Are we building our own digital prison?

Nobody builds a prison around themselves on purpose. It goes up a brick at a time, and every single brick sounds sensible while it’s being laid. Step back far enough though, and you can see the shape of the thing. Walls made of data centres. Money that logs everything you do with it. Rules about what you can read and post. And governments waving it all through no matter how loudly we object.

I want to walk through those four bricks one at a time, because each one sounds like a conspiracy theory until you look at the numbers. Everything here is linked, so you can check it yourself.

Data centres nobody asked for#

The industry I work in is pouring money into AI data centres at a rate nobody has seen before. US data centre construction hit an annualised $68 billion in June 2026, up more than 500% since early 2022. And that’s just the buildings, not the chips inside them. Alphabet plans to spend roughly $200 billion this year. Microsoft up to $190 billion. Meta up to $145 billion. Ed Zitron, who tracks this stuff obsessively, puts the total at over a trillion dollars across the big five in 2025 and 2026.

Now the awkward bit: almost none of it makes money. MIT found that 95% of corporate AI pilots fail to show a return. OpenAI expects to lose about $14 billion this year, around $115 billion by 2029, and doesn’t forecast a profit until the 2030s. Its answer? Raise another $100 billion and keep building. A lot of the money is circular too. Nvidia invests in OpenAI, OpenAI spends it on Nvidia chips, and everyone books it as growth. When investors actually scrutinised the flagship deal, it shrank from a reported $250 billion to $105 billion. That’s $145 billion of “demand” that vanished the moment someone asked questions.

And the public? Gallup found 70% of Americans don’t want an AI data centre near them. By one count, local objections held up $156 billion worth of projects in 2025. So did anyone slow down? No. The UK now lets data centres apply for “national importance” status, so approval comes from Whitehall instead of your local council. Maine passed a moratorium and the governor vetoed it. Meanwhile the IEA reckons data centre electricity use will roughly double to 945 TWh by 2030. That’s more than the whole of Japan uses today.

Maybe the bubble pops, maybe it doesn’t. Either way, the buildings, the grid connections and all that surveillance-ready compute will still be standing. Walls tend to outlast the reasons for building them.

Crypto: the great anonymity con#

Crypto was sold as the way out. Digital cash, beyond the banks, beyond the state. Bitcoin’s very first block has a newspaper headline about bank bailouts baked into it. Seventeen years later, how’s that going?

Every transaction ever made sits on a public ledger. Forever. A whole industry (Chainalysis, Elliptic and friends) exists purely to put names to it, and Chainalysis will tell you themselves that Bitcoin is “not entirely anonymous but rather pseudonymous”. Cluster the wallet addresses, subpoena the exchange that did your ID checks, and there you are. Their customers include governments and banks.

Think about what that means. Cash forgets a transaction the second it happens. Bitcoin remembers it forever. We didn’t build private money. We built the most traceable money in human history, and along the way we got everyone comfortable with the idea that money should be traceable at all.

And where real privacy does still exist, it’s being outlawed. The EU’s money laundering rules will ban privacy coins and anonymous crypto accounts by 2027. The one thing crypto actually promised is the one thing being made illegal.

Watch what you post#

Now the speech part. I’ll stick mostly to Britain, because it’s on my doorstep.

Since July 2025, thanks to the Online Safety Act, you can be asked for your passport, a face scan or your bank details just to look at perfectly legal content online. The public response was immediate: within days, VPN apps were the most downloaded on the UK App Store. Over 550,000 people signed a petition to repeal the Act. Parliament debated it and said no.

At the same time, around 12,000 people a year get arrested over things they’ve posted or messaged. Call it 30 a day, under communication laws that mostly predate the smartphone. To be fair, far fewer are charged than arrested, and convictions have actually fallen while arrests rose. But that’s cold comfort. Arrest first, shrug later still teaches everyone the same lesson: watch what you type.

The EU is at it too. For over three years it’s been trying to pass “Chat Control”, which would scan private messages on everyone’s phone, encrypted ones included, just in case. Every time experts and a handful of member states kill it, it comes back reworded. The latest version drops mandatory scanning but wants age verification inside private messaging instead.

And underneath all the law sits a quieter layer. Platform algorithms already decide which posts travel and which die quietly. Those rules were never written by any parliament, and there’s no appeal.

Is anyone listening?#

Here’s the part that worries me most. All of the above might be tolerable if the feedback loop worked. It doesn’t.

When the UK government announced its digital ID scheme, 2,984,191 people signed the petition against it. One of the biggest petitions the site has ever seen. The government’s response, published before the debate even took place: we’re doing it anyway, and it’ll be mandatory for right-to-work checks.

70% oppose data centres nearby, so planning gets centralised. Half a million ask for repeal of the Online Safety Act and get “no plans to repeal”. The machinery of consent still exists. Petitions, consultations, debates. But it works like a pressure valve now, not a steering wheel. Somewhere for the anger to go so nothing has to change.

To be fair#

I promised myself I’d be objective, so here’s the other side, and it isn’t a straw man.

Kids really are being harmed online, and polling quoted in Parliament puts support for age checks at 69%. That’s the same public signing the petitions, mind. Blockchain tracing does catch ransomware gangs and scam operations. Data centres pay taxes, and AI is useful even where it’s wildly overpriced. Digital ID works fine in Estonia. Nobody involved is twirling a moustache. Almost every brick was laid to fix a real problem, by people who could give you an honest reason for it.

So, are we?#

Yes. I think we are.

A prison isn’t defined by what its builders intended. It’s defined by the architecture. Walls you didn’t choose. A ledger of everything you spend. Rules about what you can read and say, enforced with ID checks. And custodians who log your objections and carry on regardless. Check 2026 against that list and tell me how many boxes are still empty.

The ratchet only turns one way, too. Powers granted rarely get handed back. Infrastructure never gets unbuilt. And no database built for one purpose has ever turned down a second one. Digital ID is being sold as immigration enforcement today. It becomes mandatory for work tomorrow. Give it a few years and it’ll be “convenient” for everything else.

But the same research that depressed me also shows the door is still open. VPN downloads spiked the week the age gates arrived. A small town in Missouri turned a data centre away. Port Washington in Wisconsin forced the first public referendum on one. Chat Control has been fought to a standstill for three years by ordinary people refusing to have it. And $145 billion of imaginary demand vanished from the Nvidia deal simply because people asked questions. Prisons need compliant inmates, and compliance is the one thing still in short supply.

One last confession. You almost certainly found this post through a search engine or a feed owned by the companies I’ve just described, served from their cloud, ranked by their algorithms. So was most of the research behind it. Even the complaining happens on the landlord’s property. That’s not a reason to stop writing. It’s the best evidence of how high the walls have already got.

The door’s still open. Let’s not shut it on ourselves.

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Further reading#

If you want to go deeper, these are worth your time:

• Ed Zitron, The AI Industry Is Losing. The most thorough running audit of AI’s finances.
• Wolf Street, AI Data Center Construction Spending Goes Exponential. The construction numbers behind the boom.
• Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, What happens to data centres when the AI bubble pops?
• Amnesty International, A Digital Prison. The phrase is already literal in Serbia.
• EFF on the Online Safety Act and UK digital ID.
• EDRi, Chat Control: what is actually going on?
• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The book that named the business model.
• Yanis Varoufakis on technofeudalism. Platforms as fiefdoms, the rest of us as serfs.
• Cory Doctorow on enshittification. Why platforms rot once you’re locked in.