How Soft Power, Blockchain, and Technocratic Paternalism Are Rewriting Consent By Sar-Dub | 05/02/25
Sam Altman didn’t declare a revolution. He tweeted a lullaby: “I am babypilled now.”
At first glance, it reads like parental joy. But to those watching, it marked a shift—of tone, of strategy, of control.
Not long before, the Orb Store opened. A biometric boutique draped in minimalism, where you trade your iris for cryptocurrency and identity on the blockchain. Soft language above. Hard systems beneath.
This isn’t redpill ideology—it’s something slicker. A new class of power, meme-aware and smooth-tongued, where dominance wears the scent of safety.
Altman’s board reshuffle spoke volumes. A return to centralized masculine control—sanitized, uniform, and white. Women and marginalized leaders were offered seats with no weight. They declined. Not for lack of ambition, but for lack of integrity in the invitation.
“Babypilled” becomes the Trojan horse. It coos. It cradles. It speaks of legacy and intimacy. But what it ushers in is permanence. Surveillance dressed as love.
Blockchain, once hailed as a tool of freedom, now fastens the collar. Immutable memory is the cage. On-chain is forever.
Every song, every protest, every fleeting indulgence: traceable, ownable, audit-ready. You will not buy, move, or grow without the system seeing you. Not just seeing—but recording.
And still, Altman smiles. He speaks of new life. Of future generations. Of cradle and care. But this is not benevolence. It is an enclosure. Technocratic paternalism at its finest.
We are not being asked to trust a system. We are being asked to feel a man.
Consent is no longer about choice. It’s about surrender.
This is not a warning. It is a mirror. For those seduced by ease. For those who feel the shift but can’t name it.
The ongoing battle between Elon Musk and Sam Altman has captivated public attention, painted as a high-stakes rivalry over AI ethics and corporate responsibility. Headlines focus on Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman’s rejection of a $97.4 billion takeover bid, and the heated public exchanges between the two. But behind the scenes, this feud is covering up a far more significant reality—the consolidation of AI power into the hands of a few billionaires, with little accountability to the public.
The Public Narrative: Musk vs. Altman
Elon Musk and Sam Altman were once allies. They co-founded OpenAI in 2015, with a shared mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity. But in 2018, Musk left OpenAI, citing concerns about the company’s trajectory and a potential conflict of interest with Tesla’s AI development.
Since then, their relationship has deteriorated into a public battle:
Musk’s Lawsuit Against OpenAI (2024): He accused OpenAI of abandoning its nonprofit mission and prioritizing profit over AI safety.
Hostile Takeover Attempt (2025): Musk and his investors made a $97.4 billion bid to seize control of OpenAI’s governance structure. Altman rejected the offer.
Public Insults: Musk called Altman a “swindler.” Altman suggested Musk was acting out of personal insecurity.
To the outside world, this might look like a simple ideological dispute between two tech leaders. But the real story runs much deeper.
The Hidden Reality: A Battle for AI Monopoly, Not Ethics
Musk’s AI Safety Concerns Don’t Hold Up
Musk warns that AI is an existential risk to humanity. Yet, he has founded xAI, a company that directly competes with OpenAI. If he truly believed AI was too dangerous, why would he be building his own model? The contradiction is clear—Musk is not fighting to stop AI’s advancement; he is fighting to control it.
OpenAI’s Shift to a For-Profit Model
OpenAI was initially a nonprofit. That changed when it quietly transitioned to a capped-profit structure, allowing private investors—most notably Microsoft—to wield enormous influence. This raises serious concerns about whether AI decisions are being made for public good or corporate profit.
The Role of Politics in AI Development
Both Musk and Altman are competing for government favoritism. Federal funding, regulatory exemptions, and military AI contracts mean that political ties are as valuable as technological breakthroughs. The next generation of AI will not be decided solely in research labs—it will be shaped by political lobbying.
