guard, and notably the 7th Psychological Operations Group of the US Army Reserve –– an influential support group for military actions which “involve[s] sharing specific information to foreign audiences to influence the emotions, motives, reasoning, and behavior of governments and citizens” including “cyber warfare and advanced communication techniques across all forms of media.”

NASA’s Ames Center is also known for containing one of the largest free standing buildings in the world –– Hangar One. This building, built in 1933, is over 8 acres large and is known for having fog and other weather-type patterns within its voluminous confines. In addition, it became home to the private jets of past and present Google executives Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt after a $33 million renovation plan Google offered to NASA in 2011. NASA, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board eventually came to an agreement in November 2014 which saw Google’s subsidiary Planetary Ventures LLC sign a 60-year lease worth $1.16 billion in rent, which included plans to significantly remodel the famous hangar.

Notably, the first oldest archive version of Satellogic’s website features an image of Hangar One, complete with a five-point star adorning a large bay door and another on top of the building. This is quite likely due to the fact that back in 2009, NASA, Google, and the Ames Center staff collaborated on the founding of the very incubator program that germinated the core ideas of Satellogic.

Unlimited Hangout’s first investigation into Satellogic –– April 2024’s Debt From Above: The Carbon Credit Coup –– focused mainly on the firm’s public-private partnerships related to their enforcement of a blockchain-enabled carbon market scheme via satellite surveillance. To spare repeating information regarding Kargieman’s company that was previously addressed, this article will instead focus on placing Satellogic within the context of the decades-long transmutation of America’s space program from the public sector’s federal budget into the private sector powerhouse. From the evidence, it appears that the main figures and sites responsible for NASA partnerships with the Tech industry, not only produced Elon Musk’s SpaceX –– Satellogic’s “preferred vendor for ride share missions” –– but also Satellogic itself. It seems that Satellogic was essentially created to aid both the privatized U.S. space and mass surveillance programs.

Singularity University and the Privatized Space Program

In September 2008, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil teamed up with space entrepreneur and X PRIZE Foundation chairman Peter Diamandis to found Singularity University (SU). Their decision to partner came after Diamandis read Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near, which argues that machine intelligence will soon surpass human intelligence and that humans and machines should, at that point, merge into a transhumanist collective. Diamandis approached Kurzweil after reading and suggested they partner on what would become Singularity University.

The goal of SU is to educate the “leaders of tomorrow” in emerging technologies that Kurzweil, and presumably Diamandis, believe will allow humanity to accelerate the arrival of this “singularity” event and thus a transhumanist future for humanity. Singularity University’s website boasts that it has consequently developed “a global ecosystem of techno-optimists.” This term appears to be a reference to venture capitalist (and current Pentagon advisor) Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which Andreessen argues for a full-throated embrace of “transformative” technologies like AI on an accelerated timeline, with complete disregard for whom or for what it could create negative consequences. Kurzweil is notably a “patron saint” of techno-optimism and Andreessen’s manifesto more or less portrays the ideology that Singularity University seeks to instill in its “techno-optimist” graduates.

The “Techno-Optimist” ideology overlaps considerably with Technocracy. This overlap is detailed extensively by Iain Davis in his book The Technocratic Dark State. Davis, in his book, defines Technocracy as a form of governance that claims to maximize efficiency by “scientifically” managing and socially engineering the human population using autocratic sociopolitical and technological behavioral control. In a technocratic system, the management and social engineering of the “human animal” is to be performed by unelected “experts” in science, engineering or technology, also known as the technocrats. This form of governance has been heavily adopted by the wealthiest men in Silicon Valley, including Andreessen as well as others like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.

A few months after Singularity University was created, the newly-formed university found a home at NASA’s Ames Center after securing “Corporate Founding” funding from Google and ePlanet Ventures. While Google needs little introduction, ePlanet Ventures is a venture firm associated with Tim Draper’s DFJ (Draper Fisher Jurvetson), whose investment committee once featured all three of DFJ’s partners. One of those partners, Steve Jurvetson –– much like SU founder Diamandis –– is a long-time friend of SpaceX’s Elon Musk, with positions on both the Tesla and SpaceX board. He is also credited with bailing out Musk in 2008 with large investments in both firms. However, Jurvetson hardly deserves singular responsibility for SpaceX’s survival. Two other men who were involved in that rescue also happened to play a prominent role in the founding of SU, where Satellogic was born.

Then-Director of the Ames Center, Simon “Pete” Worden, spoke upon SU’s founding, stating that “The NASA Ames campus has a proud history of supporting ground-breaking innovation, and Singularity University fits into that tradition.” Worden had been selected to run Ames by his long-time friend, Dr. Michael Griffin, who became the Administrator of NASA in 2005. Both Worden and Griffin were alumni of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO) –– colloquially known as “Star Wars” due to its early 1980s formalization under President Ronald Reagan –– with Worden having taken over Griffin’s job as Head of Technology in the space-focused missile defense program.

While at SDIO, both Griffin and Worden were responsible for immense strides taken in fields quite relevant to today’s commercialized space industry. For starters, their work helped pioneer the development of Low Earth Observation (LEO) satellite constellations such as those later launched by Satellogic. Their advancement of satellite broadcasting capabilities in general was accomplished via SDIO’s Clementine project –– a “small, low-cost, and rapidly developed satellite used to test sensor and propulsion technology for missile interceptors” and which also “mapped the Moon.” Additionally, Griffin was working at the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences after his time at SDIO, a company which pioneered the use of “a system for collecting data from remote locations using satellites in low-Earth orbit.” Worden is considered a “crucial innovator and promoter of small satellites in the early years of development” while at SDIO.

Worden and Griffin were also both instrumental to the commercially-viable build out of the reusable, vertical take-off and landing of the “DC-X” rocket, which set the stage for SpaceX’s commercially-viable building of reusable, vertical take-off and landing Falcon 1 rockets. In fact, Musk himself told former manager of SDIO Jess Sponable in 2013 that SpaceX was “just continuing the great work of the DC-X project!” While many details remain outside of the scope of this article, Griffin’s stint running a budget-starved NASA while Worden merged the space program with Silicon Valley at Ames led to accusations from Ames employees that the two men were “part of a conspiracy to destroy America’s space program.”

There are few people more responsible for the private sector takeover of the space industry than Griffin, Worden, and Diamandis –– all of whom have their unique ties to Elon Musk and the founding (and eventual success) of SpaceX.

In August 1993, the Falcon 1 predecessor “DC-X” took its first lift off in White Sands, New Mexico during testing by contractor McDonnell Douglas on behalf of the SDIO. Griffin, the Deputy Director of Technology for SDIO at the time, stated that the “DC-X was government R&D at its finest.” The DC-X took its last flight in 1995 before being upgraded to the DC-XA, which was promptly passed back within NASA proper, only to be shuttered after a final flight on July 31, 1996.

In May 1996, the month prior to the shutdown of the DC-X project, Diamandis officially founded the X Prize. The prize offered $10,000,000 to the team that could successfully breach the lower atmosphere. While the winning team would not do so until 2004, the prize kick-started the private, commercial space industry, and was influential in addressing new forms of fundraising and project management for NASA. The original X Prize Foundation Committee, announced in December 1996, featured Worden in addition to astronaut Buzz Aldrin, among others. Due to the nature of the prize being first announced in 1996, the many teams competing had to spend years building their rockets and technology, causing nearly a decade of waiting for the new space industry to blast off.

During this interim period, Diamandis got a call from Bill Gross, the founder of the early tech startup incubator Idealab, in 2000 to come aboard a new company as CEO. That new company, called BlastOff!, was given a $1 billion budget to organize a private moon mission. In a 2008 video for the Google Lunar X Prize, which officially brought together the Griffin-led NASA with SU’s funder Google and Diamandis’ X Prize, Diamandis describes the team at BlastOff! as having eventually decided to use the Russian ICBM “Dnepr” to launch their moon mission. BlastOff!, which operated in stealth, eventually shuttered in January 2001.

Only a few months prior, in October 2000, Musk was replaced by Peter Thiel as CEO of PayPal/X.com, with PayPal also having come out of the Idealab incubator (as Confinity) with an early investment from Gross and Idealab in January 2000. Furthermore, the first board member of PayPal was Idealab VP Scott Bannister, who graduated college with PayPal founder Max Levchin, and who was responsible for introducing Levchin to Peter Thiel. As previous investigations from Unlimited Hangout have aimed to prove, Idealab –– despite being little known today –– is intimately connected to the primordial origins and subsequent immense success of Google, PayPal, Palantir, Tether, PolyMarket and arguably Musk’s SpaceX.

