How Extraction, Secrecy, and GDP Illusions Sustain a Collapsing System
The Illusion of Motion
The United States is not merely experiencing political dysfunction or economic inequality; it is in a state of terminal imperial entropy.
The system still moves, but no longer evolves. Its momentum is preserved through extractive force (mineral, cultural, political, human) while the meaning behind the movement has collapsed.
We measure “growth” in metrics that obscure reality. GDP, that sacred indicator of national health, is a grotesque illusion when examined closely. Strip away the veneer, and what remains is not a productive economy but a war-based one. The largest growth sectors tell the true story:
- Arms manufacturing (the U.S. supplies nearly 40% of the world’s weapons).
- Intelligence and surveillance (a $100+ billion annual black budget).
- Classified tech contracts (the military-industrial-telecom-AI complex).
- Extraction (of data, rare earth minerals, and human capital).
These exports flow to rogue states and puppet regimes, laundered through the moral buffer of plausible deniability. “We just sold the weapons; we didn’t fire them.” The system does not rise by creating; it persists by externalizing destruction abroad through war, and at home through gentrification, debt servitude, and what can only be called apartheid economics.
The Secrecy Class: America’s New Aristocracy
The traditional class structure has inverted. The Top Secret Class, contractors, military officers, data handlers, surveillance architects, is not just the last vestige of a stable middle class in terms of income. They are the de facto ruling class, wielding power without accountability. Consider their privileges:
- Guaranteed income streams (taxpayer-funded, recession-proof contracts).
- Legal impunity (protected by classification and national security doctrine).
- Cross-sector authority (revolving doors between Pentagon, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street).
- Total insulation (never facing the consequences of their policies).
Meanwhile, the working class has been replaced by a service class; surveilled, precarious, and disposable. The result is a two-tier society: one that designs the systems of control, and one that survives under them. This is Epartheid.
Epistemological Control: How Entropy Becomes Strategy
This is not just economic decline. It is the weaponization of knowledge itself. The state enforces control through:
- Classification (making dissent impossible by rendering evidence “classified”).
- Cultural propaganda (war rebranded as entertainment, extraction rebranded as innovation).
- The hollowing of institutions (the public sector as a contracting shell, the private sector as a surveillance front).
Entropy, in this context, is not chaos; it is the rationalization of decay as strategy. The system no longer pretends to serve the public; it merely sustains its own inertia through extraction and secrecy.
The question is no longer how to fix it, but how long the facade can hold; and what comes after the collapse of an empire that forgot how to create, and only remembers how to consume.
“A machine that only knows how to grind, but not build, will eventually run out of things to grind.” -Michael Vera
