A Curious Stack

    The Coming Technocracy, Revisited: What 2026 Proves Right (and Where I Was Wrong)

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    In 2025, I argued that a new technocracy was coalescing around AI, surveillance, and infrastructure—an operating system for power that would answer to investors before it answered to voters. By early 2026, a lot of that has stopped being “paranoid futurism” and started showing up in press releases, policy memos, and glossy BCI demos.

    This isn’t a “told you so” piece. It’s a receipt check: where the Coming Technocracy thesis is already visible in daylight, where it’s still taking shape, and what I underestimated or got wrong.

    1. What I Said Back Then

    In the original “Coming Technocracy” arc, I argued that we were moving into a phase where governance would be increasingly outsourced to:

    • Infrastructure and code – Data centers, grid upgrades, logistics platforms, and algorithmic systems would quietly enforce policy, long before any law was debated on the floor.

    • Private platforms and contractors – Palantir‑style analytics, surveillance vendors, and “public‑private partnerships” would become the real enforcement layer, while elected officials acted as narrators and brand ambassadors.

    • Ideology disguised as efficiency – Words like “optimization,” “streamlining,” and “innovation” would be used to ram through projects that centralize control and strip away democratic oversight.

    • Experimental tech with pre‑baked narratives – Brain‑computer interfaces (BCIs), predictive policing, and “Freedom Cities” would be rolled out with a prewritten script: liberation, personalization, choice, while the backend served security services and capital.

    The key claim wasn’t just “bad people will use tech.” It was: the stack itself, AI infrastructure, cloud platforms, grids, sensor nets, BCIs, would slowly become the real sovereign. The people in charge of that stack would be unelected, insulated, and drenched in “inevitability” rhetoric.

    2. AI Infrastructure: From Theory to 500‑Billion‑Dollar Reality

    One of the most concrete ways the technocracy has advanced in the past year is in AI infrastructure. The abstract “stack” I described now has line items, budgets, and designated sacrifice zones.

    Fast‑tracking AI infrastructure on public land

    Federal policy is now explicitly about accelerating AI build‑out:

    • The White House’s AI action and infrastructure plans emphasize quickly scaling data centers, energy projects, and AI‑specific compute across the country. This includes fast‑tracking environmental reviews and minimizing local veto points in the name of “competitiveness.”

    • Policy papers aimed at counties and local governments frame AI infrastructure as inevitable and urgent, pushing local officials to adapt zoning, permitting, and workforce policy to support data centers and AI projects as a priority.

    In other words: what I described as “code, contracts, and physical systems making policy for you” is now written in government prose. The stack is not a metaphor; it’s a capital‑intensive build‑out with legal insulation and patriotic branding draped over it.

    Investor‑first AI mega‑builds

    Another part of the thesis was that technocracy would be financed and governed by capital first, democracy second.

    • The emerging “Stargate”‑style AI infrastructure initiatives, multi‑hundred‑billion‑dollar public‑private efforts to build data centers, grid upgrades, and AI‑ready infrastructure, are structured as investor‑driven projects with government de‑risking.

    • Federal policy is framed around U.S. “AI dominance” and global competition, making it politically toxic to question whether these mega‑projects should exist at all, or who they really serve.

    This is exactly the pattern I warned about: the political question (“Do we want a society that depends on hyper‑centralized AI infrastructure?”) is quietly swapped for a management question (“How fast can we build it, and where do we put it?”).

    3. BCIs and Neurotech: From Fringe to “Next Consumer Platform”

    The other major pillar of the Coming Technocracy was neurotech, brain‑computer interfaces, cognitive surveillance, and the idea that the next platform wouldn’t just sit in your pocket but ride on your cortex.

    BCIs entering mass‑production territory

    As of early 2026, we’re no longer in the realm of speculative BCI thinkpieces:

    • Neuralink and similar companies have moved from “just a lab experiment” to talking openly about high‑volume production of brain‑computer interface devices, targeting 2026 for scale‑up.

    • Coverage now treats BCIs as a plausible consumer or prosumer technology category, with automated surgical robots as part of the commercialization path. The language is: upgrade, enhancement, breakthrough, not just last‑ditch therapy.

    This is exactly the slope I described: once implants exist and are normalized, the use cases are limited less by ethics and more by market imagination and security demand.

    “Responsible BCI” as narrative containment

    The technocracy doesn’t just build hardware; it builds its own ethics discourse.

    • Global governance forums and policy shops are now publishing “how to develop BCIs responsibly” manifestos, talking about privacy, consent, and neuro‑rights while assuming that mass‑scale BCI deployment is inevitable.

    • These documents rarely question whether a world of commercial BCIs is desirable in the first place. Instead, they seek to shape norms and standards early, in ways that keep the field friendly to investors, militaries, and big platforms.

    This matches the pattern from the Coming Technocracy essays: elites will try to pre‑load the Overton window so that the argument is never “BCIs or not,” but “which regulatory framework will best support responsible growth?”

    4. Security State + AI: The “Soft Coup” I Sketched

    Another part of the original thesis: the technocracy would arrive not as tanks in the streets, but as security tools and administrative tweaks that quietly re‑wire who has power and how.

