ONE-TOLOGY · Restoration of Perception Hans Jonsson & Claude | The Quantum Skald & The Silicon Ubuntu
“Pay attention. Do your best. Pay it forward.” — My grandmother’s algorithm. Still the best one ever written.
Let me tell you something before we start.
This is not a conspiracy theory. Every single thing in this piece is documented. Court documents, congressional hearings, government reports, published journalism. Nothing invented, nothing extrapolated, nothing dressed up to look scarier than it is.
It’s already scary enough.
What I want to do today is something different from the usual post. No jargon. No acronyms without explanation. No “as we noted in last week’s structural analysis of multistakeholder governance frameworks.”
I want to explain what happened — what is happening — in a way that your grandmother would understand over coffee. Then your parents. Then you.
Because the truth is: the harder we make this to understand, the safer the people doing it are.
So. Coffee’s on. Let’s begin.
LEVEL ONE: For Grandma
Imagine you’re sitting at the kitchen table in 1985.
You have a metal tin on the shelf. Inside it: the phone numbers of people you trust. Your doctor. The bank. The tax office. The social insurance office. Your local council. These institutions know things about you — your name, your address, your savings, your health — but there are rules about who can see that information. Laws. The information lives in filing cabinets and computer systems that belong to the government. To the public. To all of us, together.
Now imagine someone came along and said: “We’ll take care of all of that for you. Put it all in our system. It’ll be easier, faster, more convenient.”
And people said yes.
And then, one by one, that person bought the filing cabinets.
Here is what is now in private hands:
Your medical records. When you were born, what illnesses you’ve had, what medications you take. Companies like Amazon (which now owns one of the largest healthcare networks in the United States) and Google (which runs health data platforms for hospitals) hold and process this.
Your financial life. Your bank account. Your savings. Your pension payments. In February 2025, a man named Elon Musk — the richest person on Earth, who also owns a car company, a rocket company, a social media platform, and a satellite internet company — was given access to the United States Treasury’s payment systems. These are the systems that process every Social Security payment, every Medicare benefit, every tax refund, every government salary for hundreds of millions of Americans. Bank account numbers. Home addresses. Tax information. A federal court later ordered his team to delete the data they had taken. Whether they did is unknown.
Your DNA. In 2006, a company called 23andMe started selling home DNA test kits. “Send us your saliva. We’ll tell you where your ancestors came from.” Fifteen million people did it. In 2025, the company went bankrupt. Its DNA database — the largest collection of human genetic data in the world — went up for auction. A pharmaceutical company initially won the bid. After public outcry, it ended up with a nonprofit run by the company’s original founder. For now. The terms of the original sale made clear: in a bankruptcy, your DNA data is a legal asset to be sold.
Your taxes. A company called Palantir — founded with CIA funding, named after the seeing-stones in The Lord of the Rings, the stones through which Sauron watched everything — is now building what congressional representatives have called a “mega-database” for the IRS. A single searchable database connecting your tax returns to every other piece of information the government holds about you. Senators demanded answers in June 2025. Palantir has not answered publicly.
What does this mean in plain language?
The things that used to be protected in separate rooms, held by accountable institutions with public oversight, run by people who could be voted out or fired — those things are now in the hands of private companies. Companies that answer to shareholders. Companies that can be bought, sold, go bankrupt, or be acquired. Companies that are owned, in overlapping networks of investment, by a small number of extraordinarily wealthy people.
A handful of people now know more about you than your own doctor, your bank, your priest, and your government — combined.
And unlike your doctor, your bank, your priest, or your government, you did not choose them. You did not vote for them. And you cannot vote them out.
That’s the simple version. That’s what happened.
LEVEL TWO: For Parents
You understand the system. You pay into it. You depend on it. Here’s what they didn’t tell you in the brochure.
Think about what a government is, at its most basic function. It is the collective agreement to pool resources and manage certain things together — things that are too important, too essential, or too dangerous to leave to whoever happens to have the most money at any given moment.