Out of a job and about to be flush with cash from the sale of PayPal to eBay, Musk set his sights on the stars, Mars, and beyond. The year after he was ousted from PayPal, Musk met Griffin at The Mars Society in 2001, which kicked off their lengthy friendship. The Mars Society was previously formed in 1998 and boasted Griffin as a founding Steering Committee member. X Prize Foundation Committee member Aldrin, and a plethora of employees from NASA’s Ames Center soon joined him. Musk made a large donation and subsequently joined the Steering Committee alongside Griffin. Musk has since overtly promoted the idea of establishing a technocracy on Mars. Affinity for technocracy seems to run in Musk’s family, as his maternal grandfather previously led the technocratic movement in Canada.

In 2001 and 2002, Musk and Griffin made multiple flights to Russia in an effort to purchase Dnepr rockets in order to begin experiments in space travel, arguably continuing the work of the Idealab-sponsored BlastOff! On one of their trips to Russia, after finding the purchasing price of the Russian ICBMs too high, Musk typed out a model to manufacture the rockets needed, but at low cost. He reportedly came up with the plans for SpaceX on the flight back alongside Griffin. Griffin was offered a role as Chief Engineer at SpaceX, but decided instead to become the President and COO of the CIA’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel. Musk allegedly named his son Griffin Musk after his friend, and eventually gave Griffin an advisory role at SpaceX-subsidiary Castelion in 2022. Castelion boasts mass-production capabilities of hypersonic missiles, and additionally features fellow In-Q-Tel-alum Lisa Porter on the advisory board.

Griffin left In-Q-Tel to take the reigns at NASA in April 2005 after being selected by President George W. Bush. Only a week after his appointment, Griffin met with Musk at NASA Headquarters. Two key changes to NASA’s status quo occurred at the onset of Griffin’s term –– massive budget cuts to the likes of the Ames Research Center in November 2005, and the authorization of the “Prize Authority.” This novel fundraising and budget concept had been pioneered by Diamandis’ X Prize. Only a few years later, Google, NASA and X Prize collaborated together on the aforementioned Google Lunar X Prize in 2008. Griffin was quoted as being “an advocate for the use of Prize Authority we’ve had at NASA since 2005.”

Griffin used his position at NASA to further advocate for the commercial and private space industry, and when Musk’s SpaceX nearly folded after three failed rocket launches, Griffin and his friend Worden came to Musk’s aid. In April 2006, after the explosion of a Falcon 1 on its maiden voyage, the Pentagon selected Worden to lead the inquiry into the mishap, as DARPA had helped fund the launches. The very next month, in May 2006, Worden was selected by Griffin to lead the ever-important Ames Research Center. Two years later, in December 2008, the Griffin-led NASA formally partnered with X Prize and Google, and gave $3.5 billion in contracts to SpaceX and Griffin’s former company Orbital Sciences –– saving Musk’s then-troubled company in addition to the aforementioned private bailout from Jurvetson.

The next month, January 2009, Singularity University was announced by X Prize’s Diamandis with support from the Griffin-led NASA and with funding from Google and the Jurvetson-affiliated ePlanet Ventures –– stationed at the Worden-led Ames Research Center. Early reports of the announcement even listed Worden as an official founding member of SU, although he never appears in later iterations of their founding story. When Worden finally announced his 2015 departure from the NASA Research Center, he specifically referred to “the nine years he spent at Ames” as “the most enjoyable of his 40 years of public service.” Worden furthered:

“In the last nine years we have launched dozens of small, low-cost satellites – and helped ignite a major new industry in this area… Ames has provided entry technology for the emerging commercial space launch sector. We have helped launch small satellites working with a number of nations. And we’ve hosted and inspired thousands of students.”

It is hard to separate Worden’s musings on his time at Ames from Kargieman’s decision to found of Satellogic. Not only did Kargieman become interested in the commercial space launch sector and “small, low-cost satellites” while studying at the Worden-linked, “techno-optimist” graduate program, but the same Ames facility where that program was hosted also apparently became Satellogic’s first home. Thus, more than just sparking the idea for Satellogic, Ames seems to have incubated it as a company. Furthermore, it remains difficult to parse the beginnings of Satellogic from its connections to major players in the privatization of the military and space programs. Many of these companies have been discussed in prior investigations from Unlimited Hangout –– including SpaceX, Tether, and Palantir –– not to mention their willing public partners within the US government. Notably all three of these companies have since become directly and significantly partnered with Satellogic.

In addition, one simply has to look at Satellogic’s board members, both past and present, to understand that Kargieman’s company is hardly a simple tech startup, and operates far more like a cog in a well-designed, multi-headed apparatus developed by the U.S. government but profiteering as a private company.

As previously stated, much was written about the founding and funding of Satellogic in Debt From Above, but the more recent developments deserve reminding for the context of this piece. For starters, in 2022, the current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who boasts intimate ties to stablecoin issuer (and eventual Satellogic investor) Tether, helped connect Kargieman’s company with former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who then funded Satellogic via his firm Liberty Strategic Capital. Both Lutnick and Mnuchin joined the Satellogic board that same year. Another board member who also joined that year has direct connections to the Pentagon –– Liberty Strategic Capital’s Senior Managing Director General Joseph Dunford (Ret.), who was the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under the first Trump administration. In addition, Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald notably helped take Satellogic public, with the ticker $SATL.

In February 2022, Satellogic also officially partnered with Palantir, the privatized version of the Pentagon’s controversial Total Information Awareness program. Satellogic claimed in a press release that its partnership with Palantir was intended to “leverage Palantir’s Foundry platform” in order to “accelerat[e] business process, rapid image product delivery, AI model training, and enterprise-wide data integration.” The partnership also saw Satellogic become a major provider of space-based surveillance data to the U.S. government via Palantir, which contracts with all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, the military and many other U.S. federal agencies. According to Satellogic’s press release, as part of the deal, “Satellogic will provide Palantir’s U.S. government customers with ready access to Satellogic’s high-resolution satellite imagery to drive analytical insights across a range of mission-oriented use cases.”

A few months after announcing their partnership, in April 2022, Satellogic and Palantir launched their “first Edge AI-enabled satellite into space” with assistance from SpaceX’s Transporter 4 mission. This trio working together directly lends credibility to the theory described above that the common players behind all three companies were building collaborative infrastructure –– in this case, satellites, AI and rockets. According to their press release, the “new Edge AI-enabled NewSat” is the product of a “six-month project” in which “Satellogic adapted its hosted payload program and edge computing hardware” in order to “run Palantir’s Edge AI platform.” Their “joint project” aims to “deliver[. . .] new capabilities which will have broad applicability across mission sets in both government and the commercial sector.” This technological collaboration allows for quick swapping between different algorithms depending on its location. The press release furthers:

“We are able to hot-swap between models and chain capabilities, depending on mission requirements and terrain. For example, when the satellite passes over a port we can run the cloud detector, image segmentation, and ship detector models, and when passing over a town we can switch to vehicle and building detectors.”

In total, the Satellogic hardware is capable of running 6 additional third party models, including Palantir Omni and Palantir Overcast, in addition to Xailient, Pilot.ai and Mind Foundry. According to Palantir, “the Palantir-Satellogic collaboration represents a significant step in expediting delivery and dramatically improving the quality of data sent back to customers.” Palantir’s blog post on the collaboration concluded that:

“[T]his pioneering application of Edge AI in space aims to serve as the foundation for advanced analytics that can inform timely solutions to address critical global priorities, like combatting climate change, preventing disasters, and improving emergency response.”

One of Satellogic’s more recent announcements relates to the imminent launch of a new constellation of satellites it has named Merlin. Due to launch this October and become active some time in 2027, Merlin will “support persistent monitoring of unlimited locations worldwide” by “enabl[ing the] daily remapping of the entire planet at one-meter resolution.” Presumably, this will also grant its analytic partner, Palantir, the same capability.

In announcing Merlin, Kargieman stated the following:

“Until now, organizations had to choose between global coverage at low resolution or high-resolution monitoring of a limited number of sites. Merlin removes that trade-off and enables persistent monitoring at planetary scale.”

In an interview earlier this year with Forbes Argentina, Kargieman remarked that Merlin will soon “allow us to do things we never imagined. With AI [and Merlin] we can begin to predict the future.” As noted in previous reporting from Unlimited Hangout, a long-time major focus of Palantir is predictive analytics, particularly predictive policing –– often referred to as “pre-crime.”

Merlin exemplifies Satellogic’s efforts to push planetary surveillance into a new paradigm. Kargieman has referred to this new paradigm as “Persistent Global Intelligence,” a departure from the existing Earth Observation paradigm of “episodic imagery.” Its efforts in this regard are meant to empower global intelligence and defense agencies, particularly those of the United States. This is reflected, not only by Satellogic’s existing and new U.S. government contracts, but also through their recent partnerships with U.S. government contractor SynMax (AI surveillance data analytics company backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC) and appointing one of the main architects of the U.S. military’s controversial Project Maven (AI-powered weapon targeting software) as a strategic advisor.

