false god

21 Jul, 2026

Last night a friend was telling me about her recent date with a younger guy. For whatever reason, the date didn’t ‘hit’. They hadn’t clicked.

“He works in financial tech,” she told me—a late addition to her anecdote.

“Fintech! Ugh! Let him go,” I laughed. Catch and release! “It’s pretty evil stuff,” I added.

She looked startled. “He told me all the information they use is publicly available—” my friend began.

“Did you know your home address is publicly available?” I asked her. She balked. “Yeah,” I continued, “if you own your house and pay property taxes on it, and your name is on the deed, your home address is available, through public tax records. That’s how it eventually turns up on one of those data broker sites, like People Finder.” Or if you’re registered to vote locally, etc. “Then, if someone decides they don’t like you, they can look up your address and send cops to your house.” My eyes narrowed. “When [actress] wrote in her memoir that she was doxxed because she’d engaged with me online, she really should’ve written she was doxxed because of the sale of her data.

“But yeah, his job is more evil than I was actually thinking,” I said. I rolled my eyes. “So they’re selling it,” I said. “They compile your personal data and sell it to the highest bidder. Banks, phone companies, they all do this. People don’t know they have to opt out”—and often, you have to be the primary accountholder to be able to opt out of behavioral data-sharing and cross-device tracking, I’d learned in the storefront of a cell carrier last year. I’d noticed an exponential increase in spam ever since switching carriers; I’d walked into the store to opt out of having my personal information sold and, also, to request a physical SIM card in lieu of eSIM. Couldn’t do either thing. “But sure, it’s all publicly available, even though you’re a private citizen.” I shrugged.

My friend looked unmoored.

“I don’t know that much about fintech, to be honest,” I continued, “and I really should learn more about it. But I can tell you it’s all skimming. It’s data skimming, it’s financial skimming. I’m not saying microtransactions are inherently bad, but there’s no telling what the middleman is up to. I mean the payment processor itself.” I opened a webpage to try to read more about fintech. The words blurred together. Zzz. I closed the tab again.

My friend was staring up at the ceiling now. “He talked about it really quickly,” she said suspiciously, “before I could ask any questions. I didn’t really understand what it was all about.” He’d gone so far as to explain he builds data scrapers before dropping the topic entirely.

I nodded. “Well it all goes into one big, extremely detailed data fingerprint that follows you around,” I said. A unique identifier. “Your buying habits, what you spend extra time staring at online.” Your streaming services all linked together, of course, and the websites you visit and read. I shuddered. It’s possible that webcams can watch where your eyes go when you read stuff on a computer monitor. Perfectly sane people cover up their webcams. I don’t, but perfectly sane people do.

The problem is, this data fingerprint can follow us around offline now. I explained to my friend that our Apple and Android smartphones still emit a low-energy Bluetooth signal, even when they’re powered off. That’s for tracking phones in an emergency. And that’s great. If your phone is lost or stolen, if you’re trapped in your car in a gathering snowstorm, or if Annie Wilkes has you hobbled or hogtied in bed, you’re gonna want that beacon to get picked up.

That’s where our cars come in. Most of us here in the U.S. are forced to use cars to get around, especially if we live in sparsely populated areas. And there’s all kind of weird surveillance tech being patented for cars right now; ostensibly, the cloud of info generated by your phone will be accurately combined and merged with the cloud of info already generated by your vehicle. Ford has patented the idea of locking down the vehicle and autonomously driving itself directly to a dealership or impound for delinquent nonpayment on a lease. That’s mere steps away from being a subscription car (ad-supported, too, like a Kindle!), but it’s also steps away from your own car driving you straight to the authorities for any ol’ thought crime. Which is putting us in real Minority Report territory, where your own car can turn you in for something you might eventually do.

And! You won’t be able to opt out of biometric surveillance tech from cars purchased next year onward¹. Fortunately, the average person can’t afford a new car right now. That’s fine; there are plenty other ways to track a vehicle, mostly via your phone, mostly using apps that will share your telematics data.

For example, my car insurance incentivizes installing a telematics app on my smartphone: I get a discount if I use the DriveSafe app, and man do I need that discount. Infuriatingly, “I” currently have a DriveSafe score of 76%—most of it from taking Lyfts in LA. So the data following me is very irritating because it’s not really mine: my DriveSafe app has aggregated the driving behavior of each of my Lyft drivers, merging that data with my own leisurely, easygoing drives to the dentist. The frame-up has been incidental, accidental.

Oh, well. It probably isn’t important that the data is reliable, integrous, or truth-telling at all. The ultimate end goal of data collection is to electively build a case against you, probably. (To keep my all-important discount on my car insurance, I’m told I now need to install an additional theft-prevention device to my vehicle, like OnStar or LoJack. To be sure, these services initially started as theft-prevention services, in that they are quite literally designed to help local and federal authorities find your car.)

