Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is April 27th, 2026, and we're talking a little bit about some historical events because history repeats itself, or at the very least, to quote George Lucas, it rhymes. And boy, we have enough rhyming for a poem.
So, the European Union today, I saw a little tweet about something they're trying to sneak through. Sneaky, sneaky European Union. Let me show you guys this right here. All right, let me move this on over. Oh, and we'll go ahead and grab that. Ah, perfect. All right, you ready? Hold on to your butts. Whoa, here we go.
From International Cyber Digest, and by the way, I included a link in the video to the source document fact-checking this: The European Commission is about to steal your search history in one of the largest forced data grabs in the history of the open internet, and almost nobody's talking about it. The scope is staggering. Every query you type, every voice and photo search, every autocomplete you accept, your language, your device, your country pinned to a 3-km grid, every result you saw, every link you hovered over—not even clicked, just hovered over—every click and scroll in the full chronological order of all of your search sessions on Google.
And what does that mean? The European Union is going to know your health symptoms, your pregnancy status, your sexual orientation, your interests—who knows? They know it all. Political beliefs, religious beliefs, financial distress, legal troubles, addictions, affairs, and more. This is under the proposed measures for the DMA article six eleven. Google would be ordered to ship daily search behavior of hundreds of millions of Europeans to multiple third parties through a daily API feed. Any approved online search engine or AI chatbots included would get five years of access, including government agents, so they can create a social credit profile on people. How about that?
And you might say, "Oh, come on, Charles. They can't be doing that. Nobody would be that dystopian." Well, if you look at the source document in the notes, they are. Where this comes from is something from Chinese history that Europeans are embracing. Mao, a pure evil person but very smart, created something called the Hundred Flowers Campaign between 1956 and 1957. He said, "Let a hundred flowers spring from the ground. Those hundred flowers will represent the intellectuals and the critics and tell us what's not working. Tell us where you're disgruntled. Tell us where you're upset. Tell us what the problems are."
People were a little suspicious, but over time, they started saying, "Yeah, okay. We'll tell you some stuff." And then what did Mao do? UNO reverse card, call Cultural Revolution. Yeah, purging time. He killed two million people. All those critics were lined up and shot. Why? Because he wanted to know the answers: Who's with us? Who's against us? Who has politics we don't agree with, and who needs to be put in the gulag? It's the ash bin of history, and the problem is the Hundred Flowers is not being done by a government anymore; it's being done by private industry. It's why it's called surveillance capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism is where a third-party company, not owned or operated by the government, collects information about you from your interactions with it or its affiliates and then acts as an agent of the government to help the government decide whether you're a good actor or a bad actor and what to do with you. There are two types of power: soft power and hard power. Soft power is where they deplatform you—your YouTube account just disappears, you can no longer access your bank account.
Recent legislation in the United States is talking about DUI prevention, creating software inside your car so that you can't drive if they think you're impaired. Well, maybe freedom of transportation can just be deplatformed. Soft power restricts your movements, your ability to communicate, and your economic agency. Hard power is Mao—that's the death camps. Some people, like the Musks, you can't really control, so you have to get "Purchy McPurchers."
This is happening in real time. Historically, when you look at the Stasi or the KGB or any of these other secret police, it was very expensive and time-consuming to target you. Their methodology was to make an example to create fear. It's why the Romans had crucifixion. They nailed you to a cross, not in the basement but up on the hill, so everybody in town could see it. They would walk by and say, "Oh boy, what happened to Matthias?" Well, he pissed off the Romans. You better not piss them off; they'll nail you to a cross. Public humiliation, public punishment.
With AI, you can go much further. Using surveillance capitalism and this Hundred Flowers concept of getting people to dox themselves through various means, you can retroactively look through, as Mao did, and AI can target every single person in the world. Everybody gets to be made an example. Stage one is the soft power of deplatforming, and they've tested it with COVID, economic deplatforming, and now they're testing it with freedom of movement. They did that with vaccine passports and a bunch of other things, all being put together into a global framework.
You might say, "Oh, but Charles, come on. Who would do something like that? What would be the motivation?" I'm glad you asked. We have this thing—let me see if I can spell it—Palantir. Let's see here. The Palantir ontology is integrating itself into the U.S. government as we speak. Currently, all this stuff is being wired together to a total of at least 27 agencies—not just the scary ones, but also the ones you don't fear right now: the DOD, the U.S. Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, U.S. Special Operations Command, Department of Homeland Security, ICE, HSI, HHS, the healthcare people, the CDC, the FDA, USDA, the Federal Aviation Administration, Border Patrol, the CIA, IRS, the DOJ, the FBI, the NSA, the Social Security Administration, NASA, FEMA—27 agencies.
