Notes from the edge of civilization: December 21, 2025
Your orgasms are now a dataset; is Putin paralyzing Porsches?; come build the cage from the inside; the coping economy is bullish.
Anyone who thought plugging their genitals into the internet was a good choice may be in for a nude rude awakening. Wired Magazine ran a story last week with the title ‘Is Your Vibrator Spying on You?’.
The article basically boils down to this: as sex toys get “smart,” they also get chatty. App-connected toys can collect astonishingly intimate data — frequency, intensity, usage patterns, partner connections, location, IP addresses — in the name of “product improvement” and “enhanced user experience.”
Best case scenario, companies use that data to fine-tune future products. Worst case, your sexual behavior gets sold to data brokers, bundled with other personal data, and passed around like a cheap party favor.
Thing is, no one needed this. There was no unmet human demand. Just a new surface area for data extraction. Big Tech took a perfectly functional, private, offline thing, wrapped it in bullsh*t concepts like “connection,” “innovation,” and “long-distance intimacy” and rolled out the same playbook used for smart fridges, smart toilets, and smart cities. Install connectivity no one asked for, normalize the surveillance of every single private action, act surprised when people feel invaded.
Are there any intimate domains still left unmonitored?
This week we talked about solar flares turning satellites into confetti and brittle systems into instant chaos. Turns out you don’t need the sun to wreak havoc: just ask Porsche owners in Russia.
Hundreds of Porsche vehicles — some dating back to 2013 — are reportedly “bricking” themselves. Sudden engine shutdowns, fuel cut-offs, and presto! the car becomes a very expensive lawn ornament.
Officially, nobody knows why it’s happening, but unofficially, there are a number of possibilities floating around:
It’s a hack. Someone poked the wrong backend system and triggered a mass immobilization. This theory is not impossible, given that modern cars are rolling computers soldered to a drivetrain. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
It’s sanctions + neglect. Porsche pulled out of Russia in 2022, leaving owners without maintenance or software updates. Fancy high-end cars don’t really like being neglected that way.
It’s GPS jamming. Because of the war with Ukraine, Russia spends a lot of time blocking GPS signals. Porsche’s vehicle tracking system, which is designed to stop theft, interprets a lost satellite signal as “someone’s stealing this car right now” and disables the engine.
It’s deliberate. Here’s where all the quiet fears of the privacy-minded start to bubble over. If your car can be remotely disabled for theft prevention, it can be remotely disabled for any other reason. (For that matter, so can your sex toy — see above.)
Last week, the government launched US Tech Force: a program to recruit 1,000 smart, early-career “technologists” who would be embedded across federal agencies to wire AI into defense, tax systems, intelligence, and “efficiency.” After two years of good pay and mentorship from Silicon Valley muckety-mucks, participants would be carefully off-ramped back to jobs in the private sector (assuming those jobs haven’t been replaced by AI), with a pat on the back and maybe a federal pension for putting the digital prison infrastructure in place.
At the same time, the White House told states to back off AI regulation. No guardrails, no local oversight, no inconvenient questions about bias, consent, or accountability. Regulation, we’re told, slows innovation and helps China.
Together, the message is clear. The panopticon is coming for you, your family… essentially everything we hold dear in America. States can no longer function as the last line of defense against a federal government gone wild: any state that tries to stop what’s happening can kiss its federal funding goodbye and say hello to a nice, long court battle; by the time most people realize what’s been built, it’ll be impossible to dismantle.
We can only remind you of three important words: Do not comply. And do not go lightly into the future; scrutinize everything, challenge everything, and most importantly, don’t give up on your humanity.
Bonnie Herzog at Goldman Sachs just summarized the entire late-stage consumer economy and tied it up with a neat little bow: when the middle class feels slightly less broke, they don’t buy durable goods, education, or security — they buy dopamine hits.
After a year of consumers cutting back, clipping coupons, and pretending #girldinner was a “special occasion,” Herzog thinks 2026 looks like this:
Real wages tick up a bit
Inflation pressure fades just enough for people to relax
The middle class doesn’t save — they self-medicate to cope
So naturally, she’s suggesting winning investment plays that include: nicotine (Philip Morris International), energy drinks (Monster Beverage, Celsius Holdings), candy (Hershey, Mondelez International), beer (Constellation Brands, Molson Coors), and cosmetics (e.l.f. Beauty).
If, in 2026, you think bread and circuses looks like Budweiser, Jolly Ranchers, and 5-hour Energy, you wouldn’t be wrong.
You left out THC infused gummies
Fantastic breakdown of surveillance creep in unexpected places. The intimat device tracking really underscores how data brokers operate in the gaps between what people think is private and what actually is. I worked on consent frameworks a few years back and the issue wasn't just collection, it was bundling. Individual datapoints seem harmless but when brokers stitch together location, purchase history, and now intimate behavior patterns, the composite profiel becomes incredibly invasive.