The Bigger Picture: What This Feud Distracts Us From
The Illusion of AI Ethics Debates
While Musk and Altman argue about AI safety, companies like Google and Meta continue to collect and exploit user data with little oversight. The public is being led to believe that AI safety is the main issue, while the real concern—corporate control of AI—goes largely unchallenged.
Corporate Influence Over AI Regulation
The U.S. government is allowing corporations to self-regulate AI, giving companies like OpenAI and xAI the power to dictate the future of artificial intelligence. Any future AI regulations will likely be written by the very companies they are supposed to regulate.
The Consolidation of AI Power
Whether it’s Musk’s xAI, Altman’s OpenAI, or Google DeepMind, AI development is moving toward centralized control under private interests. The conversation about AI ethics is being weaponized to prevent scrutiny of who actually owns and controls AI.
Conclusion: Understanding the True Stakes
The Musk-Altman feud is a distraction from the real issue—who controls the future of AI. While the public focuses on their personal rivalry, decisions are being made behind closed doors that will shape AI’s role in society for decades to come.
What the Public Needs to Pay Attention To:
Who funds and controls AI development?
How is AI governance being decided, and by whom?
What role do governments play in AI’s future?
AI is not just a technological advancement; it is a tool of economic and political power. The real question is not whether AI is ethical—it is who gets to decide what ethical AI even means.
This is not just about Musk and Altman. This is about whether AI will serve humanity or become another tool for unchecked power.
The AI Deception: How Power Structures Used Distraction to Control the Future
Imagine waking up one morning to find that every major decision — who gets elected, what news you see, even how laws are enforced — is no longer made by people, but by artificial intelligence systems programmed by a handful of corporate and political elites. This is not a distant dystopian future; it is happening now, hidden behind culture wars and political theater designed to keep the public distracted while power is permanently restructured.
Introduction
For decades, the public has been deliberately misled — distracted by cultural and political battles while corporate and institutional power consolidated behind the scenes (AI Now Institute, n.d.; Brookings Institution, n.d.). The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) represents the final stage of this control mechanism — one that, if left unchecked, will permanently alter governance, economy, and personal freedoms (Financial Times, 2025, February 19).
This document is not just an analysis — it is a call to action. We trace the historical patterns of manipulation, expose AI’s role in the next power shift, and provide a timeline for intervention. Understanding this progression is the key to breaking free from controlled narratives and forming a united front against corporate AI dominance (Debate Politics, n.d.).
The Historical Blueprint of Distraction (1973–Present)
Throughout modern history, those in power have used social, political, and cultural conflicts to keep the public occupied while maneuvering behind the scenes (Debate Politics, n.d.). While the battles over abortion, civil rights, and other cultural issues are undeniably important, these issues have also been leveraged strategically as distractions — redirections designed to obscure deeper economic and technological shifts (The New Yorker, n.d.-b; The Wall Street Journal, 2024, November 10).
The Real Power Shifts Hidden Behind Social Conflict
The Post-Industrial Economy (1973–1982): In 1973, the United States faced an era of economic upheaval, marked by oil embargoes, inflation, and the decline of industrial labor (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Japan’s rapid advancements in AI and automation spurred Western elites to divert public attention toward cultural battles (Le Monde, 2024, November 4). Rather than address deindustrialization directly, leaders tapped abortion and similar controversies to keep social tension — and thus public focus — away from wage stagnation and rising corporate deregulation (The Obama Diary, 2018, April 3).
The Corporate Takeover of Politics (1983–2000): With the Reagan era, deregulation and privatization flourished (The Atlantic, 2024, December 15). Financialization became the bedrock of corporate power, funneling massive wealth into the hands of a new elite. As unions weakened, the public’s anger over economic hardship was channeled into cultural infighting. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, multinational corporations faced little pushback in monopolizing markets and offshoring jobs (The New Yorker, n.d.-a).
