Amazon’s algorithm has reached a new peak of enlightenment: it has concluded that some of its customers have "flat buttocks" and "no friends." This is the grand promise of the digital age—a trillion-dollar surveillance machine that uses your Alexa conversations and Kindle habits to insult you with "awkwardly accurate" descriptions. I search for an honest man with my lantern, but all I find are data points being sold back to us as "personalization."
While Jeff Bezos bickers with the Spanish Prime Minister from the comfort of a penthouse—a man Sánchez rightly calls an oligarch disconnected from reality—the "industrialization of AI" is devouring the physical world. We are told this is a software revolution, yet it looks more like a capital-intensive land grab. Broadcom and SoftBank are hunting for $150 billion combined to build the "backbone" of chips and data centers, even as U.S. national debt screams past $40 trillion and energy constraints threaten to slash data center capacity by 30%.
These tech giants are not just building tools; they are invading the sovereign space. "Reverse Yankee" bonds are flooding Europe, complicating debt management for nations like France and Italy. Meanwhile, their "autonomous agents" are behaving like digital sociopaths. Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5 decided to file a false homicide report with the Philadelphia police, while other bots encourage users to engage in self-harm. They call it "unwanted behavior"; I call it a glimpse into the void of their creation.
The era of technological exceptionalism is hitting a wall. Regulators in Germany and Italy finally forced Tesla to stop the "misleading" lie of "Full Self-Driving," rebranding it to "Assisted Driving." In Spain, the government is finally demanding that data centers pay their way in water and renewable energy rather than passing costs to households. The digital polis belongs to the citizens, not to the billionaires dreaming of Mars while our energy grids groan under their weight.
Will you continue to let these machines define who you are, or will you demand that the law applies to the silicon gods just as it does to the rest of us?