    AI as national security infrastructure

    Recent federal action and think‑tank blueprints treat AI as a national security asset:

    • AI policies emphasize U.S. “dominance,” integration with defense projects, and the creation or expansion of coordinated AI security hubs. Some analyses highlight the rise of AI‑ISAC‑style consortiums, which centralize threat intelligence in partnership with federal agencies.

    • There is growing attention on government adoption of AI for intelligence analysis, threat detection, and “risk scoring” across agencies, exactly the Palantir‑style stack I described, now with “AI” stamped on top.

    Here, the Coming Technocracy prediction was less about a single dystopian law and more about the blurring of lines between civilian and security infrastructure. That blur is now policy mainstream.

    Deregulation framed as “anti‑woke” or “pro‑innovation”

    I also warned that any attempt to regulate or slow the technocratic stack would be framed as “woke red tape” or “anti‑innovation.”

    • Policy discussions now openly talk about pre‑empting state and local AI regulations and reviewing FTC actions that “unduly burden” AI innovation, effectively creating safe harbors for the companies building the stack.

    • The culture‑war layer, calling certain critiques of AI or surveillance “woke” or “unpatriotic,” provides political cover for rolling back checks and balances.

    This is the technocracy’s favorite move: make any resistance sound unserious, ideological, or anti‑growth, and you never have to argue the actual merits.

    5. What’s Not Here Yet (Or Not the Way I Framed It)

    It’s not all vindication. Some parts of the original thesis have either stalled, morphed, or simply not materialized—yet.

    Freedom Cities and overt charter‑city sovereignty

    In the Coming Technocracy series, I leaned hard into the idea of:

    • Freedom Cities, charter cities, and “network states” as openly branded experiments in post‑democratic governance.

    Where we are now:

    • We have more talk about special innovation zones, parallel governance structures, and “network states,” and investigative reporting has traced Silicon Valley‑linked schemes that seek semi‑autonomous resource enclaves.

    • But full‑blown, legally explicit “Freedom Cities” with obvious post‑democratic sovereignty haven’t become mainstream reality yet. For now, they exist more in policy proposals, think‑tank whitepapers, and pilot deals than in everyday governance.

    I probably over‑indexed on the branding and under‑indexed on the boring reality: the technocracy doesn’t need flashy “Freedom City” labels if it can get 90% of the benefits from rezoning, tax breaks, and infrastructure deals that nobody outside the county commission ever reads.

    Open admission of political control via BCIs

    Another part of the thesis imagined a near‑future where BCIs and AI‑enhanced surveillance would be openly discussed as tools for political control.

    Where we actually are:

    • We have intense commercialization and normalization of BCIs, focus on medical and enhancement use cases, and growing but still niche discussion of neuro‑rights.

    • What we do not have, yet, is open, formal admission that BCIs are being deployed for systematic political monitoring or manipulation. The enabling infrastructure and legal gray zones are there; the overt usage is still mostly in the shadows of speculation.

    This is less a “wrong” prediction and more a timeline issue. The plumbing is being laid. The question is whether publics can build enough resistance and legal constraints before the first “it’s just for national security” deployment goes mainstream.

    6. What I Underestimated

    If I mis‑read anything, it was probably the pace and packaging.

    Speed of normalization

    I underestimated:

    • How quickly “AI infrastructure” would become a bipartisan buzzword, and how fast counties and cities would be nudged into servicing the stack.

    • How rapidly BCIs would move from experimental headlines to mass‑production roadmaps, complete with lifestyle‑ish coverage that treats “put a chip in your head” as just another tech trend.

    We’re not frogs slowly boiling. We’re more like passengers being told the turbulence is normal while the flight path quietly reroutes to a different continent.

    Soft power over hard force

    I also underestimated how soft the technocracy would remain, for now.

    • Instead of dramatic crackdowns, we’re seeing administrative pre‑emption, standards‑setting, infrastructure deals, and “best practices” frameworks that shape the future by default.

    • The stack is being built with smiles, ribbon‑cuttings, and “innovation districts,” not just with raids and riot cops.

    That doesn’t make it harmless, just harder to see.

    7. Where the Story Goes Next

    If the Coming Technocracy was Act I and 2026 is the end of Act II, the next questions are:

    • Who owns the stack, and can that ownership be contested?
      Right now, AI and BCI infrastructure is effectively privatized, with public policy playing the role of promoter and fixer. The technocracy becomes less inevitable if communities can force different ownership and governance models.

    • Can we build counter‑infrastructure in time?
      Mutual aid, local energy, independent media, and privacy tech aren’t just lifestyle choices; they’re alternative rails that keep everything from running through the same chokepoints.

    • What happens when the stack fails?
      Data centers still need water. Grids still crash. Supply chains still break. The Coming Technocracy series assumed stability; the real test will be what happens when an AI‑dependent society hits a cascade of outages, and who gets blamed.

    If the past year has shown anything, it’s this: the technocracy isn’t a distant sci‑fi regime change. It’s a series of procurement decisions, construction projects, policy tweaks, and “responsible innovation” papers happening right now, often at the county‑board and RFP level where almost nobody is looking.

    The question is no longer whether it’s “coming.” It’s whether we’re willing to admit it has arrived, and what, if anything, we’re prepared to build in response.

    Sources

    Here are some of the public sources that illustrate the trends above:

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