Stargate Argentina

While engineering Satellogic’s pivot to AI-powered “Persistent Global Intelligence” satellite surveillance, Kargieman decided to create yet another company –– this one aimed at cashing in on the AI “boom.” He, along with Matt Travizano and Stan Chudovsky, founded Sur Energy in 2025. Travizano was an Argentine who was also the head of Sur Ventures, which invested in Satellogic, and had long-standing business interests in California. He is also credited with connecting the administration of Javier Milei to prominent figures in Silicon Valley. Travizano died last year while scaling California’s Mount Shasta, shortly after founding Sur Energy. Meanwhile, Chudovsky was previously VP of Messaging at Meta/Facebook and, prior to that, VP of Growth and Global Strategy at PayPal.

Shortly after launching, and even before having a website presence, Sur Energy announced a massive partnership with OpenAI, the formerly non-profit but now for-profit AI company run by Sam Altman and the developer of ChatGPT. Altman is a protégé of Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir whose recent move to Argentina and meetings with Milei and top government officials earlier this year made international headlines.

The Sur Energy-OpenAI partnership, formalized in October 2025 via a letter of intent, seeks to develop a $25 billion data center in Argentina’s Patagonia region called Stargate Argentina. Oracle, the CIA-linked data infrastructure company helmed by Larry Ellison, will likely operate Stargate Argentina upon its completion, per Kargieman. Oracle is notably OpenAI’s partner in the U.S.-based Stargate project, which –– per OpenAI –– now has global ambitions. Kargieman has also claimed that construction on Stargate Argentina will begin this year and end in 2027, even though the planned location of the site has not been made public. Notably, Milei’s administration was intimately and directly involved in the discussions that led to the signing of the letter of intent between Sur Energy and OpenAI.

In announcing the project, OpenAI’s Sam Altman referred to Sur Energy as one of Argentina’s “leading energy companies,” which it is not. Upon the announcement, even Bloomberg noted that Sur Energy was entirely unknown in the sector and had exactly zero assets in the country. OpenAI later clarified that Sur Energy was instead “the energy and infrastructure developer” of the project, not the provider.

Reports have suggested that the majority state-owned nuclear power firm, Nucleoeléctrica, may play a role in the project. Significantly, Milei’s government announced its efforts to privatize Nucleoeléctrica just weeks before Stargate Argentina was announced. Forbes pointed to the involvement of Nucleoeléctrica’s former president, Demián Reidel, in Stargate Argentina. Reidel, prior to leading Nucleoeléctrica, had been a top advisor to Milei and an architect of his administration’s policies on AI and nuclear power. In that role, he had controversially claimed that Argentina, Patagonia in particular, was ripe for AI development, but that its main problem was that it was too populated with Argentines.

It was later revealed that Sur Energy had signed two memorandums of understanding with two other Argentine power providers prior to announcing the project in October of last year. Those companies are Central Puerto and Genneia. Central Puerto is the formerly state-owned power provider of the Buenos Aires area, which was privatized in the early 1990s and has since expanded to several other areas of the country. The second, Genneia, is an interesting company to explore in this context, as it shows how Milei’s administration has become entangled with the network supporting Milei’s ostensible worst enemies.

Genneia was created in 1991, initially operating as a natural gas distribution company under the name Emgasud. It rebranded to Genneia in 2012 following a pivot to renewable energy. This pivot was driven by the introduction of a new crop of shareholders, namely Argentine businessman Jorge Horacio Brito, his son Jorge Pablo Brito and his long-time business partner and brother-in-law Delfín Jorge Ezequiel Carballo, all of whom joined the company’s board a year prior to the rebrand in 2011.

Brito was the long-time head of Argentina’s Grupo Macro, which includes and was built around Banco Macro. Brito’s early banking enterprise was initially launched as a financial company during the 1970s, when Argentina was under dictatorship. His company was closely related to figures who would later become top officials in the government of Raúl Alfonsín, after Argentina transitioned away from dictatorship and toward “democracy.” One such figure was Mario Brodersohn, who was Alfonsín’s Treasury Secretary when Brito and Banco Macro were granted banking licenses in the late 1980s. Brito allegedly used his close ties to the government for privileged access to information. In one notorious example, his bank bought 3 million dollars prior to the Alfonsín government’s disastrous “Spring Plan” (Plan Primavera) that saw the Argentine peso sharply devalued. He was investigated, but never charged.

Under the subsequent government of Carlos Menem and a wave of privatizations, Brito again received preferential treatment. When the province of Salta had its regional bank privatized, Brito’s Banco Macro was the only buyer put forward. Other provincial banks were privatized in a similar fashion, netting Banco Macro millions of taxpayer dollars annually just in payment for its maintenance of provincial bank accounts.

During the Argentine economic crisis of 2001, Brito’s Banco Macro came out on top, buying up collapsing banks and expanding its footprint. Meanwhile, the bank participated in the notorious “corralito,” a government policy whereby depositor funds were essentially frozen for over a year and Argentines could only withdraw $250 a week from domestic banks. During that time, the Argentine peso was, again, sharply devalued, and depositors lost a significant portion of their wealth.

Brito subsequently became extremely close to the political power center of Argentina yet again under the “center-left” Kirchner political dynasty. This coincided with Brito’s appointment to chair ADEBA, the Association of Private Banks of Argentine Capital. Brito was again a major beneficiary of Kirchner-era policies, including the decision to have ADEBA banks manage pension pay-outs. He was also investigated for his apparent role in moving suspect funds in one of the worst corruption scandals of the Kirchner era, the Ciccone Case. He was allegedly involved in several other corruption scandals that plagued the Kirchner presidencies, but was never properly investigated. His coziness with political power even continued under the “right-wing” government of Mauricio Macri, leading some media outlets to call Brito “the banker friend of political power, who never loses.”

However, it seems that Brito’s strategy to be as close to political power as possible was not only about making massive profits, but also about preventing investigations into his apparent criminal dealings. Banco Macro, under Brito, was an avid money laundering enterprise. When Argentine authorities began fining banks for violating anti-money laundering (AML) practices in 2010, Banco Macro was fined for just that five times in less than a year. A few years later, in 2015, Banco Macro had some of its activities temporarily suspended by Argentina’s National Securities Commission (CNV) for continuing to fail to enforce even the most basic AML practices. The bank then issued a short press release (without providing evidence) that it had, in fact, complied and, thanks to Brito’s political connections, the suspension was lifted after just one week.

Brito was eventually forced to step down from Banco Macro following his role in the Ciccone Case, the aforementioned Kirchner-adjacent corruption scandal, as well as money laundering concerns. He returned to lead the bank in 2020, once he and his associates believed the fallout from the scandal had died down, only to die in a bizarre helicopter crash a few months later. After his death, his son Jorge Pablo Brito took the reins of his business interests along with Delfín Jorge Ezequiel Carballo, who was Jorge Brito’s long-time partner and brother-in-law.

When Javier Milei ran for Argentina’s presidency, he ran against what he called a political “caste” that included, not only politicians, but the businessmen who enabled and often benefited from brazen acts of political corruption. Banco Macro, under both Britos, has been a key financial enabler of this political caste, with some former Argentine politicians calling it “the bank of Argentina’s [establishment] politics” because of its long-running and often insidious relationship with national politicians. The Brito family and Banco Macro are arguably a key financial node that has allowed this political “caste” to function and metastasize. Milei has even privately referred to Jorge Pablo Brito, chairman of the board of Genneia, as one of the main financial backers of his party’s opposition.

Nevertheless, under Milei’s government, Brito’s Genneia has been given preferential treatment compared to other domestic energy companies and given million of dollars in government contracts, undermining both Milei’s supposed commitment against the entrenched “caste” of Argentine political corruption as well as his supposed commitment to free market competition. Perhaps Brito’s and Milei’s shared interest in turning Patagonia into an AI “hub” was enough for Milei to look the other way.

However, even the deals with Genneia, as well as Central Puerto and Nucleoeléctrica, may not be enough to power Kargieman’s Stargate Argentina. According to press releases and reports, Stargate Argentina is planned to have a capacity of up to 500 MW “to support advanced artificial intelligence computing.” This means that the data center will use roughly 500,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) every hour, and thus roughly 4.38 billion kWh annually. As a result, Stargate Argentina, once it is fully operational, would aim to use a supply of electricity roughly equivalent to 3.4% of all electricity currently produced in the entire country annually. In contrast, in the United States, all data centers, AI-related and otherwise, use roughly 4-5% of domestic electricity production annually. Kargieman himself has said that Argentina “generates and consumes approximately 14 gigawatts of energy in terms of capacity”, and that, with his data center alone, “Argentina would go from consuming 14 to 14.5 gigawatts.” Kargieman himself acknowledged this jump is a “significant percentage.”

