Digital Cage

Hey everyone, welcome back to another Learn With Hatty. This is my latest video turned into an article. This is based off of some facts and some theories or speculation. I am creating an idea of what I think the future is going to look like if we do not take the right steps to support our favorite open source projects and privacy. Check out the video version if you get a chance. I created all of the media using Grok Imagine. I found a good rythem in making these using a couple different AI projects. If you have any ideas on topics you would like me to create a video about please leave a comment and let me know. Let us begin.

If you watched “Part Two: Who Are They?”, you know we already pulled back the curtain on the shadowy players in crypto, AI, big tech, and government. But here’s the thing, 2025 wasn’t just “another crazy year.” It was the acceleration point.

While the world was glued to headlines about Gaza ceasefires, Trump’s second-term chaos, and far-right surges across Europe, something far more calculated was taking shape in the background. Crypto boomed, busted, and “reset.” AI didn’t just trend, it invaded everyday life. Big tech hoarded talent like never before, and banks like JP Morgan quietly started tokenizing trillions in assets.

Governments? They rolled out digital currencies and digital IDs faster than you can say “surveillance state.” That’s not random. That’s not coincidence. That’s a coordinated push toward a universal system where every dollar you spend, every place you go, and every click you make is tracked, analyzed, and scored by “them.”

Stick around as we connect the dots in this breakdown. By the end, you’ll see how 2025 laid the foundation for a world where privacy isn’t just weakened, it’s basically a relic. Let’s get started.

AI’s Unstoppable Rise

First up is AI. In 2025, AI stopped being hype and officially became the engine behind the tracking machine. Google dropped models like Gemini 3 and Gemma 3, pushing reasoning, planning, and multilingual capabilities to new levels. The Stanford AI Index showed massive productivity boosts and shrinking skill gaps across industries. McKinsey’s global survey backed it up. Companies weren’t just experimenting with AI anymore; they were embedding it deep into customer service, logistics, HR, and high-level decision-making.

Sounds like progress, right? But here’s the dark twist, all that “efficiency” runs on data, your data. AI agents got more autonomous, handling tasks with minimal human oversight, exactly the kind of thing Microsoft said we’d see more of in everyday life. The hype correction hit, MIT and others pointed out that AI didn’t magically fix everything, but the race didn’t slow down.
IEEE Spectrum’s numbers showed U.S. firms dominating large models. Training costs stayed high, but usage costs dropped, which means AI became cheap to deploy everywhere. It was suddenly in every app, every platform, every service.

Now connect that to government. Under Trump, AI was integrated more deeply into federal data systems under the banner of “efficiency,” “fraud detection,” and “national security.” Critics warned this is the perfect setup for predictive policing, automated risk scores, and massive biometric databases.

Imagine AI systems pulling in your social media posts, your transaction history, your location data, your biometrics, and analyzing all of it in real time. That’s the universal system in action. And as AI pushed further into robotics, healthcare, smart cities, and wearables, the control net didn’t just expand, it tightened. Scary? Yes. But AI is only one piece of the puzzle.

Crypto’s Wild Ride

Now let’s shift to crypto. 2025 was a rollercoaster that is for sure. On the surface, it looked like just another boom-and-bust cycle. Underneath, it was perfect cover. Early in the year, liquidity surged, institutions piled in, and volatility cooled down. KuCoin alone hit about 1.25 trillion dollars in trading volume, averaging more than 114 billion a month.

Then came the hangover. By Q4, a big leverage reset wiped out a lot of the year’s gains. Bitcoin ended the year down from its mid-year highs. Analysts spun it as a “healthier foundation,” but for long-term holders, it just highlighted how fragile and easily steered this space is.

The grand predictions failed, total crypto market cap never reached the 6 trillion some people were calling for. Ethereum ripped about 65% in Q3, Solana around 32%, while Bitcoin lagged at roughly 6%. Meanwhile, global policy moved forward quietly. TRM Labs highlighted how just 30 key jurisdictions now cover around 70% of global crypto exposure.

Here’s where the conspiracy line starts to come into focus. That chaos? That “unpredictability”? It’s the perfect excuse for governments and central banks to say, “See, wild crypto is dangerous, use our safe digital money instead.” Enter CBDCs and “regulated” stablecoins. Programmable money means they can control not just how much you spend, but what you spend it on and where. Tie it to your carbon footprint, your social behavior, your political donations, your health status, and suddenly money isn’t neutral. It’s conditional.
Crypto getting mainstreamed under “friendlier” regulations doesn’t automatically mean freedom. It can mean the opposite: a smooth on-ramp into surveillance coins. With states and institutions openly eyeing Bitcoin reserves and tokenized treasuries, the line between “sovereign money” and “crypto rails” gets blurrier by the day.