Another private company, Reviver, has already signed deals with four states to sell a digital license plate that looks cool as hell—with Bluetooth and LTE built-in, of course, so that the license plate itself can send and receive data². But always-connected digital license plates are surveillance overkill, thanks to Leonardo’s SignalTrace technology, which, with the latest Flock update, Flock cameras now implement: when you pass such a camera, the all-seeing eye notes your license plate number, but it’s also sniffing all identifying info, like MAC addresses, from your smartphone, smartwatch, AirTags, and any other devices you typically carry, tying it all to your car’s plates. This is all data skimming—which is to say, theft—but this time it’s being perpetrated by private companies who are selling their neat hacking tricks to authorities, especially local ones.

And I mean, this is just what happens when you outsource the work of public agencies to techbros, who are the defense contractors of the new world. (Is signal jamming illegal, though? You bet your ass it is.)

What’s really cool about Flock cameras is, at least 20 law enforcement officers have already been caught misusing Flock data, typically to stalk their ex-partners. (Five in Georgia were arrested, with another freshly accused just today³.) Perhaps more notably, though, a woman was wrongfully accused of Amazon package porch-theft—cornered in front of her home and told she could only review the incriminating footage after she’d confessed (her own porch cam filmed the encounter with law enforcement). The woman had to use her own surveillance tech just to prove her innocence.

So, as the very first line of defense, I am trying to ditch my smartphone, trying to make the computer go back to being a physical place I go—a room in my house, a workspace—rather than an identifier I carry.

But ditching a smartphone is more difficult than you might think! Not only does accessing banking or municipal services typically require a smartphone, but my life is pretty entangled with iOS. “I was rushing through my divorce paperwork,” I explained to my friend. “I didn’t even realize until later,” I continued, “that I’d allowed iOS to create digital passkeys for both ID.me and DocuSign. ID.me is what the federal government uses to identify you online! And DocuSign counts as a legally-binding signature. It dawned on me that anyone with my phone and PIN could pretend to be me.” I have biometrics turned off, so all an interloper really needs is my PIN. The point is, your phone is easy enough to break into. So why does it contain all the stuff you’d want to physically put into a fireproof lockbox?

Horrified, I’d started frantically deleting iOS Passkeys, switching over to a YubiKey I now carry on my keyring. I held one of my YubiKeys up to show to my friend. “Passkeys are a real thing, they started out as a physical security thing—” I began. As in, they’re not meant to be generated or managed by iOS; they’re supposed to be carried on your person, physically plugged into a device as external hardware verification. Hmm. I noticed then that my friend’s eyelids were getting heavy: she was literally falling asleep. Like, my explanation was literally putting her to sleep. Fine. I put my YubiKey away.

I muttered something about the planned wellness community I’d briefly lived in, where the local gym and rec center collected residents’ biometric health data, plotting and mapping trends. Like, that was the advertised perk of living there, of availing oneself of their amenities. But the neighborhood had also supplied their own cable, telephone, and Internet: convenient, and perfectly suspicious. Even before we moved there I thought the whole thing sounded mad.

It doesn’t even matter; that stuff is already outdated, too. New houses often have a smart meter outside, similar to an old-school electrical meter, but one that is capable of skimming incoming and outgoing data, broadcasting trends to the cloud⁴. Old houses can be retrofitted to use one of these boxes, too, obviously. It’s illegal to break into one of these meter boxes, or to modify one in any way; the box is considered private property of the private corporation operating it. In other words, your home is being fingerprinted, too. (I returned a TP-Link router just for my family’s peace of mind, but I’m not totally sure the ASUS I ended up with is that much safer, you know?)

“Here’s what I keep thinking about,” I told my friend. It was a horrible, grim realization that had occurred to me when I was stranded in the bathroom without any reading material.

“What about our great-great-great grandchildren,” I said. “Who won’t remember the advent of AI, didn’t witness the erosion of privacy all in the name of security theater, didn’t grow up using computers—already don’t grow up using computers, actually,” I said, thinking about kids on phablets, who rarely encounter a mouse and keyboard in their day-to-day lives.

“But now computer components are so expensive, it’s easier to just access a cloud computer. But future generations might not have access to computers at all. And they won’t know about ‘the cloud’ or data fingerprinting or how any of this works. They’ll likely carry something like a phone, or some other sort of receiver,” maybe a little NFC device, maybe something built into an ID card, “that can track them at shopping kiosks or allow them to clock in. Medieval serfs, basically.”

I sighed. “All they will know is, somehow, someone somewhere knows everything they’re doing, everything they’re thinking, what they buy at the grocery store, what they watch on TV. And when they get in trouble for doing something, their own car will take them straight to the authorities, to agents of the state.” Straight to the archangels. “They’ll think that’s God,” I concluded⁵.

My friend blinked.

“You should write this down,” she finally said. “A science-fiction story.”

