Notes from the edge of civilization: January 11, 2026
Privacy as theater; here comes the Sun King; would you like your submarine sandwich with a retinal scan?; plus Canada, Ukraine, and borderless loyalty.
Private messaging in the UK is about to go the way of the big red phone box: still technically there, but emptied of its original purpose and repurposed by the state.
Under the Online Safety Act, the UK’s communications regulator — Ofcom — is preparing to force encrypted messaging services to scan all user content on devices before it’s encrypted, using so-called “accredited technology.”
It allows the regulator to compel any online service that lets people talk to each other, Facebook Messenger, Signal, iMessage, etc to install “accredited technology” to scan for terrorism or child abuse material.
The way this works is by scanning all your messages. Not just the suspicious ones. Not just the flagged ones. Every single message. On your device. Before they’re encrypted.
Once implemented — potentially as soon as this summer — end-to-end encryption in the UK becomes a polite fiction: messages may still be “encrypted,” but only after your phone has checked in with the authorities first, quietly transforming private conversation into a monitored public utility.
At some point over the past 13 months, did we go from the year 2026 to 1726? Are we in some strange governance time warp? If so, someone please wake us up!
Louis XIV was purported to have said, “L’etat, c’est moi.” (Translated crudely as: “The state, I AM the state.”) And whether the pointy shoes or the flowing robes with gold filagree entitled him to say or believe that, at least the Sun King was forthright about it. After all, monarchs gonna monarch.
But we’ve always thought ourselves better than that. After all, America was founded as the antidote to monarchy. We fought a bloody revolution over it. And yet, when this Reuters story crossed our desk, we had to raise an eyebrow. Trump has ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds.
It immediately brought to mind parallels between the Sun King and King Trump. Whether it’s the new White House “ballroom,” time spent worrying about Nobel Prizes, or renaming a performing arts center, the historic lunacy is almost fully compatible.
At the end of Louis XIV’s reign, France was effectively bankrupt, its national debt was gargantuan, coinage had to be manipulated repeatedly, and the tax system was lopsided and fragile. All sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
So when our Monarch-in-chief starts calling the shots to manipulate markets and shape outcomes, the echoes ring down the corridors of history. In our case, we couldn’t help but notice that the century is different, the hall of mirrors is the same.
You just went in for a Danny’s Favorite — piles of thin-sliced salami, capicola, spicy ham, provolone, and Italian dressing on a sub roll. But you came out as part of a police lineup.
Wegmans, the beloved East Coast supermarket chain, has quietly rolled out facial-recognition cameras that actively scan your face and compare it to a watchlist built by the company’s “asset protection” team, fed with information from law enforcement. If you’ve ever been flagged before, the system is designed to recognize you the moment you walk through the door. But full disclosure: everyone gets scanned (duh!).
The company says this technology is limited to a small number of stores in “communities that exhibit an elevated risk.” They claim they aren’t collecting other biometrics like voice or retina scans (yet!), won’t sell or share the data (yet!), and will eventually delete it — though they won’t say how long they plan to keep it forever.
So now grocery shopping comes with passive identity checks, whether you consent or not. Reddit users compared it to Minority Report, because the system predicts your behavior before you’ve done anything at all.
As always, the justification is safety, but the result is that every ordinary act of daily life gets quietly converted into a checkpoint.
Come to think of it, we’ll just skip the sub.
Oh, Canada…
The ruling Liberal government’s globalist-in-chief, Chrystia Freeland, announced via social media last week that she had accepted a “voluntary role” as an economic advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This means she would step aside as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “special representative” for the reconstruction of Ukraine. Oh, and by the way, “In the coming weeks, I will also leave my seat in Parliament,” she added, almost as an aside.
This is a classically Canadian move. In a more muscular country, the substance of the announcement — advising a foreign government while sitting in Parliament serving the constituents of your own nation — would have triggered hearings, shouting, and at least one senator pretending to read the constitution for the first time to check legalities. In Canada, the discussion is all about process: she forgot to stagger the announcements in the proper order. But otherwise, carry on.
In actual fact, Freeland advising Zelenskyy collapses any distinction that may have existed between national sovereignty and transnational power consolidation. It reveals the fact that, for a certain class of political actor, countries are fungible and loyalty is not territorial. In the new world order, successful politicians don’t “retire.” They get absorbed into the stinking, soggy sponge that is global advisory boards, NGOs, and elite institutions where influence is exercised quietly and never voted on.
A lot of it is political theatre based on who is doing it and what is popular.
Last night, I saw that suddenly, the Democratic party almost as one voice decided that Hamas is now the bad guys after several years of them being the the victims. I guess they got in new polling results.
A few years ago, killing up Gaddafi, going into other countries to kill people like Bin Laden, and spending billions of dollars through USAID to topple governments was good and now arresting Maduro is bad. It is not like there was no precedent. Anyone remember Manuel Noriega?
What is the difference between Trump manipulating the currency and the unelected chairman of the Federal Reserve doing it? That is they whole schtick of Keynesian Economics. At least we get to vote on the President.
I don't like private companies doing the facial recognition and Minority Report style pre-crime prevention but I understand it. But what else can they do? Especially when in many jurisdictions, the criminal justice system specifically avoids deterring criminal behavior.
Much of it is a total sham and there are no "good guys". You have the EU trying to choose which oligarchs will give them a better price between Russia and Ukraine. You have the western countries choosing to support whichever regime will give them the better deals. The drug wars have a long history going back at least as far as the Opium Wars where they support the criminals when they think they will gain an advantage. It happened in China with the British supporting the the opium trade. It happened in Central and South America with the cocaine trade. It happened in Afghanistan with the opium trade. It is happening now with China supporting the Fentanyl trade.
"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun" Ecclesiastes 1:9
I wonder how long before the UK sees the consequences of censorship. I don't know how it will manifest but something's bound to break. The loss of trust in the ruling class will rise and the dissent will go underground. Fear will be rising and building as it always does with tyrannical governments. I'm pretty sure it will backfire due to human nature, and will probably cause all sorts of problems for the ruling class as well as citizens.
Canada is headed in the same direction with censorship and appears to be imploding economically and morally. When it gets bad enough Canada could break apart and a tidal wave of strife will be upon us.