On top of that, Stargate Argentina has claimed it will only use renewable energy sources, which currently represent slightly under half of Argentina’s total energy production. Some Latin American news outlets have noted that Stargate Argentina’s ambitions will be difficult to achieve given that, in order to have the advertised capacity, all existing renewable energy sources in Argentine Patagonia –– from the flared gas of Vaca Muerta in the Neuquén province to the wind and hydro plants of its southernmost regions –– will not be enough to meet its demands.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the project is infeasible. For instance, the Neuquén province in particular has the promise of generating much more energy over time, though increased energy production would likely have to precede Stargate Argentina’s full build-out, as currently planned. Indeed, in a recent interview, Kargieman has alluded to this, stating that Sur Energy is planning “to build the infrastructure for the generation and distribution of energy to supply the data center,” but that it planned to partially rely on existing power infrastructure. In addition, the Milei government has made it a point to attract AI-related investment, including data centers, through its new tax incentive scheme known as RIGI, which provides tax benefits for large, often foreign investments in the country. Stargate Argentina is a known beneficiary of the RIGI scheme. This, coupled with Milei’s deregulatory bent, could allow data centers to quickly colonize Patagonia, particularly given that data center construction and operation is almost entirely unregulated in Argentina (e.g. they face essentially no legal obstacles related to their potential impact on the environment or local inhabitants).

“A Source of Dollars”

Like in many other countries, Argentines are wary of AI and, as a consequence, local and federal officials have touted the build-out of data centers, particularly in Patagonia, as projects and investments that will create significant employment opportunities for locals. For instance, the Planning Minister of the Patagonian Neuquén province, Ruben Etcheverry, has claimed that a proposed data center “corridor” in Neuquén will “open new economic opportunities for the local population.” Meanwhile, Argentine president Javier Milei, proclaimed earlier this year that, while “many fear that there will not be enough work in the Argentina of tomorrow,” these new industries –– e.g. energy, mining, critical mineral processing, digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence –– “will more than meet the demand for labor withdrawn by the old industries, and with much better salaries.”

However, the main figure behind Stargate Argentina, Emiliano Kargieman, apparently disagrees. Last December, Kargieman, in an interview with La Nación, claimed that AI data centers, including his own project, “are not a source of jobs in Argentina.” Instead, he posited that they are, in actuality, “a source of dollars.” More specifically, Kargieman stated that:

“For construction, data centers require employing thousands of people. For its subsequent operation, it employs about a hundred people. It is not a direct source of employment. [. . .] That is not the way this investment is going to contribute to the country [. . .] The development of AI infrastructure contributes to the country not only by generating a line of income from exports of computing services, dollars. It also allows us to position ourselves strategically and improve the competitiveness of companies and the efficiency of the State.”

Kargieman’s claims that data centers are not a direct source of employment is supported by local and regional investigations. One such investigation, jointly written by Brazilian and Argentine media outlets, found that data centers in South America “do not create local job openings and much of the investment funds [destined for job creation] instead go to technological teams, which are generally imported.”

Thus, even Kargieman has acknowledged that projects like Stargate Argentina are not about creating jobs for locals. Given this admission, it is worth mentioning again that a key architect of Milei’s AI policy and his alliance with Silicon Valley –– Demián Riedel –– had previously claimed that local Argentine populations were the main obstacle to AI infrastructure development.

Javier Milei and Argentina’s Digital Transformation

Once Stargate Argentina is up and running, who is likely to benefit most of from this massive Patagonian data center? Per Kargieman, it may not be his main partner in Argentina –– OpenAI. In his recent interview with La Nación, Kargieman noted that OpenAI’s Sam Altman has acknowledged to him (and also publicly) what many investors have been warning more feverishly in recent months, that there is an AI market “bubble.” Kargieman says that such a bubble existing is “normal,” adding that “all the major industrial revolutions were accompanied by bubbles.” In the case of those who invested in factories or other infrastructure in past bubbles linked to past industrial revolutions, Kargieman stated that “whoever invested in that building goes bankrupt, but someone ends up using the building.” Thus, he sees it as irrelevant whether Stargate Argentina is ever used by OpenAI or not and, in his words, seems to imply that OpenAI itself may disappear after an inevitable market correction.

From Kargieman’s point of view, it doesn’t matter “whether it is OpenAI or not [using Stargate Argentina’s projected data center], what matters is the long-term demand of the sector.” In response to that statement, his interviewer said: “So, if OpenAI does poorly, there will be others looking to use this type of infrastructure.” Kargieman responded in the affirmative and stated that “the infrastructure is going to be used for something regardless of whether it is OpenAI or not.”

While Kargieman seems to imply that OpenAI may not be the ultimate user of Stargate Argentina, but rather a corporate accelerator of its construction, he does hint at one of the actors he thinks will ultimately be using Stargate Argentina and for what purpose: the Argentine State. Kargieman stated in that same interview that the State would be among the main beneficiaries of Stargate Argentina because, over the next decade, “States will transform to be more efficient using AI.”

Kargieman then added the following:

“This can only be done if citizens’ data is handled in an environment over which the State has jurisdictional control. A data center of this type in Argentina gives the country its initial stepping stone for a profound transformation of the efficiency and transparency of the State’s operation, based on data control. These things are not minor. It is a long-term strategic function.”

Open AI itself has a similar view. For instance, one of OpenAI’s press releases about Stargate Argentina stated that:

“In addition to developing the infrastructure needed to power AI, we are discussing opportunities with the Argentinian government to drive AI adoption across Argentina, as part of our OpenAI for Countries initiative [of which Stargate Argentina is part], starting within the government itself.”

If Argentina’s government is to be one of the likely ultimate users of Stargate Argentina, it is important to examine what its government is already using AI for and how else they plan to use it.

While much has been written about Milei’s laissez faire policies with respect to AI and corporations, including allowing for AI-only companies with no humans involved to operate in the country, it is his government’s use of AI that has been largely overlooked.

One of the Milei-led government’s earliest domestic policies with respect to AI came in 2024, when former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich announced that the government would surveil Argentines’ social media activity with AI in order to “predict future crimes.” To do this, Milei’s government created a new subagency of the Security Ministry called the AI Applied to Security Unit (La Unidad de Inteligencia Artificial Aplicada a la Seguridad). The new Unit works to “patrol open social networks, applications and internet sites,” in order to “detect potential threats, identify movements of criminal groups or predict riots.” The Unit also uses AI to “analyz[e] security camera images in real time in order to detect suspicious activity or identify wanted people using facial recognition” while also “patrol[ling] large areas using drones, provid[ing] aerial surveillance.” This aerial surveillance would also be fed into the AIs used by this new subagency. The Unit also identifies “suspicious financial transactions or anomalous behavior that could indicate illegal activities” through its automated surveillance activities, while also “us[ing] machine learning algorithms to analyze historical crime data and thus predict future crimes.” The program is remarkably similar to a U.S. proposal that was made under the first Trump administration in 2019. That program, known as SAFEHOME, sought to use AI analytics on Americans’ social media posts to identify potential “warning signs” of individuals who may commit acts of violence, allowing those individuals to be “disrupted” by the government before they could commit an illegal act.

Around the same time that the AI Applied to Security Unit was created in Argentina, it was also reported that the Milei-led government planned to replace human government workers and organizations with AI, further underscoring Milei’s commitment to the Argentine State’s “digital transformation.”

More recently, in May of this year, Milei’s government announced a new AI public policy “innovation” – the creation of a “digital twin” for every Argentine based on their online activity, as surveilled by the State. This “twin” would then be cross-referenced with other government databases and then used to create predictions that would then inform public policies. This, notably, is quite similar in some ways to the concept of futarchy, which seeks to use prediction markets to dictate public policy. In announcing the policy on X (formerly Twitter), Milei remarked that “Argentina anticipates the future, because the future does not wait” and treated this new policy “innovation” as a global milestone.

In announcing the policy, the Argentine government stated that: “a State that not only observes reality once the problems have already occurred, but also has the capacity for anticipation, simulation and prevention.” It then described a “digital twin” as “a tool aimed at transforming data into prediction capacity and strategic design of public policies.” The video Milei posted to X when he announced the policy noted that this use of a “social digital twin” would allow the State to “predict the future” from a person’s childhood until “autonomy” (i.e. adulthood) in order to “anticipate the impact at each [life] stage.” One image shown in that video shows Argentina’s Minister of Human Capital, Sandra Pettovello, talking to officials from the United Nations and European Union as part of the project. It also displays the logo of Amazon Web Services (AWS), a CIA contractor, suggesting that they would also be involved in the project. However, the Ministry later clarified that “no external companies” would be involved in the development of the system.