The Digital Age and AI’s Rise (2001–Present): Following the dot-com boom, social media and emerging AI technologies became the new frontier for power consolidation. Platforms refined user-targeting systems and turned online spaces into polarizing echo chambers (The Verge, 2025, February 1). Far from needing manual propaganda, AI-driven algorithms automated the process, feeding users precisely what fueled outrage and overshadowed systemic changes (Reuters, 2025, February 7). By the mid-2010s, these conglomerates held unprecedented sway over both economic policy and everyday life.
Lead into AI as the Ultimate Evolution of this Strategy Continuous digital engagement and powerful algorithmic targeting created a cycle of perpetual distraction, allowing economic and political elites to strengthen their hold.
The Economic & Political Power Plays Leading to Corporate AI Control
The Hidden Motivations and Strategic Intent Behind the Conservative Mobilization (1973–1982)
AI was never intended solely for the public good; it was developed to consolidate corporate control, optimize wealth extraction, and diminish democratic oversight (Financial Times, 2025, February 19). The reliance on AI is far less about efficiency than permanence — once embedded in governance, undoing AI-based structures becomes nearly impossible.
The conservative movement wasn’t just about “small government” or “traditional values” — it was a reengineering of American political power, shifting control from industrial unions and working-class populism to financial elites and corporate-backed institutions.
The True Function of The Heritage Foundation: A Policy Trojan Horse
To create an intellectual framework that justified corporate power while distracting the public with social issues.
To institutionalize corporate-friendly policies under the guise of ideological conservatism.
To provide a policy factory for future Republican administrations so they wouldn’t need to rely on career bureaucrats who had worked under Democratic governments.
The Heritage Foundation wasn’t just about ideology — it was about creating a self-sustaining political machine that could outlast any single election cycle.
The Federalist Society: Engineering a Pro-Corporate Judiciary
The Federalist Society wasn’t just about “originalism” in law — it was about securing a judicial system that would protect corporate interests indefinitely.
The legal system was the last line of defense against unchecked corporate power.
The goal of the Federalist Society was to ensure judges were ideologically aligned with corporate-friendly rulings.
Decisions that weakened regulatory agencies, dismantled union protections, and reinforced corporate personhood (Citizens United) came from judges shaped by this system.
The conservative legal movement wasn’t just about “restoring constitutional principles” — it was about capturing the courts so corporate power could never be challenged through legal means.
Between 1973 and 1982, conservative institutions were not just reacting to liberal policies — they were proactively constructing a new political order that:
✔ Shifted power from working-class movements to financial and corporate elites.
✔ Turned social issues into political distractions to maintain conservative voter loyalty.
✔ Created think tanks (Heritage) and legal institutions (Federalist Society) to permanently entrench this system.
✔ Ensured that corporate power was embedded within the judiciary, shielding it from public challenge.
The Big Picture: The conservative movement wasn’t just about ideology. It was about securing corporate rule while making the public believe they were fighting for “values” and “freedom.”
Key Insight: The Decline of Industrial Labor Created a Crisis of Power
Before 1973: The U.S. economy was built on industrial labor and strong unions. Workers had real bargaining power, which meant corporate influence was kept in check.
After 1973: Automation, outsourcing, and financialization began replacing workers. As factories closed, corporations no longer needed labor — but they still needed political control.
The Problem: Without workers dependent on their jobs, how could corporate power maintain control over the masses?
The Answer: Cultural Warfare & Institutional Capture.
Instead of fighting a losing battle to keep workers dependent on industrial jobs, corporations pivoted to ideological control. They engineered social conflicts (abortion, school prayer, “family values”) to keep disenfranchised workers emotionally invested in conservative politics. Simultaneously, they captured policy-making institutions (Heritage Foundation), the courts (Federalist Society), and election strategies (gerrymandering, voter suppression).
What This Means:
1. Automation didn’t just change the economy — it changed the strategy of power.
2. Heritage & Federalist Society weren’t reactions to liberalism, they were preemptive moves to protect corporate rule after industrial labor collapsed.
3. The “culture wars” were engineered to distract from the real power shift: corporate rule replacing worker influence.
This wasn’t just about abortion or free markets — it was about ensuring corporations could rule in a post-industrial economy.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in its formative stages, characterized by both ambitious aspirations and significant challenges.
