Notes from the edge of civilization: August 2, 2026
The spectacular stupidity of Google Earth; humans litter the moon; nationhood loopholes are closing; and AI isn't the only one hallucinating.
This week, Google announced a new integration inside Google Earth that would allow users to transform real satellite and 3D imagery into historical reconstructions, architectural concepts, educational scenes, and more. It didn’t take more than a few hours for people to start stress-testing the tool, realizing they could create convincing fake satellite imagery over real locations, including refugees near the Mexican border, a non-existent nuclear plant in Iran, and a fatal crash on an Amsterdam street.
Less than 24 hours later, Google rolled the feature back to, “work on implementing stronger guardrails.”
The timing of this is spectacularly stupid. Releasing a tool for fabricating satellite-style evidence would have been reckless at any moment, but doing it in the middle of expanding wars — when verifying competing claims about bomb damage, nuclear sites, and civilian casualties increasingly depends on satellite imagery — borders on societal sabotage.
The most charitable reading is that the product team had been working on this for a while and was excited to go live with their ‘cool new tool.’ Perhaps nobody with sufficient authority was asked what might happen when users type «show missile damage at an Iranian nuclear site» into the prompt field?
The darker reading is that Google knew misuse was possible but considered the product launch more important than preserving the evidentiary integrity of satellite-style imagery. It may be conspiratorial to suggest the feature was intentionally released to contaminate the information environment during wartime, making genuine evidence easier to dispute, but perhaps intent is actually beside the point.
Once fake satellite evidence becomes easily manufactured, the main political benefit is not just that you can’t believe false pictures, but that real pictures can now be denied. Every authentic image of a bombed hospital, damaged airbase, or burning oil terminal can now be dismissed as “probably AI.” So while Google may not have intended to fog the battlefield, they may have just handed all sides a massive fog machine.
Remember, we were always at war with Eastasia… and now we may have the photo evidence to prove it.
When and if humans finally create colonies in outer space, one thing is for sure: they’ll feel right at home when they see the litter spreading across the neighborhood.
This week a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage, launched during a lunar mission in 2025, is expected to slam into the moon at roughly 5,400 mph. The collision will carve out a crater about 90 feet wide, but scientists are rushing to gloss over the story, saying it poses no danger and will provide valuable data for future lunar exploration.
So, in short, humanity’s first instinct upon reaching a new frontier — long before building a permanent settlement — is to use it, abandon it, and call the mess a research opportunity.
As we noted in a story earlier this week, when people move they bring their old habits with them.
No word yet on whether Mr. Musk will be on the hook for the littering fee.
Malaysia has ordered the closure of the Network School, an experimental community founded by tech founder Balaji Srinivasan with the aim of laying the groundwork for a future “network state.”
Srinivasan has dreamed of a digitally organized society that exists alongside, and perhaps one day beyond, traditional nation states for many years, writing about it in his 2022 book The Network State.
In an August 2024 blog post, he wrote: “We’re starting a new school near Singapore for the dark talent of the world.” (We plan on exploring that idea more in an upcoming story.) By “near Singapore,” what he meant was an island in Malaysia known as the Singapore-Johor Special Economic Zone.
Malaysia was none too pleased when they heard reports that Israeli participants had joined the project, since it is a country that does not recognize Israel and restricts entry by Israeli citizens. Malaysian authorities later said they found no immigration violations among those inspected, but ultimately revoked the school’s license over regulatory issues.
Within a day, Srinivasan announced the project would relocate to Kazakhstan.
There’s so much to explore in this story — permits, zoning, nationhood, citizenship, talent, and opportunity… to say nothing of the term “dark talent.” But for Notes, we’ll just focus on one small slice: the fact that governments are becoming less willing to tolerate systems that separate legal nationality from physical access. Whether through investment passports, digital communities or globally mobile elites with multiple citizenships, the spaces between jurisdictions are narrowing.
Just weeks ago, we wrote about how the European Union demanded that several Caribbean nations dismantle their “golden passport” programs, arguing that citizenship sold by one country effectively grants access to the entire Schengen Area.
Now Malaysia has moved against a private community that, intentionally or not, appeared capable of creating another pathway around national restrictions. For decades, globalization rewarded those who could navigate the gaps between countries. Now, governments are increasingly trying to close them — while they still can.
We just couldn’t resist weighing in on the on-again-off-again “deals” that seem to be flying a mile-a-minute out of Washington DC’s inner circle. Probably not for the reason you’d expect.
Nevertheless, one minute, deals are being begged for by one side, another minute, expletive-filled rants against “scumbags” and “lunatics” abound. The art of the deal may have met its match, given the kinds of realtime hallucinations we’re witnessing.
But truly, we say, the real victim in all this? Justice.
The rants and hallucinations, deals and expletives are simply running cover for the sordid Jeffery Epstein saga.
Where’s the justice for the abuse? Where’s the headlines putting pressure on this administration to bring to account the perpetrators and real “scumbags?” Why can’t we root out and punish pedophiles and sex fiends that appear to be running this nation’s politics, business, academia, and intelligence? When are we going to stop sacrificing our children to Moloch?
That’s the point of this little vignette. Don’t forget. Don’t partake in the hallucination. Don’t take your eyes off what’s really happening. The future of our children depends on it.
Maybe the folks at Google did an important thing by alerting the laity to how easy it is to fake graphical "evidence" these days. If they rolled out the feature for the general public, even if only for a very brief time, then you know governments have had access to that kind of technology for far longer.
If knowledge that satellite imagery can be faked so easily helps collapse the credibility of government, I'm all for it!
This may surprise you, but one of my favorite people in history is Che Guevara... certainly not for his political ideals, but primarily for his intellectual proclivities., and also for his loyalty and adherence to his philosophy (be that for better or for worse)... In one of his early works, 'Guerrilla Warfare' (1961), he outlines the predispositions necessary for a true revolution to occur... In his preamble to that book he states quite unequivocally that "True revolution can not occur until the ruling authority has lost it's last vestige of propriety."
If the American public was ever made fully aware of the full scope of involvement of the majority of our upper strata of political, financial, and social self assuming elites wrt the Epstein fiasco, that knowledge and realization of the utter depravity of those in high places would totally remove the last vestige of our nation's moral propriety, and by doing so would undermine the confidence in the government of the United States of America to the point of descending into chaos... and this nation would cease to exist in the manner that we know it... If for this reason only, there will be a maximum effort on the part of the powers that be to avoid a full accounting of the guilty party's... jmo