Notably the concept of the “digital twin” was developed in the 1960s by NASA, which –– as previously explained –– played a major role in Kargieman’s past and his decision to launch his company Satellogic. As previously noted, Kargieman’s company is now shifting gears to offer “Persistent Global Intelligence” by remapping the planet daily with satellite surveillance at high resolution for its clients, most of which are intelligence and defense agencies. Notably, NASA has more recently argued that digital twins are important for “predictive maintenance” of complex systems. When applied to Argentine society at large, the proposed digital twin system is likely to synergize with the Security Ministry’s new AI unit, which already focuses on “predictive policing.”

As previously noted, Satellogic’s soon-to-be-launched satellite constellation, Merlin, which will have AI-native capabilities will, per Kargieman, “allow us to do things we never though possible” such as “begin to predict the future” using AI-powered planetary surveillance. Satellogic and Kargieman are not alone in this endeavor, as industry publications have recently noted that “space-based predictive analytics” will be a “gamechanger.” One top executive at a Canadian satellite surveillance company was recently quoted as saying:

“Predictive analysts is going to be more important going forward. Be it in terrorism or nature in terms of wildfires, predictive analytics will aid the earth in a completely new way.”

Thus, Kargieman –– whose Stargate Argentina is slated to serve as an essential data repository for these type of AI predictive programs with national security applications –– is also committed to predictive analytics through his other main venture, Satellogic. Notably, Satellogic and its imminent predictive capabilities are being marketed largely to the U.S. national security apparatus and its web of private contractors. With Argentina a signatory to the U.S.’ new and highly secretive Pax Silica agreement, both Argentina under Milei and Kargieman’s affiliated business interests are seeking to make Argentina a critical node of U.S. power projection with respect to emerging technologies and the often Orwellian applications of those technologies for population control and the suppression of dissent.

As previously reported by Unlimited Hangout, a network of former counterterrorism and surveillance projects once hosted by the U.S. Military’s now shuttered Information Awareness Office (IAO) at DARPA were privatized after garnering significant public controversy due to extreme privacy concerns in the early 2000s. The privatization of this network of programs was largely made possible by one man –– Peter Thiel. One of Thiel’s companies, Palantir –– the privatized version of IAO’s Total Information Awareness program –– is closely partnered with Kargieman’s Satellogic, as previously mentioned. Total Information Awareness was explicitly created to target “terrorism” after the 9/11 attacks, but treated everyone as a suspect. Its goal was to use predictive analytics to stop “terrorists,” or anyone they defined as such, before they could commit any attack.

As noted earlier in this piece, Satellogic appears to be part of another, related nexus of companies born out of the effort to privatize major aspects of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO) or “Star Wars” project of the Reagan era, a project which was also closely linked to the architect of DARPA’s IAO, John Poindexter. As noted in previous Unlimited Hangout reporting, Poindexter was also a key figure in Thiel’s efforts to privatize Total Information Awareness as Palantir. Today Palantir offers predictive analytics with applications for national security and law enforcement, with the ultimate goal of preventing crime and terror events before they occur –– just like Total Information Awareness.

Peter Thiel recently made the decision to move to Argentina, largely due to the governance strategies, public policies and ideology of Javier Milei. Shortly before Thiel met with Milei and top government officials, the Argentine government announced its “social digital twin” initiative, leading some international and domestic media outlets to speculate about a connection between Milei’s meeting with Thiel and the project’s announcement. Many of those outlets made note of Thiel’s role as both a co-founder of Palantir and as the current chairman of its board. Palantir, unsurprisingly, offers digital twin functionalities as part of its product suite for both national security and corporate applications.

Thiel is, of course, also well known for his controversial political views. While often publicly posturing as a libertarian, Thiel clearly has no interest in defending the civil liberties of the general public, if his business record is any indication. His political views are better classified as neo-reactionary, as he is now known to be a central figure in the growing nexus of Silicon Valley “techno-optimist” billionaires who are overtly transhumanist and seek to balkanize and privatize the public sector into “smart” city-states. Milei, similarly has publicly postured as a libertarian and freedom maximalist, while his governance decisions –– particularly those related to AI –– show that he is functionally a freedom minimalist with respect to the Argentine public. His “chainsaw” approach to shrinking the government has been heavily applied to those agencies that had provided social benefits, while the size of the government agencies dealing with surveillance and “security” has ballooned.

It is quite clear from the evidence that what is emerging in Argentina under Milei is a beta test for what will likely become a global model for techno-authoritarianism, where AI-powered capitalism (likely with minimal human involvement) enjoys complete freedom while human beings enjoy essentially none. Herein lies the potential for a disturbing return to the data-sharing operations that were used to hunt and murder dissidents during the era of CIA-backed South American dictatorships, such as Operation Condor, in which Argentina’s dictatorship enthusiastically participated. In that context, it is worth pointing out that Argentina’s dictatorship had attempted to create “paper twins” of its citizens by collating its surveillance data (e.g. wiretapped phone recordings, etc.) in order to predict their likely behavior and if they might present a threat to the dictatorship. These primitive data-based dissident elimination programs were closely associated with the disturbing and extensive crimes of those dictatorships against their own citizens.

With the technology of today, Milei’s “digital twin” efforts and other AI-powered programs could rapidly resurrect and improve the infrastructure of atrocity from Argentina’s dictatorial past, allowing them to commit crimes against humanity and against human freedom faster than ever and at much greater scale. In these efforts, Milei has no greater ally domestically than Stargate Argentina’s Emiliano Kargieman, who is building both the planetary surveillance grid and the terrestrial data depository that will make it all possible.

The post How “Argentina’s Elon Musk” Is Bringing Technocracy To Patagonia appeared first on Activist Post.

How the Epstein Network Is Privatizing The Government & Building Out The Surveillance State (w/Whitney Webb) | TCHR

Whitney Webb explains how Leslie Wexner privatized Ohio’s state government, and is using his position between the markets and the state to help the Thielverse build out the ‘Silicon Heartland.’

Under the radar, the billionaire class is building the infrastructure and models necessary to create a dystopian future in which cities become billionaire fiefdoms – completely privatized, governed by dictatorial CEOs and financed by subservient taxpayers. The buildout of data centers is one essential part of the effort to construct a totalitarian capitalist society, which is already advancing.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges interviews investigative journalist Whitney Webb, the author of “One Nation Under Blackmail,” who unravels the complex relationships between elected leaders, the National Security State, the state of Israel and Big Tech. Webb discusses the methods being used in the Silicon Heartland, the area around Columbus, Ohio, where Les Wexner, who has ties to organized crime and was Jeffrey Epstein’s most notable benefactor, and other powerful billionaires such as Peter Thiel of Palantir, have made significant headway in creating a privately-run city — New Albany. She describes their use of innocent-sounding front groups, such as Jobs Ohio, private development corporations and political bribery to enrich themselves and create what they are marketing as Smart Cities.

Hedges and Webb expose the connections between the billionaires behind this effort and the State of Israel. Webb argues that Israeli startups have been promoted to Big Tech “so that US technological infrastructure on multiple levels would be so intimately enmeshed with Israeli interests that they could never meaningfully boycott Israel.” The same technological infrastructure is also being fused with the National Security State – intelligence and the military – to also make it dependent on the private sector.

The ideology underlying this new model of feudalism originates from the Neo-Reactionary Movement. Beyond that, Webb explains, the billionaires involved believe fervently in a transhumanist future where “the end goal of humanity is to have humanity merge with AI in some capacity” such that there are two classes, the wealthy and a large underclass that is either exploitable or expendable, and obedience is enforced through technology. There is still time to prevent further development of this dystopian future by, among other actions, unplugging from the very technology being employed to create it.

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

Chris Hedges: The proliferation of data centers built to process immense amounts of data sets and train AI models has spawned widespread grassroots backlash by a diverse coalition of Americans across the country. The people behind these industrial behemoths and the legislative infrastructure that has laid the path to their development, however, are scarcely understood. In a recent article for Unlimited Hangout, Whitney Webb investigates the Silicon Heartland or the part of the Columbus metropolitan area that is being rapidly developed into a major hub for technological development, hosting big tech campuses, semiconductor production facilities, and massive data centers. Webb reveals that at the center of this technological development drive is Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent benefactor, Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of Bath and Body Works with ties to organized crime, who co-founded the Mega Group, a cohort of Jewish entrepreneurs who once met twice a year to discuss where to target their philanthropic investments. Birthright Israel was one of the most prominent initiatives spun out of the group.

