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Twenty Billion Scans a Month: Have We Already Lost the Farm?

The questions arrive together, the way dread arrives. Have we already lost the farm? Can anything already recorded be dissolved and unlinked from our names? Is every Bluetooth signal tied to us, every chip in every pet a beacon, every Flock camera quietly cataloguing the bodies that walk and drive past it? And if enough of those answers are yes, why are companies pouring concrete across the desert to raise data centers the size of small cities, and what is the end of it, to track, to prosecute, to imprison? I chased the documentation and let it correct me where I was wrong. Here is what holds up.

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The Money That Never Leaves the Room: How AI’s Circular Financing Revived a Warning Richard Cantillon Issued Three Hundred Years Ago

In September 2025, the chip company Nvidia announced that it would put as much as $100 billion into OpenAI. The pledge carried a condition that few headlines bothered to translate: OpenAI would spend a large share of the money leasing and buying Nvidia’s own processors to fill the data centers the investment was meant to build. Nvidia pays OpenAI. OpenAI pays Nvidia. The figure on the press release reads as growth. The mechanism underneath reads as a man moving a coin from his right pocket to his left and announcing that the household has grown richer.

Continue reading → The Money That Never Leaves the Room: How AI’s Circular Financing Revived a Warning Richard Cantillon Issued Three Hundred Years Ago