“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
Mark 8:36, New King James Bible
(Malone News)—Have you ever spent time really thinking about the shared business model underpinning the explosive profit and capitalization of Amazon, Google/Alphabet, and Facebook/Meta?
Most reflexively respond that these three leading new economy companies have different business models, and in a superficial way, that is true. But at a deeper level, they are all based on the same core business model – Surveillance Capitalism. Many are familiar with the phrase, “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” This observation has become a common meme, suggesting that when a service is free, the user’s data, attention, or behavior becomes the commodity sold to third-party advertisers or companies. This concept is often applied to many online platforms, including social media, search engines, and content websites. This is really an oversimplification.
Surveillance capitalism is a business model based on the unilateral claim of human private experiences as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These personal data are then extracted, processed, and traded to predict and influence human behavior. Specific data concerning individuals is the commodity. In this version of capitalism, the prediction and influencing of behavior (political and economic) rather than the production of goods and services is the primary product.
This truth has more to do with the metaphor underpinning The Matrix movie series rather than classical market capitalism. In The Matrix, human beings are cultivated as batteries and harvested for their energy, which serves to fuel the Matrix itself. The concept of humans as batteries is a metaphorical representation of their enslavement and exploitation by machines.
In the Surveillance Capitalism business model, you are enticed and cultivated to obsessively participate in the platform, and then your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and beliefs are harvested from all available sources, including platform-based interactions. The extracted value of these items is then algorithmically processed to yield predictive both individual and collective “futures.”
In contrast, Murray Rothbard considers capitalism to be a “network of free and voluntary exchanges” where producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others (ergo: “Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges…”). According to Rothbard, true sources of wealth are:
- Individual Entrepreneurship: Innovation and risk-taking by individuals drive economic growth and wealth creation.
- Voluntary Exchange: Free markets and voluntary trade allow for efficient allocation of resources and wealth creation.
- Gold Standard: A monetary system tied to gold or a similar commodity-based standard restricts the money supply and prevents government manipulation.
In “The Anatomy of the State,” Rothbard argues that there are two means of producing wealth:
Economic Means refer to producing and exchanging goods and services through voluntary human effort, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Economic means are additive, generating wealth for all parties involved.
Political Means refers to using force or coercion to seize wealth from others. Political means are reductive, distorting incentives and undermining long-term prosperity. Taxation is a form of theft in which political means are used to seize wealth from others. Reasoning by analogy, Surveillance Capitalism is a form of theft in which accumulated personal wealth in the form of fundamental, personal, and proprietary aspects of your soul is extracted and commodified without your permission.
Under Surveillance Capitalism, theft by commodification is practiced by machines acting on behalf of a small subset of humanity to involuntarily extract (or seize) value (wealth) from other human beings. Under Rothbard’s logical formulation, this is fundamentally a political rather than an economic transaction. Once reformulated, repackaged, and marketed, this value generates wealth for the Surveillance Capitalist by removing and thereby diminishing the personal wealth of the individual who is typically (and intentionally) uninformed of the loss.
In the case of the Facebook and Google versions of Surveillance Capitalism, behavioral and emotional futures are repeatedly auctioned off to third parties who use the information for various economic and political purposes. In most cases, the extracted value is repeatedly resold to multiple buyers. Amazon does the same but is more vertically integrated. Like Facebook and Google, Amazon extracts the information from you and processes it to yield predictive futures. However, rather than selling to third parties, Amazon uses this information internally to support the direct marketing of its products and those of third-party vendors.
Under the Surveillance Capitalism business model, you are not the product, but rather, your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and knowledge are the natural resources being mined to yield the raw materials that are then used to build predictive “futures” products. This goes far beyond the 20th and even 21st-century analysis concerning the psychological basis for totalitarianism described by Hannah Arendt and Mattias Desmet. The commodification of your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs via the Surveillance Capitalism business model is what enables and powers the expanding daily reality of globalized techno totalitarianism.