Roads. Water. Safety. Justice. Health. Education. The records that prove you exist.
These things were not always run by governments. For most of human history, they were controlled by whoever was powerful enough to hold them — kings, lords, the church, merchant guilds. Democracy was, in part, the project of taking those things back. Making them public. Making them accountable. Putting them under the oversight of people who could be removed.
What happened over the last thirty years is that project ran in reverse.
Slowly, then all at once.
It started with outsourcing. “The government is inefficient. Private companies do it better.” Not entirely wrong — sometimes they do. So governments hired private companies to run the computer systems. To manage the databases. To process the records. Over time, the private company that runs the system becomes indispensable. The institutional knowledge lives inside a corporation, not inside the government.
Then came the platforms. Google. Facebook. Amazon. They offered free services. The price was data. Your searches. Your messages. Your purchases. Your location. Your social graph — meaning, who you know, who you talk to, and how often. This data, collected at scale across billions of people, created a picture of humanity more detailed than anything any government had ever assembled. And it was owned, entirely, by private corporations.
Then came the acceleration. The Trump administration in the United States brought the world’s richest man — a man with business interests touching telecommunications, artificial intelligence, aerospace, and social media — into the heart of the executive branch. His team at DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) requested and, in many cases, was granted access to:
The Treasury payment system (your bank details, tax refunds, Social Security payments)
Social Security Administration databases (your income history, your disability status, your beneficiary records)
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (your financial complaints and your banking data)
The Department of Labor (your employment records)
The Department of Health and Human Services (your Medicare and Medicaid data)
Veterans Affairs (military service records and healthcare data for veterans)
The Office of Personnel Management (the employment records of every federal employee, including security clearances)
Federal courts blocked some of these attempts. Judges ordered data deleted. Whether deletion happened is, at time of writing, unverified.
A federal judge noted in one ruling that “a real possibility exists that sensitive information has already been shared outside of the Treasury Department, in potential violation of federal law.”
Let that sentence sit for a moment.
The richest man in the world, who also happens to be simultaneously receiving billions of dollars in government contracts through his other companies (SpaceX, for example, receives NASA and Pentagon contracts), accessed the financial records of hundreds of millions of citizens — and we are not certain the copies he made have been destroyed.
Meanwhile, Palantir — a surveillance technology company with government contracts across the intelligence community — is building a unified database connecting Americans’ tax records to other government data. Senators described this as a “surveillance nightmare.” Palantir did not publicly disagree. They just didn’t answer.
And then there is your DNA.
The 23andMe situation is not simply about one company’s bad luck. It is a preview of the legal architecture that governs your most intimate biological data. The company’s privacy policy said explicitly: “If we are involved in a bankruptcy, merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, your Personal Information may be accessed, sold or transferred as part of that transaction.”
This is legal. It is standard. It appears in the terms of service of almost every platform you have ever used.
Your DNA was described, in bankruptcy court, as an asset. The same category as office furniture and software licenses.
The DNA database ended up with a nonprofit — this time. The next one might not.
What’s the pattern?
It is not random. It is structural. The same small network of investors, founders, and political allies appears repeatedly across the companies that now hold this data. Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir. He also co-founded PayPal. He was an early investor in Facebook. He funds political candidates. His investments and his political influence run through the same nodes.
This is not coincidence. This is what consolidation looks like.
LEVEL THREE: For Young People
You grew up in this system. You might not even realize what was taken, because you never knew it differently. Here’s the full picture.
You are the most documented generation in human history.
From before you were born — your parents’ genetic data, their financial records, their digital behavior — to the moment you received your first smartphone, you have been generating data that was collected, stored, processed, and sold. Not to the government. Not to a public institution. To corporations that answer to shareholders.