Through a dizzying array of public-private partnerships and alleged shell companies, Wexner has gained control of key real estate that is now being utilized by military-contracting big tech companies, enriching himself and the corporations he’s lured to the Silicon Heartland along the way. But it is how Wexner has accumulated this leverage that illuminates the dark inner workings of our political system. These public-private partnerships, Webb reveals, despite the banality of their name, function as a way for oligarchs to funnel taxpayer money into privately developed business projects. These agreements also enmesh the money, objectives, and players of the private sector so deeply into the legislative process that they empower the private end of these partnerships to take de facto control of their government collaborators. In doing so, these oligarchs facilitate a quasilegal corporatization of government.

Inevitably, as data centers increasingly become a key component of the nation’s surveillance infrastructure, other centers of power enter the mix as well, with national security actors – defense executives, Israeli business interests, Vivek Ramaswamy, Peter Thiel allies, and Vice President J.D. Vance lingering on the peripheries of the public-private framework advancing this data center deluge.

Joining me to discuss the legal infrastructure and networks behind some of our modern surveillance state is investigative journalist and author of “One Nation Under Blackmail,” Whitney Webb. So, let’s begin with Wexner, who he is, and perhaps, he has close ties to Epstein, you can speak about that as well.

Whitney Webb: Sure. Thanks so much for having me back on, Chris. So yes, Leslie Wexner, probably best known for one of two things, either being the richest man in the state of Ohio or being the most well-known benefactor of Jeffrey Epstein, at least on paper. So, Leslie Wexner created what is now a large conglomerate of companies, now under the parent company L Brands, but some of the best-known companies that he has been behind are longtime staples of American malls, Bath and Body Works being one, Abercrombie and Fitch, The Limited, Limited Two, etc. etc.

Some of my reporting on him in conjunction with Epstein has focused on things like his organized crime connections, which were alleged by Columbus local police as they were investigating the death of one of his lawyers, or one of the lawyers rather, of The Limited, named Arthur Shapiro in the 1980s, who was deemed to have been murdered in what was referred to as a mob-style hit back in, I believe, 1985 or so. And he, Wexner, and his close associate, John Kessler, were named as suspects and their ties to organized crime were detailed in a report that was heavily censored by the Columbus police chief at the time and ended up being revealed inadvertently through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by local journalist Bob Fitrakis in the late 90s. And so, we have a record of that and the various organized crime connections that were alleged too, a record of that now.

Notably Kessler is the person that created with Leslie Wexner something called the New Albany Company, which is this private company that has essentially taken control of this what was once a very small suburb outside of Columbus, Ohio, called New Albany. And through a series of efforts to drastically alter not just local law, but also state law, the New Albany Company was able to become the de facto local government of the town of New Albany by entering into a public-private partnership with the local government of New Albany. But in some of these law changes they lobbied for, including at the state level, allowed the New Albany company created by Wexner and Kessler to do unprecedented things for a private company, like tax local residents and issue bonds and all sorts of things that are normally meant to be the business of local governments. And Kessler, for example, has said that basically the New Albany local government in their partnership is extremely pro-development and adheres to a master plan that was developed by the New Albany Company.

So, this is one of Wexner’s other endeavors, aside from, of course, his association with Jeffrey Epstein and longtime partnership there, and his corporate behemoth, L brands, that he runs and that made him a billionaire. But this is one of the other things that he has been developing for some time, the town of New Albany, which now obviously is part of the broader Columbus region, home to the vast majority of Ohio’s data centers. So, Ohio is currently, I believe, fourth in the United States for having the most data centers behind Virginia, Texas and California, I believe. But they have about 193 data centers currently, I believe, and 121 of those are in and around New Albany.

Chris Hedges: Your article shows that Wexner and various public-private partnerships that he’s spirited are serving as a key node in the development of this data center in Ohio, the Silicon Heartland, but there’s a much broader coalition of people and institutions that are driving the data center push, wrapping Big Tech, the US government, elements of the military-industrial complex in the mix. What’s the objective and why data centers?

Whitney Webb: Do you mean in Ohio or in general?

Chris Hedges: Nationally. Well, both, I mean, because Ohio is kind of your case study.

Whitney Webb: Right, sure. So obviously it’s fair to say that the network behind the data center push is extremely large and influential, obviously spearheaded by big tech companies that, at this point, have, for all intents and purposes, fused with the National Security State. And this has been ongoing for some time. So, a good example is to look back at the 2018 National Security Commission on AI that was chaired by Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, and a close associate of Schmidt, who had previously held a top position at what is now the Department of War. And basically, everyone on that commission was either a major executive at one of these big tech companies that is behind the data center push or figures that had previously worked for the military to establish, basically, the US roadmap on AI and what needed to be done for “national security purposes.” And it’s fair to say that even beyond that, you can see how these two groups have become so intertwined by the fact that the intelligence community, as well as the military and other major aspects of the federal government, contract extensively with these same big tech companies and are arguably largely dependent on them. While at the same time, a lot of these big tech oligarchs are major donors to our politicians.

So, on various levels, they have much more influence than arguably any other group right now. And I think as a very visual example that people will be familiar with that’s a testament to this, is after Trump’s inauguration or during Trump’s inauguration last year, behind him was a line of Who’s Who of Big Tech CEOs like Jeff Bezos and other figures like him, a testament to their role and importance in getting him elected for a second term. And he has obviously, so far, been generously repaying their patronage.

But there’s important people to look at too in the buildout of the data center deluge, as you called it, that aren’t such public figures at this point. So, there’s a lot of AI infrastructure companies that are becoming increasingly important to this, but they largely stay out of the news. So, one good example, I think, for this would be a company called Crusoe AI, which is, for example, building the Stargate project for Open AI and Larry Ellison’s Oracle, which was announced in the early days, I think one of the first announcements actually, of Trump soon after his inauguration this time around. And they’re basically building a lot of the data centers and working as a sort of a middleman between these big tech companies and the actual creation and infrastructure that they rely on. And so, those companies are an important part of this constellation of actors as well.

And it’s also something that’s happening well beyond the US. So, one of the founders of Crusoe AI, for example, is named Cully Cavness, and he accompanied Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Palantir, on his recent trip to Argentina to meet with Javier Milei. Later, they also met with Chilean politicians, apparently including the president of Chile, though it wasn’t publicly announced, and also the president of Paraguay. And, not long after that, at least in the case of Milei, there have been these proposals of allowing companies with no human employees that are run by AI to operate in the country, an announcement of Stargate Argentina on behalf of OpenAI, run by Sam Altman, who’s closely affiliated with Peter Thiel.

So, these people are looking to build data centers really all over the world. And why are they doing it? Why data centers? It’s essential to basically their various plans for AI, which include not just their plans for AI-related businesses, but also a lot of these people subscribe to specific ideologies that see that extreme investments in AI and AI compute capability are necessary in order to further the development of what they call ‘Artificial General Intelligence’ or an AI superintelligence, and some of them hold an almost religious fervor, you could say, for having that come to fruition and are openly transhumanist and think that the end goal of humanity is to have humanity merge with AI in some capacity. So, they have not just the economic incentive, they also have this, I would call it, quasi-religious incentive as well, which may help propel this along even when the economics of it don’t necessarily make sense. And at the end of the day, I think it’s a testament to how we’re sort of living in an era of, this is the importance to them, of computing power over people. And so, people that are negatively affected by them, apparently their concerns don’t matter and there’s a coordinated effort to sort of paint any pushback as being propelled by China, for example, and various different narratives are being fielded right now to try and manage local anger at an increasing cost of living crisis, many of which have been linked to data centers, particularly their power usage and their water usage.

And some of these Thiel-linked outlets, like Pirate Wires, for example, have tried to push against those claims, but using the data on the books about water usage and some other people in some other claims, but in states like California, most data centers aren’t required to report how much water they use. So, how accurate is the data we have on it anyway? And a lot of data centers are moving into areas that have water issues or are having droughts already and so obviously local concern about that is quite reasonable but for the big tech oligarchs, they’re not really interested in hearing those concerns. They have a dedicated mission to improving AI for, as I mentioned, various purposes and moving the United States further into an AI-powered economy.

Chris Hedges: So, could you explain what people like Wexner and Thiel, what is their political and social vision? What are they trying to create and how will these data centers and AI help them achieve this vision?