Big Tech’s Dominance

Now, what was big tech doing while all this unfolded? They weren’t sitting on the sidelines. They were building the infrastructure that makes the system possible. DeepSeek emerged as a serious challenger, forcing the old giants to push even harder. Meta went on a hiring spree, poaching thousands of AI and ML engineers. The talent war intensified, concentrating power in a handful of companies with the most compute, the most data, and the most influence.
At the same time, TikTok faced legal attacks and regulatory threats, outages hit major platforms, and wave after wave of data breaches reminded us that our information is always on the edge of exposure. The World Economic Forum highlighted AI, blockchain, and digital finance as top “transformative technologies.” TechRepublic talked about AI megacenters, space-powered data infrastructure, and record-breaking data breaches in the same breath.
Interestingly, only two of the “Magnificent Seven” actually beat the S&P 500 in 2025. The narrative of insane big-tech valuations cooled a bit, but their power didn’t shrink, it consolidated. State tech offices struggled to modernize, while private giants raced ahead with AI integration, cloud dominance, and proprietary data pipelines.

And here comes the crucial part. Under Trump’s second term, public-private partnerships ramped up. Subsidies, incentives, and defense contracts poured into AI, chips, and cloud infrastructure. In other words, the state and Silicon Valley started fusing even more tightly. Think about it. Big tech owns the data centers, the AR/VR hardware, the AI assistants, the app stores, the ad networks. Governments bring the laws, the enforcement, and the ID systems. Crypto and tokenization bring programmable money and assets.

Outages, hacks, and “security crises” then become the perfect justification to roll out “more secure” identity systems and tokenized access layers. And every time you log in, pay, verify, or travel, you leave a perfectly linked, time-stamped trail. That’s where “they” turn your data into their most powerful weapon.

Banks Go Blockchain

Now let’s talk about the old guard, the banks. In 2025, traditional finance didn’t fight blockchain, they hijacked it. JP Morgan took the lead, launching its first tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, branded “My OnChain,” and handling trillions in assets. Their Kinexys blockchain unit scaled digital asset infrastructure, betting that tokenization isn’t a niche, it’s the next stanard.

We saw landmark moves like a U.S. commercial paper issuance on Solana for Galaxy Digital, settled in USDC. Private equity funds started experimenting with tokenization on institutional platforms. Money market funds hit around 7.7 trillion dollars, and stablecoins surpassed 300 billion.

Mainstream headlines called it “innovation” and “efficiency.” But what it really does is redraw the map of Wall Street into something more trackable, more programmable, and more dependent on digital ledgers. Because once assets are tokenized, every investment, pledge, collateral move, and settlement becomes a data point. It can be traced, analyzed, and linked. Cash in a drawer is invisible. Tokenized everything is not. This is the on-ramp to a fully banked, fully visible financial system. Where opting out becomes harder and harder.

Government’s Grand Plan

Finally, the piece that locks everything together, governments. In 2025, CBDCs and digital IDs moved from theory to rollout. The IMF released papers focusing on “risk management” and “financial stability” around CBDCs. The UNDP framed digital currencies as tools for financial inclusion in developing countries. Central banks like the Bank of Japan advanced pilot programs, stress-testing the tech and the policy implications.

In the U.S., Congress debated the idea of a “digital dollar.” In the U.K., the Bank of England pushed ahead with digital pound plans designed to work seamlessly alongside physical cash, at least for now. Reports estimated that around 15 countries had either launched or gone live with some form of CBDC by the end of 2025. On paper, you’ll hear a lot about “privacy-enhancing technologies.” Even EU bodies like the EDPS warned about the risks of full financial digitization. The Atlantic Council kept a running tracker showing just how global this move has become. But when you strip away the buzzwords, here’s what it really is. Digital IDs tied to health data, income, benefits, taxes, travel, and eventually your money.

If your ID is required to access your funds, your job, your transportation, your healthcare, then “non-compliance” isn’t a slap on the wrist. It’s exclusion from society. Combine that with AI’s data analysis, big tech’s infrastructure, crypto’s tokenization, and banking’s obsession with on-chain settlement, and what do you get? A single, integrated, trackable ledger of human activity.

The Final Warning

So, let’s zoom out. 2025 wasn’t just a year of random headlines. It was the blueprint being drawn in real time. AI analyzes. Crypto and tokenization structure and label every asset and payment. Big tech builds the pipes and the interfaces. Banks normalize on-chain money and assets. Governments enforce it all with digital IDs, CBDCs, and regulation.

From Google’s AI breakthroughs, to JP Morgan’s tokenized funds, to the CBDC pilots and digital ID frameworks. Everything is converging toward a world of total tracking. You can call it “efficiency.” They will. You can call it “safety.” They absolutely will. But at a certain point, efficiency becomes control. Safety becomes obedience. And convenience becomes a cage. Is this the future of prosperity, or the infrastructure of digital enslavement? That’s the question you need to ask yourself now, not later.

In Part Four, we’re going to talk about resistance and opt-out strategies, how to protect your privacy, where you still have leverage, and what you can do before this becomes inescapable. If you found this helpful or thought-provoking, hit like, subscribe, and drop a comment. What do you think 2026 is going to bring. More pushback, or deeper control?

Thanks for reading everyone, and as always…stay vigilant and keep learning.
Original article on Medium