As Big Tech uses economic warfare to oblige users into centralised AI-model systems, governments aim to restrict internet access and control participation through digital IDs.
This hammer and anvil effect is not a coincidence, but a middle ground where citizens are poised to lose out. Big Tech gets to reinvent its monopolies by artificially pricing the market out of computing power, and governments get to dictate who can access information under the guise of protecting whichever expedient minority group is in vogue.
As with the EU’s abominable Chat Control bill, ‘the children’ are trotted out as the ultimate pretext for just about any measure these days.
Manufactured hardware shortages
In a previous article, we discussed the ongoing manufactured RAM shortage that threatens to collapse both user demand for medium-to-high-end computer hardware, and its availability as companies increasingly cater for imaginary AI data centres and close their doors to normal customers.
Asus made waves last week when it announced that it was discontinuing its GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Prior to that, Crucial announced it will exit the consumer RAM business in 2026, ending almost 30 years of selling RAM and SSDs to PC builders and enthusiasts.
Meanwhile, Western governments, in particular Starmer’s government, has been attempting to plough ahead with widely disliked proposals for digital ID cards. Supposedly, the introduction of a digital ID is both to control illegal immigration, or to protect the children, naturally. The sales pitch swings between the two depending on what the government believes the public is most receptive to on any given day.
Public-private collusion?
According to a new report, the tech giant billionaire, Larry Ellison, has a £700 million IT deal with four Whitehall departments, and has donated a staggering £257 million to a think tank run by Tony Blair, a long-standing close friend. The former prime minister has long lobbied for the introduction of digital IDs.
In plain English, this means that Ellison funds and expects to profit from the introduction of digital IDs in the UK. This better explains the attempt to mandate digital IDs than the official government line of ‘proving the right to work’, or protecting teens and children.
It also demonstrates how public-private partnerships are the norm, rather than the exception. And it is perhaps little wonder that citizens, users and customers draw the short straw time and again.
Indeed, the distinction between public and private quickly falls apart when one peels away the thinly veiled attempts to remodel society into something that might be dubbed techno-feudalism.
Orchestrated by powerful private interests and enabled by all-too-willing public institutions, a future of carefully managed scarcity and control seems to be in the works.
All in all, even the most charitable explanation does not bode well for normal people. On the one hand we have the hammer of unaffordable customer electronics; on the other the anvil of mandated government surveillance and conditional access to information.
What’s to be done?
As usual, the answer lies in ownership and self custody; in saying no and demanding true separation of powers.
Running a local LLM (Large Language Model) is a great first step. Refusing to submit to digital ID requests (even at the cost of losing access to your social feed – which is littered with AI slop anyway) is another. Boycotting products and services, OpenAI in particular, is another avenue of attack.
Check out this article for more info on how to protect your digital data.
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