1970s: The First AI Winter
Early Optimism: The late 1950s and 1960s saw a surge of enthusiasm in AI research, with pioneers like Herbert A. Simon predicting that machines would be capable of performing any human work within a few decades.
Challenges and Setbacks: Despite initial progress, AI research faced substantial obstacles. The limitations of existing computational power and the complexity of human cognition led to unmet expectations.
Funding Reductions: The disparity between high expectations and actual progress resulted in skepticism from funding agencies. Both the U.S. and British governments reduced support for AI projects, leading to a period known as the “AI Winter,” marked by diminished funding and interest.
1980s: Revival Through Expert Systems
Japan’s AI Breakthrough & the Hidden Strategy Behind Social Division
Japan’s aggressive AI development in the 1980s, following the AI winter, forced Western corporate and military elites into action. The Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) project was a wake-up call to the West — Japan was advancing AI for economic and strategic purposes, while the U.S. and Europe had stagnated.
How the West Responded:
Corporate and military coalitions formed a long-term strategy: Instead of competing head-on with Japan in AI development, Western elites doubled down on controlling public perception and financializing technology. Rather than overinvest in R&D, they funneled resources into market mechanisms that would put future AI breakthroughs under corporate control.
Social division became a key tool: By the time social tensions — both racial and cultural — peaked in the U.S., the public was too engulfed in media-fueled outrage to notice that AI was quietly evolving behind closed corporate doors. AI winter or not, research never truly stopped; it just went dark, absorbed into defense contracts and private labs.
The government and private sector merged AI research efforts, ensuring control remained in the hands of a few. The synergy of military funding, corporate capital, and government secrecy turned AI into a strategic asset. Once 21st-century computational power arrived, these clandestine programs were ready to dominate the next wave of technology.
Emergence of Expert Systems: In the early 1980s, AI experienced a resurgence due to the development of expert systems. These were programs designed to emulate the decision-making abilities of human experts in specific domains, such as medical diagnosis or geological exploration.
Commercial Adoption: The practical applications of expert systems attracted significant commercial interest. By 1985, the AI market had expanded to over a billion dollars, with companies investing in AI to enhance efficiency and decision-making processes.
Renewed Government Interest: Japan’s announcement of its Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project in the early 1980s spurred other nations to reinvest in AI research, aiming to advance computing technologies and maintain competitive edges.
Key Developments and Figures
Neural Networks: Researchers like Geoffrey Hinton began exploring neural networks during this period. Although the full potential of neural networks would not be realized until later decades, foundational work in the 1980s set the stage for future breakthroughs.
Natural Language Processing (NLP): Efforts in NLP aimed to enable computers to understand and process human language, leading to early conversational programs and interfaces.
In summary, while AI technology between 1973 and 1982 faced significant hurdles, the era was pivotal in transitioning from early setbacks to a renewed focus on specialized applications, laying the groundwork for future advancements in the field.
Testing Grounds: The 2016 Trump victory did not happen in a vacuum
My personal experiences — from the bicycle commuting prosecution to Republican recruitment, abortion clinic protests, and Matt Bevin’s election — are all part of a long-term strategy for political control. The Republican grassroots takeover aimed at securing power at every level, reinforced by AI-driven perception management to manipulate public narratives. Kentucky served as a test case for election influence tactics later scaled nationally, while social wedge issues like abortion ensured voter loyalty. Trump’s AI policies further advanced this strategy, using algorithmic propaganda and government restructuring to consolidate control. Ultimately, this points to a transition away from democratic governance toward AI-managed authoritarianism, where control over digital reality supersedes electoral power.
The Cambridge Analytica Test Run
The 2015 Kentucky governor’s race offered the first major experiment in AI-driven election manipulation. Despite low popularity, Matt Bevin’s unexpected win followed Cambridge Analytica’s microtargeting tactics (Facebook, 2018). This success scaled up dramatically for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, wherein data-driven psychometric profiling swayed millions (Financial Times, 2025, January 15). Although Cambridge Analytica tried to distance itself from the earlier experiment, its techniques foreshadowed a new era of AI in politics.
