THE SOFT FORK | Remember Sundays
Attention is the new gold, and the fight for AI supremacy
Look what it takes to get attention these days?
Pattern Recognition and AI Research
This is my attempt to format a living record of AI research for my childrenâso that someday, if they wish, they can understand how we arrived at this moment. The choices most of us believe we are making are illusions; they were already made for us. The Supreme Court has long since been compromised, and the symbols of power we see on the surface are a distraction from the infrastructure of control being built beneath our feet.
Epsteinâs âBallroomâ operates as a data hub, a nerve center of influence, tethered to the network of new data centers springing up nationwide. They own the house, and when they tore it down, it was not destructionâit was misdirection. The true prize is the bunker below, integrated into the digital nervous system of Silicon Valleyâs Washington D.C. twin. In 2025, attention is the new gold, and the fight for AI supremacy is the ultimate war for that resource.
The Illusion of Foreign Policy
Despite the headlines about supporting Ukraine, the deeper reality is that Russian influence already permeates our government. What we are witnessing is not aidâit is a performance. Every message from the White House feels like theater, because the decisions are not originating there. Leadership changes are just skin-deep alterations on a system already operating as a captured state.
Trump, in this system, is an instrument. He is used like an autopen, signing off on actions he likely does not even fully comprehend. They grant him whatever he demands, not out of loyalty, but because the underlying machinery needs a distraction and a signature. The machine itself is the regime.
The State-Regime Society
We are already in a state-regime society. Platforms like TikTok are not neutral; they are operational tools. By 2025, feeds are populated with approximately fifty percent AI-generated chatbot content. These bots steer attention, amplify hard-right narratives, and invisibly suppress content that does not align with the preferred frame. Participation in this ecosystem means unwitting complicity in the regimeâs attention economy.
Lawsuits and public debates are smokescreens. The real work is happening underground, literally. The teardown of the White House structures is not about renovation for tradition or securityâit is about integration. Beneath the East Room, tunnels and bunkers are being rewired into the national and global digital lattice. AI-guided systems, data storage, and market-tracking nodes form a self-contained loop, where value and intelligence circulate without the friction of public oversight.
The Hidden Business of Governance
If you observe the U.S. tech and policy summits, the pattern becomes unavoidable. The country is managed like a business, complete with revenue streams from taxation, tariffs, and privatization of public resources. Administration changes do not touch the underlying system. Whether the figurehead is Trump or anyone else, the pipelines stay in place, and the machine hums on.
This soft fork of governance mirrors the architecture of AI and global marketsâclosed loops, self-reinforcing, optimized for extraction. Traditional liquidity, democratic deliberation, and visible accountability have been deprecated. In their place, we have a society running atop invisible code, guided by private agreements between government organs and tech-finance hybrids.
The Bigger Picture
The emotional narratives capturing headlinesâthe outrage cycles, the public condemnationsâare only surface phenomena. The real transformation is infrastructural. We are shifting into a world where the visible government is a theater, and the true operations occur in sealed corridors of data centers, market algorithms, and AI-driven surveillance ecosystems.
The soft fork is already complete. We live in its branch.
CreatorHuman ⢠TJ Baden