Dystopian Daydreams and Data-Driven Deportations

It’s been 99 days since I started this “Odds & Sods” experiment. In America, they give a new President a hundred days before passing judgment—seems a sensible enough standard. So, as I approach that milestone, I’ll borrow the custom and ask you plainly: What do you make of these weekly dispatches? Do they interest you, provoke you, bore you? I’d welcome your candid thoughts—just hit reply and let me know.

But before you do, let us not pretend that this week hasn’t presented us with billionaires and corporations to badmouth. Here we go:

Katy Perry’s Space Tourism: The Victory of Spectacle Over Significance

One cannot help but marvel at the spectacle: Katy Perry, pop royalty, ascending above the Kármán line in a phallic monument to private capital, crooning “What a Wonderful World” while the world below simmers and chokes. We see not merely a celebrity jaunt. It’s the incarnation of a future Aldous Huxley warned us about—a “Brave New World” where the machinery of pleasure and distraction has become the highest civic virtue, and the pursuit of sensation replaces the pursuit of meaning. Huxley’s dystopia is not one of jackboots and secret police, but of engineered contentment and the narcotic haze of spectacle. This week, we’re not drawing parallels to Orwell’s dystopia, as I refuse to let this newsletter become predictable.

In Huxley’s World State, the masses are lulled by soma and titillated by “feelies”—technological marvels that simulate experience while sterilising it of consequence or depth. Katy Perry’s Blue Origin flight is our own soma holiday: a meticulously curated, eleven-minute orgy of weightlessness, televised tears, and the ritual kissing of Texan dirt, all under the approving gaze of billionaires and daytime talk show hosts.

The event is sold as a triumph of empowerment and connection. Yet, it is a connection without substance, empowerment without struggle—a simulacrum of progress, as hollow as the capsule that carried them skyward. The flight’s supposed historicism—an all-female crew, a pop star among scientists—is as carefully engineered as any World State caste.

The message is clear: transcendence is now a consumer good, available to those with the right connections or the right face for the camera. The rest may watch, weep, and perhaps, for a moment, feel “super connected to love” by proxy. Meanwhile, the inconvenient truths of planetary crisis and social inequality are anaesthetised by the spectacle, just as Huxley’s citizens are pacified by their entertainments and their drugs.

In the end, Perry’s spaceflight is not a challenge to gravity, but a surrender to it—the gravitational pull of a culture that mistakes sensation for significance, and distraction for deliverance. It is not the dawn of a new age, but the confirmation that Huxley’s prophecy has come true, not with a boot, but with a broadcast and a brand partnership.

Peter Thiel, Architect of Mass Deportation

Palantir has transformed from a software vendor to the architect of America’s deportation machine. 404 Media leaked memos which show a company eager not just to support ICE but also to enhance operations, offering “ImmigrationOS” as if it were a trendy device, rather than a tool for uprooting lives with algorithmic indifference.

For anyone who values data privacy, Peter Thiel, the billionaire ideologue behind Palantir, is not only a tech mogul but also the high priest of a worldview in which your most intimate details are fair game for governments, corporations, and anyone else with the right connections and a hefty enough checkbook. This occurs while he publicly derides public health systems and champions the erosion of democratic safeguards.

With a flick of a switch, Palantir now allows agents to pursue “actionable leads,” monitor “self-deportations,” and capture not just criminals, but students, overstayers, and those with minor infractions—because who cares about proportionality or decency in favour of efficiency? When inevitable failures arise—families are disrupted, due process is ignored—Palantir provides a FAQ, as if a few ethics bullet points could erase their complicity. If this is the desired world—where a bureaucrat’s error can condemn a life—let us have the courage to admit it and recognise Palantir for what it truly is: not a security champion, but the facilitator of a new age of impersonal cruelty.

US Border Protection: Now Screening for Thoughtcrime

America’s border is no longer just a physical boundary; it’s now a digital challenge, filled with AI that scans your information even before you arrive in the US. Customs and Border Protection now boasts software that scours your social media, ancient blog posts, even the dark web, all in the name of “security.” These include software like Fivecast Onyx, which quickly scours publicly available online content—from Instagram photos to decade-old blogs—sorting and presenting data for border agents to flag “persons of interest.” The CBP already uses 31 such AI systems, with many more in development or testing.

They claim it’s about stopping potential threats, but what it achieves is a wholesale assault on privacy, where a stray tweet or a forgotten photo can brand you as suspicious. Let’s not mince words: this is surveillance run amok, with algorithms as judge, jury, and executioner. Innocent travellers are flagged not for what they’ve done, but for what a machine thinks they might feel or believe. EU officials now travel to Washington with burner phones, as if visiting a hostile regime. Author and entrepreneur Aya Jaff recommends uninstalling messenger apps like Whatsapp or Signal. The US, once a beacon of liberty, is fast becoming a cautionary tale of technological overreach, where the only thing more endangered than security is the right to be left alone.

Thank you for reading. Before I sign off, a small reminder: If you have a moment, I’d be grateful for your thoughts—good, bad, or indifferent. Just reply to this email and let me know what’s working, or what isn’t. I’m all ears.