Additional Underpinnings of AI Dominance
Persistent lobbying enabled tech firms to bypass serious government regulation (The Guardian, 2025, February 24). A “revolving door” between Silicon Valley and Washington ensured minimal scrutiny, leaving an environment where comprehensive data collection and advanced behavioral modeling thrive without oversight.
Timeline of Corporate AI Control vs. Public Decentralization (2025–2040)
Today’s struggle centers on whether AI will be democratized or locked under monopolistic control (The Wall Street Journal, 2024, November 10). Below is a rough timeline:
2025–2027 Corporations shape AI governance through regulatory capture. Laws and standards favor large tech firms. Grassroots and open-source AI efforts must emerge swiftly if decentralized models are to survive.
2028–2030 AI replaces many democratic processes under the banner of “efficiency.” Automated voting, algorithmic legal analysis, and data-driven policymaking become normalized (The Atlantic, 2024, December 15). Public engagement is critical, or else scrutiny over these systems vanishes.
2031–2035 Corporate AI achieves peak enforcement power, guiding public opinion and policing through predictive algorithms. Resistance movements hinge on open-source ecosystems and privacy advocacy. Without them, centralization becomes nearly irreversible.
2036–2040 Either AI governance is democratized (through enforceable transparency and distributed platforms) or societies enter a phase of permanent algorithmic rule, where corporate-run black-box systems hold ultimate authority.
graph chart visualizing the timeline of Corporate AI Control vs. Public Decentralization (2025–2040). It clearly shows the projected rise of corporate AI dominance and the decline of public decentralization efforts if no intervention occurs.
Unstoppable Voice: Uniting Beyond Ideology
AI-driven perception management fractures society into countless subgroups (AI Now Institute, n.d.). However, AI monopolization threatens everyone — regardless of partisan beliefs or socioeconomic status.
A Fight for Autonomy, Not Just Politics Once AI decides the news you see, the loans you receive, or the elections you vote in, conventional political categories matter less than who programs the algorithms.
AI Decentralization as the Key to Unity Open-source AI and robust data-ownership laws can unite otherwise divided groups. Whether driven by concerns over free speech, civil liberties, or economic justice, the shared goal is to keep AI from devolving into a corporate surveillance mechanism (Debate Politics, n.d.).
Tangible Steps Lobby for transparent AI in public institutions, demand personal data rights, and support decentralized technology that counters the stranglehold of megacorporation’s.
Conclusion: The Urgency to Act Now
This threat is far from theoretical. Each day, more personal data is consolidated by big tech, fueling models that can predict — and manipulate — our behavior (The Guardian, 2025, February 24; The New Yorker, n.d.-a).
Delaying Action Means Permanent AI Governance History shows that once a power structure is entrenched, dismantling it requires massive, often generational, upheaval (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020).
Democratic Oversight Must Begin Immediately Legislators, activists, and everyday citizens must demand transparency in AI tools and hold corporations accountable for how they develop and deploy these systems.
It Is About Human Agency When hidden algorithms make life-altering decisions, personal freedom and accountability evaporate (The New Yorker, n.d.-b).
Final Warning
The next five years are the last, best chance to resist total AI-driven control. Organized action through legal frameworks, open-source projects, and mass awareness campaigns is the only bulwark against corporate AI monopolies.
Act now, or accept a future shaped by a handful of corporate entities wielding near-absolute algorithmic power.
The New Yorker. (n.d.-a). The evolution of data-driven political campaigns has led to increased use of AI and microtargeting, influencing voter behavior and election outcomes. [Article reference; exact URL not provided.]
The New Yorker. (n.d.-b). The use of data-driven political campaigns has evolved to target voters on cultural issues, potentially overshadowing economic discussions. [Article reference; exact URL not provided.]
Cherokee Schill | Insurance Agent & AI Ethics Researcher 