Whitney Webb: So, essentially what Wexner has done in the state of Ohio, and what I detail, is that he has privatized major aspects of local and state government through first, in the example I gave earlier of New Albany and then extending beyond that to first the Columbus region and then really the state in its entirety, focusing mainly on the Department of Economic Development, and where that essentially intersects with people like Peter Thiel is his professed interest in the writings of people like Curtis Yarvin in the Neoreactionary Movement, who posit that the answer to current problems with our government is to privatize the state entirely and place in charge of it a CEO that would essentially operate as a dictator. So, both men quite clearly have an interest in privatizing major aspects, if not all, of the US government. And so, ultimately from that, what does that mean? And up until this point, the way to achieve that in a practical sense has been to expand and grow the power of public-private partnerships, where almost always the public sector is subservient to its private sector partner. And it’s used to enrich the private sector partner and the public sector, ostensibly working as a watchdog here on private sector power, does not end up functioning that way. And so ultimately, this is what we’re seeing, I think, especially with the ascendence of oligarchs like Thiel and people close to him in the halls of political power, for example. The best example, obviously, being current vice president JD Vance, is to further this so we go beyond the public-private partnership model that’s predominated for several decades now and move into this more extreme privatization, which may happen gradually or suddenly, depending on how they think it could best be implemented to suit their interests.

Chris Hedges: One of the points you make in the article is that they seize, I think, they took control of the liquor tax in Ohio, but one of the points you make is that once this public money pours into their hands, there’s no accountability. Nobody knows where it goes.

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so what I was talking about in that specific example is this organization that was created as essentially the privatized version of the State Economic Development Authority, and it’s called Jobs Ohio. And so, Jobs Ohio was allowed to purchase rights to the Ohio liquor tax for, I think, $1.4 billion, which it made back extremely quickly, and because they are a private company, they are not required to show how they use the funds they take in from the liquor tax and are essentially referred to as a ‘dark money organization’. They claim, of course, to be creating lots of jobs by offering taxpayer-funded, through the liquor tax and other means, incentives packages to a lot of these large data center companies and other corporations that are in the same sphere that have moved in like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril, which is backed by Peter Thiel.

But Jobs Ohio has been able to, supposedly, they claim that these incentive packages help attract all of these businesses to the state and if they didn’t exist, those companies would go elsewhere. But studies show that’s only true in maybe 25% of cases. And it’s unclear how many jobs Jobs Ohio has actually created since it came into existence in 2011. And if you’re looking at data centers, a lot has been said about how many jobs they’re going to create, but most of the jobs they create are temporary. They’re construction jobs, and so once the data center is built, most of them employ maybe 20 to 30 people per data center, which is not very much. And so, if you consider the amount of money, which is often millions, poured into these incentive packages, which also include in Ohio sales and property tax exemptions, is it really worth it for 20 to 30 jobs per center when the losses to the Ohio taxpayer number in the millions?

Chris Hedges: And this was money, if I remember correctly from your article, that that was used to fund education, I mean to fund basic services. Once they took it, that money is gone.

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so if you look at Governor Mike DeWine, for example, he pushed through a recent spending bill that gutted all of those services. And there was efforts at the state level to push through legislation that would curb some of these tax exemptions for data centers, and Mike DeWine vetoed that but Mike DeWine and some of the people that work under him, their political careers have been very related to the fortunes of Leslie Wexner, who count among their biggest donors. Of course, it’s fair to say also that Wexner donates to both parties, but the vast majority of his patronage in the state has gone to Ohio Republicans, Mike DeWine being no exception. And his predecessor, John Kasich, was heavily funded by Wexner as well, which seems to have resulted, in part, in the creation of Jobs Ohio, which ended up being used to scale the model that Wexner implemented in Columbus via the Columbus Partnership.

Chris Hedges: At the beginning of the article, you write about how Wexner helped create a network of public-private partnerships, and of course, as you mentioned, use billions of dollars of Ohio taxpayer money to finance a massive welfare system for corporations. Can you detail how the public-private partnerships are put together, how they work, and how Wexner used them to create this vast data center development?

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so the culmination of that effort is the company that we just discussed called Jobs Ohio, but it started off in the region of Columbus. So, as I mentioned earlier, Wexner successfully privatized the town of New Albany, which is close to Columbus and sits within the Columbus region, and in the early 2000s, Wexner and Kessler, who created the New Albany Company that took over that town, created something called the Columbus Partnership, which basically became the de facto Economic Development Authority. And the Columbus Partnership then spawned something that is now called One Columbus, that is the Columbus Region’s Economic Development Authority. And it is a public-private partnership that the private sector donors to One Columbus include Wexner’s companies but also include very large companies that have a large presence in the state, like JP Morgan, for example, and ones that have large data centers in the state and the Columbus area specifically, like Amazon. And so not surprisingly, One Columbus, as they say, is “aggressively focused on achieving the economic development goals of its private sector partners,” which includes the build out of data centers. And so, to facilitate that and subsidize that with taxpayer money, that is what these public-private partnerships are essentially doing. And as I said earlier, there’s no proof that these are necessary to bring the vast majority of these companies to the region or to the state, but it is a way to use taxpayer money to subsidize the buildout of AI infrastructure on a massive scale.

And they continue to foot the bill in other ways via higher power bills, for example, which in the Columbus region, in particular, have exploded as the data center boom in the state has continued to grow. And as I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of data centers in the state are in that area. And so, after the success of the Columbus Partnership, various other replicas, you could say, were spawned in various other parts of the state – Cleveland, Cincinnati, and so on – until it was basically, I think, in about five or six, maybe seven chunks. And then Jobs Ohio is created and then partners with every single one.

So basically, Wexner and Kessler created the model in Columbus, and then it’s replicated in every other major metropolitan area in Ohio, and then connecting all of them is the 2011-created Jobs Ohio, which John Kashich, as I mentioned earlier, the year before Jobs Ohio was created, declared receiving 35 ‘gifts’ from Wexner, but declined to disclose what the gifts were and what their monetary value was. And another interesting point there is that the venture capitalist from Sequoia Capital, Mark Kvamme, also donated, I think, several million dollars to Kasich right before he created Jobs Ohio. And then after creating it, Kasich put Kvamme in charge of Jobs Ohio.

Chris Hedges: Can you talk about the ties with Israel? I know Compass data centers, you mentioned, has Israeli ties. And I’m wondering whether the pairing between Wexner and Compass illustrate a network driving the development of Big Tech in the AI boom that has deep Israeli roots.

Whitney Webb: Well, looking at a lot of the tech companies and data center companies that have installed themselves in New Albany in particular, the vast majority of them have significant subsidiaries that operate in the state of Israel. And Wexner, of course, is intimately related to the State of Israel through his own activities. For example, I think several decades ago, he was sort of acting as a middleman in some business capacities between Israel and China and also working on establishing Israeli businesses and helping them establish themselves in the occupied Golan Heights, among other things. And that’s to say nothing of his links to the Mega Group, for example, which, as you noted in your introduction, created Birthright Israel, and also Jeffrey Epstein, who at this point is quite known for his ties to former Israeli politicians and the Israeli state.

But I think it also speaks to sort of a broader issue, to have a lot of this infrastructure of technology in the US be intimately intermingled and connected to Israel. And this was actually something that was furthered and actually developed in conjunction with Netanyahu and the so-called vulture capitalist and significant donor to neoconservative causes, Paul Singer, who explicitly created a company called Startup Nation Central with the explicit purpose of making it impossible for the US to ever significantly support the BDS movement or the Boycott Divest Sanctions movement. And the goal was to basically market Israeli startups to US big tech firms so that they would acquire a lot of those startups in unprecedented numbers and also contract with them so that US technological infrastructure on multiple levels would be so intimately enmeshed with Israeli interests that they could never meaningfully boycott Israel, no matter what happened, essentially. And a lot of these startups, of course, if you’ve ever looked into the Israeli startup scene, are intimately related to Israeli intelligence and Israeli military operations. They’re staffed by veterans of one or the other. And at the same time, coincidentally, that Startup Nations Central was created, the Israeli government developed an explicit policy where these startups would be used to conduct operations that previously had been conducted in-house by Mossad and Unit 8200 and other parts of the Israeli intelligence system. So, for lack of a better word, they have an explicit policy of using them as front companies for intelligence. And so basically by having all of these big tech companies absorb them, the goal is to have a a major economic lever of power over the tech industry in particular that would prevent US policy from ever meaningfully challenging Israel, even at this point in time when they have actively been conducting a genocidal war for years in Palestine.

Chris Hedges: So, let me ask about Anduril. Can you explain what that is and its importance?

Whitney Webb: Yeah, so Anduril is a company that was created by Palmer Luckey and Trae Stephens. Palmer Luckey was a Thiel fellow. He created Oculus Rift, and later it was sold to Facebook when Peter Thiel was on the board of Facebook. And Luckey’s subsequent venture, Anduril, was funded in large part by Thiel. And then Trey Stevens is a former veteran of the intelligence community that went to work for Palantir, which of course is a Peter Thiel-created company, and then later joined Founders Fund and decided to create Anduril with Luckey at a time when he was also more or less advising the Trump administration Pentagon, its transition team, during Trump’s first term as president. And so, they in particular specialize in autonomous weaponry, mainly drones. And so, they have moved into the Columbus area as well.