So, everyone is getting wired into a private surveillance capitalism stack that knows everything about you and everything you do. The European Union is mandating that Google has to turn it all over to third-party APIs. Who's going to plug into it? Firms like Palantir. And then what are they going to do with it? Turn on social credit for everybody. Flip a switch, turn on social credit. That will be connected to your communication, your transportation, and your money.
You say and do the wrong things according to the power structure, and your bank account gets turned off, a la CBDC. Your voice is turned off—no more Gmail for you, no more YouTube for you, no more X for you, no more social media for you, no more TikTok. It's out. Your car doesn't turn on, and your passport gets revoked. To make it even spicier, what if we also punish people for associating with you? So, if Bobby over here has a score of 200 and Jimmy's score is 500, if Jimmy interacts with Bobby, sorry, Jimmy, now you're at 450. You're getting close to stuff turning off. Better not talk to Bobby.
What does that make you? It makes you the enforcer of the tyranny of the regime. You, the individual, are going to comply because if you don't, you get your bank account shut off, you can no longer drive your car, and you can no longer express your voice. You might say, "I have constitutional protections." Where do they apply with private companies? Remember that argument? It's a private company; they can do whatever they want. Yeah, they can just shut you off. You have no constitutional protections because it's not the government doing it; it's a third party.
All your criticism, your search histories, your political affiliations, your sexual partners—all that's going to be turned over in both America and the European Union, and it's going to be entered into these giant, scary ontologies. They're going to use it to exert soft power, and then the people they can't exert it over, they can systematically harm. If you complain about harming them, you know what happens? You get added to the list. Unlike the Soviet Union or the time of the Romans, it's not just one out of a hundred who gets punished; AI makes it everybody.
So, when someone asks you why midnight, that's why. Freedom of association, commerce, and expression—we cannot allow trusted third parties to know everything about you, control AI, control the flow of money, and control the flow of information. You need to be your own bank. You need to own your own data. Your identity needs to be self-sovereign. You need systems that can't be evil, that cannot comply with these types of things. It's a fight worth having. Never in human history has so much power been given to so few, and so much capability belongs to so few.
The reason constitutions exist is to restrain this behavior. These governments found a loophole through surveillance capitalism and found partners in crime to help them do these things. The only thing we have are these protocols to push back. It's why cryptocurrencies are the most consequential technology in the history of humanity because this is the technology that prevents humanity from being put into chains by the few at the peril of the many.
So, that's why midnight. It's a binding tissue that connects many different technologies together, allowing you to interact with the big people and the little people while preserving your self-sovereignty and your privacy. You can't debate this video because all this stuff is happening in plain sight. You can see the documents, the partnerships, the billions of dollars of value being exchanged, and the Snowden disclosures. They've been working towards total information awareness since DARPA had the IAO, the Information Awareness Office. Google it. Look at the logo; it's a pyramid with a goddamn eye looking at the planet. These people never go away; they just flare up like surveillance herpes.
We beat them down, we seem to have a victory, and then ten years later, they come up using a different set of boogeymanism. I didn't even mention the identity backdoors currently being proposed for many operating systems. They want KYC to use a computer. So, not only is your freedom of movement, your freedom of speech, and your economic agency at risk, but your access to a computer could potentially be shut off if your identity is shut off. Is that good for you? Doubt me? Google it. Look at the legislation. They're haggling over whether open-source software should use it or not.
Tell me, is iOS open source? Is Windows open source? How many people are there? Android doesn't really count; Google will comply, as will Samsung. They're forced to. Are you getting it yet? If we don't have freedom of association, commerce, and expression, we have nothing, and life won't be worth living. I don't believe some wave of robots led by an evil ASI is going to kill us all in a Terminator style, but I sure as hell believe that if we admit the status quo and stay distracted, this is the kind of stuff that's going to do us in and make work life not worth living.
That's why I'm still in the fight. That's why we got Midnight, and that's what we fight against philosophically. You and only you should own your own identity. You and only you should be your own bank, and you and only you should own your own data. No one should have this much power ever under any circumstance.
Thank you all for listening, and until next time, have a good day.
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