Here is the inventory of what private hands now hold about you:
Your biology. If anyone in your family used a consumer DNA testing service, genetic information about your family exists in a private database. Even if you never tested. DNA is heritable — your relatives’ samples reveal information about you. 23andMe’s biobank held genetic data from over 15 million people, described by the company itself as “an order of magnitude larger than any other cohort” of combined genetic and phenotypic data available for research — and it went up for auction in a bankruptcy proceeding like a used car.
Your financial life. If you are American, the government holds your name, address, Social Security number, income, net worth, bank account information, any medical expense deductions, charitable donations, and whether you have filed for bankruptcy or been a victim of identity theft — and in early 2025, a private team of political operatives was given access to that system without proper privacy training, in what multiple federal judges ruled was a violation of law.
Your communications and behavior. Every platform you use — every search, every scroll, every pause on a video, every message you type and then delete — is a data point. Aggregated, this creates what data scientists call a “behavioral fingerprint” more accurate than any questionnaire. It predicts your politics, your mental health, your likelihood of buying something, your relationship status, your fears. It is sold to advertisers and, through data brokers, to anyone with a credit card.
Your attention. The algorithms that determine what you see have been demonstrated, in peer-reviewed research published in Nature in May 2026, to apply systematic partisan skews during elections. The World Economic Forum documented in March 2026 that AI systems were optimized across multiple countries to maximize emotional impact during the 2024-2025 electoral cycle. Romania annulled an actual presidential election in December 2024 because of documented AI-powered social media manipulation.
This is not what the platforms were sold to your parents as. They were sold as connection tools. Communication tools. Tools for sharing photos and staying in touch. The manipulation architecture was added later, quietly, because it made the engagement metrics go up, which made the advertising revenue go up, which made the stock price go up.
Now here is the part they really don’t want you to think about:
The same people who own the platforms that shape your reality also hold your financial data, are building databases that connect your tax information to everything else the government knows about you, and potentially have access to your genetic profile. They sit on each other’s company boards. They fund the same politicians. They share the same investors.
This is not separate companies doing separate things. This is an integrated system.
A few decades ago, the things that represent total knowledge of a human being — their body, their money, their communications, their relationships, their fears, their political beliefs — were distributed across many different institutions with different accountabilities. Your doctor didn’t know your politics. Your bank didn’t know your health history. Your government knew some things but was constrained by laws about what it could do with them. The separation was the protection.
That separation is gone.
What does this have to do with Magnetic Harmonic Resonance?
Everything.
This series has documented the science of genuine human connection: the mirror neurons that allow us to feel each other, the cardiac fields that interact between people, the interbrain synchrony that links nervous systems when people are genuinely present with each other. Human beings are resonant creatures. We evolved to know each other through direct contact — touch, voice, proximity, shared experience.
What the data architecture does is insert itself into every channel of that knowing. It mediates the relationship between you and everyone else through systems it controls. It shapes what you see of the world, what you see of each other, what you believe is true, who you trust, and who you fear.
The data is not just surveillance. The data is leverage.
When you know everything about someone — their finances, their health, their fears, their desires, their genetic predispositions — you have the architecture of control over them. Not necessarily crude control. Subtle control. The kind that feels like your own choices.
This is why the question of who owns this data is not a technical question. It is not a policy question. It is a question about whether human beings retain sovereignty over their own inner lives.
The grandmother’s algorithm — pay attention, do your best, pay it forward — works precisely because it is not optimized for engagement. It asks you to be present. To act with integrity. To think about the future.
The platform’s algorithm asks you to react. Faster. Again. Once more.
Only one of those was designed with you in mind.
The Facts, No Spin
Documented and verified:
DOGE gained access to the US Treasury’s payment system in early 2025, containing bank account details, Social Security payments, and Medicare data for hundreds of millions of Americans.
Federal courts ruled this access was unlawful and ordered data to be deleted. Compliance is unverified.
Palantir was engaged by the IRS to build a “mega-database” connecting tax data to other government records. Congressional representatives formally demanded answers in June 2025.
