Who’s at Fault for the Panopticonification of Society?

“I think it’s just going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. And finally, it’s going to be so weird that people are going to have to talk about how weird it is.” These were the words of American ethnobotanist, lecturer, and writer Terrance McKenna spoken in 1998. 

Let’s jump ahead to 2001. Against the backdrop of a grief-stricken and paranoid post 9/11 United States, Oracle steps in to save American national security. Amidst the tensions regarding security, Oracle CEO and co-founder Larry Ellison first advocated for the creation of a national identification card system, a digital ID that would store the biometric information of every American citizen. Ellison even offered to make the software free of charge. Ellison has, in some ways, achieved a similar consolidation of data to what a digital ID would bring by organizing most of the data on American citizens into Oracle databases, alluding to the nearly $2.5 billion USD in licensing revenue from federal governments that Oracle generated in 2003. It is more important than ever to recognize these changes in data structuring and remain skeptical about their use. One cannot say for certain that these decisions were made with malicious intent. Still, the timing certainly spoke to a larger shift towards the dominance of user-data-driven governmental monitoring systems.

Data is not the only thing American citizens should be concerned about when it comes to the increasingly powerful tech monopolies; their information sources are also being targeted. On July 24, 2025, an $8.4 billion USD merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media was approved by US regulators, giving Skydance founder David Ellison ownership of America’s most influential entertainment and news platforms, including Paramount Pictures, the CBS broadcast television network, and Nickelodeon. Larry Ellison, David’s father, was the financial backer for the merger. Ellison now has the freedom to influence American news, children’s TV, and the narratives that shape average American household politics. Ellison’s consolidation of these news channels presents an interesting shift in the narrative of media distribution, because it beckons us to question the sources, biases, and vested interests in the information we are exposed to. 

However, the consolidation of informational institutions doesn’t stop in the US; it is also highly relevant in the UK, with many investments imperative for Tony Blair’s think tank. The Larry Ellison Foundation has donated or pledged over $200 million USD to the tech-focused Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Together, they are advancing on unifying all government data under one database so it can be “consumed and used by the AI model,” said Larry Ellison at the World Governments Summit held in Dubai in February. He goes on to elaborate that the National Health Service (NHS) is the perfect example of unification, since it holds almost all the data on UK citizens, but, according to Ellison, it is fragmented and “unfit for purpose.” What we should focus on is the crucial use of the word “using” when discussing population data. What exactly would an AI model be “using” population data for, in a database meant to “unify” a “fragmented” organizational system? 

To better understand the repercussions of this, we need to pivot and examine another big tech player: Peter Thiel. Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir, a software company that provides intelligence services to federal agencies, governments, militaries, and international organizations. The intelligence they provide is in surveillance and facial recognition, and they were just handed a seven-year, $415 million USD contract to overhaul the NHS and build a central data repository, called the Federated Data Platform, in the UK. The implications of this are huge: not only has Ellison already misstepped on the use of this data in some sort of AI-related “purpose,” but one of the largest companies in surveillance data has taken over its development. Although there is not much evidence of a direct misuse of this power, it is imperative to question who will control our health care systems, which include some of the most sensitive data about individuals. 

When discussing the actions of tech leaders, equal focus should be placed on who they are and how their identities shape their behaviour. Ellison’s first biography was published in 1997, titled The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison:* God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison. A conflated sense of self and external forces keeping their perceptions of control front and centre have been at the forefront of how tech billionaires have consolidated that power. This was seen when Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos sat front and center at Trump’s inauguration, and it was reiterated when Trump said Larry Ellison is “the CEO of everything.” The enormity of this level of oversight should not be brushed off as a coincidence; rather, the decision-making and leadership roles responsible for allowing the usurpation of power should be scrutinized and questioned. 

At the start of the article, there is a mention of a snippet from an interview with Terrance McKenna. In the same interview from 1998, McKenna makes an interesting claim, “…The systems which are in place to keep the world sane are utterly inadequate to the forces that have been unleashed.” McKenna was not talking about the current techno-monopoly when he made that point, but it is evidently an interesting perspective to grasp at. What is important to understand is that the systems in place are rapidly transforming, and the future of our autonomy, privacy, and, consequently, freedom is at a crossroads. Thus, it is up to us to decide whether accepting these changes as they come is the best course of action or whether there should be consequences for the leaders in charge. Creating monopolies over populations while controlling information and knowledge should not be disguised under the guise of “advancement”—it should be viewed through the lens of privacy breaches, leaking sensitive information to government agencies, and spying on one’s own citizens. These are all markers of a surveillance state, and maybe it is time to question why society seems to be moving in that direction. 

Edited by Jacob Van Bergh

Featured Image: “Larry Ellison On Stage” by Oracle PR is licensed under CC BY 2.0.