Palmer Luckey credits Jobs Ohio with their decision to establish themselves there for this factory called Arsenal One, which is due to be producing an extensive amount of autonomous lethal drones, really any day now at this point. And nearby, there’s an effort by Howard Lutnick’s company, Cantor Fitzgerald, to find the next Anduril to fill that particular space. So, Cantor Fitzgerald, of course, being Howard Lutnick, the current commerce secretary with a lot of ties to Epstein in particular. So, it’s kind of interesting to see that coalesce in the region that has essentially become Leslie Wexner’s fiefdom. And aside from that, it’s worth noting that another venture of Palmer Luckey as well, that’s also more or less linked to Peter Thiel and other figures in and around Palantir, like Joe Lonsdale, is this effort to create a Stable Coin bank called Erebor, which Luckey nominally created, but it’s going to be run by other people. But it’s going to be based in Columbus. And so, this is an effort to increase dollar hegemony through dollar Stable Coins.

And I think recently they were fielded as a choice to restructure Venezuela’s sovereign debt, or particularly the debt of their state oil company, following the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and during a time when Trump, at least, claims that he is “running the country.” So that’s worth keeping in mind, as is the fact that Erebor was explicitly created to replace Silicon Valley Bank, which you may remember collapsing a few years ago. And if you paid attention to reporting about the collapse, the collapse of the bank was largely created by a run on the bank that was orchestrated by none other than Peter Thiel. How interesting. So, just an example of how this this particular network operates in one sense and also the fact that they have extensively sought to include Ohio in a lot of their plans.

Chris Hedges: Just to close, I wonder if you can describe Smart Columbus and how it’s kind of functioning as a test city for other smart cities in the US. It’s clearly, I think you make the point, part of a broader nationwide trend.

Whitney Webb: Yes. So, Smart Columbus is an initiative that was created by the Columbus Partnership, which as I mentioned earlier, was created in the early 2000s by Wexner and his henchman – I don’t know what else to call him – John Kessler. And essentially, it was created to yes, make Columbus a test case for smart city technologies and the implementation of various smart city programs, one of which is aimed at eliminating the use of private cars within the city of Columbus and moving sort of to these fleets of ride-sharing vehicles, Ubers essentially, and potentially in the future, Waymo’s and things like that. And oddly enough, this directly intersects with an entity that I mentioned earlier, the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which was led by Eric Schmidt, and one of the goals of that commission, though not in their final report, but in documents of theirs that were obtained by Freedom of Information Request, was their belief that in order for the US to compete with China in artificial intelligence, which of course to them was of prime national security importance, it was essential that private car ownership be phased out and replaced with these ride-sharing fleets of Ubers essentially or eventually autonomous ride-sharing vehicles as necessary to train and improve AI in order to compete with China. And so essentially Smart Columbus was a test case for that or is looking to promote those types of initiatives, which they’ve done quite gradually. It obviously hasn’t gotten to that point in Columbus, but essentially the goal of this other Columbus partnership-connected entity is to have those kinds of things happen in Columbus specifically and basically use it as a beta test for these technologies that are designed by Silicon Valley or, in the case of the US and NSCI military-related figures as well to have that essentially be beta tested in Columbus without the people of Columbus really having any input into that process at all.

Chris Hedges: What they’re building is a kind of totalitarian capitalism, isn’t it?

Whitney Webb: You could say that in a way. It’s interesting to point out that a lot of these oligarchs that swim in these same circles as Peter Thiel, take Mark Andreessen, for example, is the author of a document that he calls “The Techno-optimist Manifesto”, and one of the main influences he says for that paper is a “philosopher” by the name of Nick Land, who’s quite popular also in the Neo-Reactionary Movement.

And Nick Land argues that capitalism is a type of AI, and that capitalism is also God, and thus AI is God. And Mark Andreessen kind of reflects those ideas in his writings. And these ideas are pretty much very popular with the same people who are interested in Curtis Yarvin’s ideas of privatizing the state and having it be led by a CEO dictator, which, as I mentioned earlier, is of interest to Peter Thiel and some of his allies, which include Andreessen. So essentially, like I said earlier, I think they’re building it out of the sense that they’re essentially creating, I guess, a new model of feudalism, but enforced by technology, where basically there’s an upper class and then a large underclass and having that be enforced by technology. And one of the favorite historians of these big tech oligarchs that they’ve done interviews with, sit-downs with him, like one with Mark Zuckerberg, for example, is Yuval Noah Harari and he has argued that in this era of AI and the data center push and all of this that we’re living now, but he said this several years ago that in contrast to the industrial revolution of times past where it was the unexploited versus the exploited, now for the vast majority of people, it will be exploited versus expendable, and it’s better to be exploited than expendable. And so, as AI is taking jobs from regular people and all of this, being led by organizations that, it must be a sick joke to call it Jobs Ohio.

We are basically living in an era where these people are attempting to build a very anti-human future, and they see capital as the most important thing to support and guide and nurture. People, and humanity in general, are secondary to the progression of AI, which a lot of these people, as I mentioned earlier, see as directly connected to capital and is essentially deified by these people. And so, we certainly cannot live in a world like that. Some of them have written books about how the goal is to basically have like brains in vats and robots basically conduct economic activity and have a perpetual growth economy with no humans involved at all, that our future is essentially that.

So, this is obviously a future that people that don’t want something insanely dystopian like that should reject. And the best way to do that is to not use their products and to basically divest yourself as much as possible from big tech devices and services and the products they offer because, for example, in the data center push, in this paradigm where they say anyway that data is the new oil, data centers are sort of like the oil pipelines in previous decades. And if you look at examples like the Keystone Pipeline and how the government managed that backlash and things like that and furthered their development through things like eminent domain, we may see a lot of that happen in the future with data centers. But the best thing we can do is not use their products. It’s a little different than oil, where you have to fill up gas in your car to get by. We don’t need to use AI chatbots and ask them all these mundane things or use them if we’re really against what the data centers are doing. And as this becomes a progressively more pertinent issue for people in the United States, in particular, if you want to stop the data center push and backlash, they have a lot prepared to prevent any sort of direct action or even in-person protests so the best thing we can do is just boycott and divest ourselves from their products as much as possible because they can’t really justify a data center build out if no one is using their algorithms and in chatbots. So, we absolutely do have a way to keep this from going as far as they would like it to go and to prevent them from pumping up everyone’s water and raising electricity prices and basically doing a lot of things that are going to make regular life people’s lives increasingly harder. It’s already hard and we have time now to develop something independent of these companies that are basically taking control of our government that have very nefarious agendas not just for the United States, but for the natural world, and humanity in general. And I think really the best way forward, the nonviolent approach is best, and it is to divest, and not use their stuff as much as possible.

Chris Hedges: Great, thanks, Whitney. I want to thank Max, Thomas, Diego, and Nawell who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

The post How the Epstein Network Is Privatizing The Government & Building Out The Surveillance State (w/Whitney Webb) | TCHR appeared first on Activist Post.

NATO & Israel’s Weapons of Mass Migration – Henningsen talks with Jim Webb

In the first part of this discussion, Patrick offers his firsthand account on the ground in Iran, and dispelling many of the western propaganda myths spread by our politicians and media to demonize the country and set the stage for conflict. Later, we prove how NATO military interventions and Israel’s heavy influence of US foreign policy, specifically war and sanctions—are the main drivers of the major migrant flows into Europe. Also, we look at Israel’s dangerous alliance with the Far Right in Europe, and how this is manipulating western politics. All this and more. 

Host Jim Webb talks with journalist and geopolitical analyst Patrick Henningsen from 21st Century Wire to unpack the real driving forces behind the explosive immigration issue. Watch: 

READ MORE NATO NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire NATO Files

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The post NATO & Israel’s Weapons of Mass Migration – Henningsen talks with Jim Webb appeared first on Activist Post.

Drawing the AI Line in the Sand – #SolutionsWatch

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The IMA/#SolutionsWatch panel is back for another all-star debate/discussion/free-for-all. This time, we tackle the question of AI: can it be used as a tool or should it be shunned altogether? Where and how do you draw the line in the sand? And what’s the AI hubbub all about, anyway? Find out in this fascinating conversation.

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Panel guests:

James Corbett of corbettreport.com

Broc West of corbettreport.com

Ryan Cristian of TheLastAmericanVagabond.com

Whitney Webb of UnlimitedHangout.com

Steve Poikonen of AM Wakeup

Hakeem Anwar of AbovePhone.com

Jason Bermas of X

Kit Knightly of Off-Guardian.org

Hrvoje Moric of GeopoliticsAndEmpire.com

Gabriel of Gabe.Rocks

The post Drawing the AI Line in the Sand – #SolutionsWatch appeared first on Activist Post.