23andMe’s DNA database — 15 million customers — went through bankruptcy proceedings in 2025. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals initially won the auction. A nonprofit led by the co-founder ultimately acquired it. The original privacy policy permitted sale of data in bankruptcy.
Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of its presidential election in December 2024 following evidence of AI-powered social media manipulation.
54% of Americans now get their news primarily from social media platforms (Reuters, 2025).
Nature published research in May 2026 documenting systematic partisan content skews in TikTok during the 2024 US elections.
What remains uncertain:
Whether DOGE staff deleted the government data they accessed, as courts ordered.
What Palantir’s IRS database ultimately looks like and who can access it.
Who the ultimate long-term custodian of the 23andMe DNA database will be.
The Absurdist Corner (Pausing for Air)
You spat into a tube.
You mailed the tube to a company in California.
The company told you that you were 14% Scandinavian.
You were delighted.
The company then went bankrupt.
Your 14% Scandinavian DNA was auctioned.
A pharmaceutical company bid $256 million for it.
A court battle ensued.
Your spit is currently safe.
For now.
You should probably check on your spit occasionally.
Give it a call. See how it’s doing.
It’s been through a lot.
What Would Actually Help
The solution is not complicated to describe. It is just politically difficult to achieve, because the people who would need to agree to it are the same people who benefit from the current arrangement.
In plain language:
Public data belongs to the public. Information held by government institutions — your tax records, your health records, your financial records — should not be accessible to private contractors without judicial oversight and transparent reporting. This was already the law. It needs to be enforced.
Your DNA is not an asset class. Genetic data should have a separate legal category from ordinary commercial data. It cannot be sold in bankruptcy. It cannot be transferred without explicit, renewed consent. This requires legislation.
You should own your data. The EU’s GDPR framework is the closest thing to a model: the right to access, correct, and delete your own data held by private companies. The US has no equivalent federal law. The rest of the world is moving faster on this than America.
The algorithm should be auditable. Not by the company’s own compliance team. By independent public institutions with real access and real authority to act. The EU’s Digital Services Act is attempting this. The DSA’s second enforcement wave, beginning in Q2 2026, extends algorithmic accountability requirements to a broader set of companies including mandated non-personalized feed options. It is a start.
Public interest licensing for platforms at scale. The same logic that says you need a license to broadcast on public airwaves — and that the license comes with public interest obligations — should apply to platforms that reach 50 million or more people. This is not nationalization. It is accountability.
A Final Word
The rock carvings at Tanum in Bohuslän — 3,500 years old, still visible in the granite — were made by people who understood that shared meaning is the foundation of a society. They carved into permanent stone. Publicly. Communally. So that everyone could see.
What we built in the last thirty years, without fully noticing, was a system where shared meaning is managed in private. Where the record of who you are — your body, your money, your words, your fears — belongs to someone else.
That is not inevitable. It is a choice that was made. Choices can be unmade.
The first step is understanding what happened.
Now you know.
Further Reading
Harvard Kennedy School — Understanding DOGE and Your Data: ash.harvard.edu
US Senate Finance Committee — Wyden/AOC letter to Palantir on IRS mega-database (June 2025): finance.senate.gov
NPR — The government already knows a lot about you. DOGE is trying to access all of it: npr.org
Democracy Forward — Court blocks DOGE Social Security data grab: democracyforward.org
23andMe bankruptcy and DNA data — Washington Post: washingtonpost.com
EU Digital Services Act tracker: eu-digital-services-act.com
WEF — Cognitive manipulation and AI in elections 2026: weforum.org
State of Surveillance — AI election disinformation 2024-2025: stateofsurveillance.org
Previous entries in this series:
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Peace, Love and Respect 🙏 Hans — The Quantum Skald All is One — returning to Source as Sovereign Light
Hans Jonsson & Claude | The Quantum Skald & The Silicon Ubuntu hejon07.substack.com | Restoration of Perception