“I don’t want to,” I snapped. I inhaled sharply. “I talked to your husband about this in the car one time. Speculative fiction always comes true.” I put my face in my hands and moaned softly. “When I was a teen, I loved Bill Gates. He envisioned an always-on, always-online computer, one that could control an entire smart home, where a web browser and a file browser were the same type of window. Brilliant.” I’d been on Bill Gates’s side in the Microsoft antitrust suit, having emotionally gone all-in on Active Desktop. Now I rolled my eyes. “These days, sometimes I think he’d had, not an idea, but a dark vision of the future. But he really believed it was his own idea, so he felt compelled to build it.

“Why did all of Octavia Butler’s stories come true?” I asked my friend now, a lament. “Why did William Gibson’s? I’ve tried to explain to my best friend that there’s no such thing as divination. William Gibson has said as much of his own work. This whole time he’s just been observing where we’re already heading, where everything leads. This isn’t fortune-telling, this isn’t even forecasting, it’s just describing the timeline we’re already on.”

“You’d make money from a story,” my friend gently teased me.

Ah, yes, money—that thing I need most. I gave her a look. I squinted. I evaluated her statement.

“Yeah,” I said flatly. “Maybe. But you can’t just write out a dystopian warning without also offering solutions. You can’t write a dystopian story at all! Because people, if they read it, they’ll internalize it. People are mimics, they just mimic one another.” I sighed heavily.

Then I threw both hands in the air. “Don’t build the Torment Nexus,” I exclaimed.

My friend had never heard of the Torment Nexus. I tried to explain, but I quickly gave up. “The point is,” I huffed, “you can’t just tell people not to do something. You can’t just issue a direct warning about the Torment Nexus. It’s well known in New Age circles that the Universe doesn’t hear the word ‘don’t.’ Don’t think of a pink elephant.” We collectively imagine a pink elephant, even though we ourselves don’t believe in pink elephants⁶.

So what is to be done? “Maybe my lane is to keep writing down ways, scattered here and there, ways to… fight the future.” What is that from? The Matrix? Terminator? Halo?? And it starts with doing what I already do, which is practicing good digital security hygiene, thank you very much.

“I don’t like thinking this way,” I told my friend⁷. “Honestly, it’s looking way too much like… like the mark of the beast microchip stuff.” Ugh, I hadn’t even wanted to say it. There’s this whole cultural wave of paranoia⁸, especially popular with evangelical fringe conservative end-times Christians, especially with Candace Cameron-Bure. I don’t know where Kirk Cameron falls on the spectrum, but it doesn’t look great. Thinking this is a potential outcome is not a great look for me. It doesn’t feel great, either. I don’t like sitting on the toilet and arriving at the same logical endpoint that Candace Cameron already gazes upon regularly.

Still. Living rurally means I get to watch the locals watch, with deep suspicion, the influx of newcomers—mostly Californian and Texan libertarians seeking some sort of ideological refuge. The locals are watching their farmland get bought up and developed, watching new infrastructure being built.

Local government is, of course, eager to sell to real-estate developers: free money⁹. The locals are suspicious of outsiders, of their own local government, of federal overreach. People using their own well water and septic systems don’t want to be incorporated with the nearest town, don’t want to be forced to pay for utilities they will not use. These are all meaningful cultural differences.

These same good people are going to be the ones on the defensive frontlines, fighting off data centers when giant corporations inevitably come to take over the fields. They’re the same people who are already protesting Flock surveillance. They’ve been training their whole lives to already be suspicious of this shit, God bless them.

Days earlier, my best childhood friend had been describing our hometown—the gossip mill, some particular rumor that had followed her family.

“That’s how you do it, by the way,” I suddenly murmured to her. I laughed.

At that moment she had been talking, not about corporations seizing farmland at all—even though it’s one of her favorite topics—but about our childhood friend’s dad, the entitled, tyrannical Nazarene pastor who lived in the house behind my parents’ house, who systematically ruined everyone’s lives and childhoods, terrorizing everyone, before finally taking off with a girlfriend in her 20s, leaving his wife—my beloved childhood dentist’s receptionist—destitute. (“She’s Grandma now, living her best life,” my best friend assured me, smiling.)

He’d also, a little inexplicably, planted bamboo in his backyard. Just to be annoying, probably. It had overgrown, had kicked over our shared fence, had begun to take over our own backyard. My parents were constantly hiring people to try to uproot it. My pet rabbit loved it. She would hop through the little jungle, chowing down—like Rambo, if he could eat his way through the wilds.

We were talking about the havoc the Nazarene pastor had wreaked on everyone, up to and including the invasion of bamboo.

“That’s how you do it, by the way,” I murmured. I laughed.

“Do what?” my best childhood friend asked me.

I smirked and rolled my eyes at the same time. “That’s how you get a data center to give up on trying to take your land,” I said to her now. “They say… they say you should just… plant some bamboo. A privately-held corporation will lose interest fast.”

My best friend gasped. “Bamboo takes over everything,” she exclaimed, delighted.

“Yep,” I said.