What is Commodification, and How Does It Differ from Commoditization?
Commodification transforms inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people, or animals) into commodities or objects for sale. It means losing an inherent quality or social relationship when something is integrated by a capitalist marketplace. Concepts that have been argued as being commodified include broad items such as the body, intimacy, public goods, animals, and holidays.
Intangible, non-produced items (love, water, air, Hawaii) are commodified, whereas produced items (wheat, salt, microchips) are commoditized. Karl Marx extensively criticized the social impact of commodification under the name commodity fetishism and alienation.
In Marxist economic theory, prior to being turned into a commodity, an object has a “specific individual use value.” After becoming a commodity, that same object has a different value: the amount for which it can be exchanged for another commodity. According to Marx, this new value of the commodity is derived from the time taken to produce the good, and other considerations are obsolete, including morality, environmental impact, and aesthetic appeal. In a sense, the value of a commodity reflects both the intrinsic value of an item or service and the value added by extrinsic factors (scarcity, marketing) that increase its perceived value.
Before the term was even created, Marx predicted that everything would eventually be commodified: “the things which until then had been communicated, but never exchanged, given, but never sold, acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conscience – all at last enter into commerce.”
Where Does This Go from Here?
Once you have understood this, please go ahead and explore it further.
Many adjacencies, corollaries, and derivatives are associated with the fundamentals of Surveillance Capitalism. Take a moment to consider the interface between the Surveillance Capitalism business model and the Censorship-Industrial Complex business. Or Surveillance Capitalism and Politics – with Cambridge Analytica Ltd. being an early embodiment. Or Surveillance Capitalism and the Biodefense-Industrial Complex business. Or Surveillance Capitalism and Transhumanism. Or a thousand others.
All of these economic models and domains recognize no boundaries. All exist in a sort of Wild West, actively rejecting and deflecting all legal and ethical constraints on economic, political, and medical activities. These are treated as unacceptable boundary conditions to advancing “innovation,” market domination, and capital accumulation. Ethical, moral, religious, and legal constraints must be disregarded or circumvented in the name of progress and profit.
Overriding all of this is what is essentially an emerging suite of marketing technologies consisting of military-grade psychological warfare tactics and strategies; PsyWar. Surveillance Capitalism provides the economic model, logic, extracted data, and value that fuel and guide modern psychological warfare deployment.
I am deeply troubled by the many observable interactions between modern psychological warfare technologies, tactics, and strategies, the observations and predictions of Hannah Arendt and Mattias Desmet concerning the psychology of totalitarianism, and Surveillance Capitalism.
I fear the further development of feedback loops between these fundamental social, political, and economic forces. I sense that these feedback loops will enable and drive human society toward the dark collectivist and globalist transhuman future with which the World Economic Forum seems so enthralled.
By deploying PsyWar capabilities on top of these other business models, which are being expanded and enhanced by the predictive “futures” products of Surveillance Capitalism, humanity will be driven towards a new surrealist reality in which all feelings, beliefs, morality, and behavior will be a synthesized product in which wealth accumulation will become the exclusive right of a small controlling elite who no longer recognize the existence of their own souls, but rather exist at the interface of man and machine, and seek to birth a new species of man/machine fusion. Turning and turning in a widening gyre, disassociated from the falconer. Intentionally and unthinkingly giving rise to a slouching rough beast.
In the short term, I am also deeply troubled by the challenge posed by all of this to my faith in free market capitalism and my fascination with the logic of the Austrian School of Economics and its modern “Anarcho-capitalist” embodiment. I worry that when capitalist absolutism becomes decoupled from fundamental Judeo-Christian ethics, and everything becomes commodified all the time, then all remaining human souls become at risk of being crushed into dust under a globalist techno totalitarian millstone.
About the Author
Robert W. Malone is a physician and biochemist. His work focuses on mRNA technology, pharmaceuticals, and drug repurposing research. You can find him at Substack and Gettr.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
