Notes from the edge of civilization: June 29, 2025
Insect-sized surveillance; wearable surveillance; newborn DNA surveillance; the banality of evil.
Just what the world needed right now: military-grade robo-mosquitoes. China’s military robotics lab recently flexed its dystopian muscles with a video showcasing a mosquito-like drone designed for “information reconnaissance” and “special battlefield missions.” Translation: this little guy can fly into your house, hover near your laptop, and watch you type your crypto keys… or worse. The evil implications are nearly endless — one can imagine future versions carrying viruses or other bioweapons, being used for micro-targeted geo-engineering, or maybe even one day extending its bug-like qualities to actually “injecting” us like a mosquito bite.
China, of course, is not alone in developing micro-drones. Harvard’s been busy building the RoboBee — about half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, and powered by “artificial muscles” that move when voltage is applied. It can fly, swim underwater, and perch using static electricity. Meanwhile, Norway’s Black Hornet micro-drone might just take the trophy for creepily honest marketing:
Save lives and minimize collateral damage. Detect and identify threats day and night without being detected. Increase operational tempo and expand maneuver options.
The age of boots-on-the-ground has been replaced by bugs-in-your-bedroom. Sleep tight.* And maybe cover that webcam and your windows.
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* That sentence would normally be finished “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.” But there is no indication that bed bugs have been weaponized. Yet.
Who needs bug-sized drones when RFK Jr. wants to put the surveillance device right on your wrist?
Apparently, “Making America Healthy Again” now means turning the entire population into a biometric science project, tracked 24/7 by sensors, apps, and AI that can probably tell when you lied about skipping dessert.
This week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced what he called “one of the largest HHS campaigns in history” — a full-blown push to get every American into wearables. Think watches, rings, bands, and "smart" clothing that track your glucose levels, heart rate, stress, sleep cycles, food responses… and yes, probably your mood.
He told Congress:
“My vision is that every American is wearing a wearable within four years.”
(Is it just us or does that sentence sound a bit more like a threat than a promise? We thought RFK Jr. was one of the good guys!)
Just to put a cherry on this biotech sundae, remember that RFK Jr.’s pick for Surgeon General, Dr. Casey Means, is the co-founder of a company called Levels, which just so happens to sell the exact kind of glucose-monitoring tech the government is now promoting. Nothing like public health policy crafted by private health profiteers.
Let’s be honest: You don’t need a robot mosquito to track your vitals when the government wants to do it via your wrist — and call it empowerment. Worse, it’s probably conditioning to normalize the idea that eventually, one chip under your skin will be all that’s needed. No more pesky ring or necklace that needs to be charged.
Stay ‘mark-of-the-beast’ free, friends.
As if wearable health trackers for every American wasn’t dystopian enough, let’s hop across the pond, where the UK government just announced it wants to map the entire DNA of every newborn baby in the public health system.
Yes, every baby. Entire genome. Collected at birth. Stored. Studied by AI.
Warped is what we call it. Authorities say it’s to “assess disease risk,” but when governments start collecting genetic blueprints like baseball cards, it’s not hard to see the slope greased and angled toward hell.
Just in case you were still clinging to the notion that maybe this is an important advancement in modern health, let’s pair it with these other recent UK policy shifts: Parliament just voted to decriminalize late-term abortion, allowing a woman to end her pregnancy up to the moment of birth. They also just voted for assisted dying. Super!
So now we’ve got government-mandated DNA sequencing at birth, legal termination at the end, and algorithmic medicine dictating everything in between. Between wearables here and genome mapping there, the panopticon isn't just digital — it's biological.
If you’ve ever wondered how an entire civilization can sleepwalk into horror while everyone insists they're just "doing their job," you may want check out this new PBS documentary: “Hannah Arendt: The Life of the Mind.” While we haven’t watched the whole thing yet, the clips suggest it’ll be worthy of your time, especially if you’ve noticed the creeping normalization of absurdity lately.
Arendt fled Nazi Germany, escaped internment in France, and wound up in America where she committed the ultimate sin: she thought out loud. Her report on the Eichmann trial coined the phrase “the banality of evil” — and no, she didn’t mean evil is boring. She meant it’s terrifyingly ordinary. It wears a suit, files paperwork, and calls it policy. Sound familiar?
Her warning was incredibly poignant: totalitarianism doesn't need jackboots, checkpoints and battering rams. It needs a culture where people stop thinking — where obedience replaces conscience and moral judgment is outsourced to systems, algorithms, and “experts.”
(Is it just us or does that sentence sound a bit more like a threat than a promise? We thought RFK Jr. was one of the good guys!)
100% threat, and it would seem I'm probably going to be done with wearables when my current Garmin Croaks. I feel like I get so little from it. I appreciate the mapping, the stats tracking of my exercise, but outside that all it really seems to do is bark at me when a metric falls outside a generic baseline for "human" vs for me, and even then given the environment I don't think I would want something tailored to me knowing what the powers that be want to do with it.
I share your outrage! Wish I knew how to wake the sleepwalkers and NPC’s! You can thank the 25% of us who refused the clot shot here in NY, otherwise we’d all be walking around carrying vaccine passports to gain admittance everywhere. I think at this point, all I can do is make my stand and hope there is enough of us to form an opposition. Wondering when will people realize you cannot comply your way out of tyranny.