By Marcus Coetzee, 18 July 2026.

Over the years, I’ve been contemplating an array of technological phenomena and trends. They form a scenario where big technology oligopolies continue to gain power and develop mutually beneficial relationships with governments. This follows my recent essay on increasing government surveillance. Together, these trends begin to look like something from a cyberpunk novel. 

I also wrote an earlier essay in 2023 arguing that AI is a disruptive technology that humanity will use much like others it has invented. This scenario explores what tech companies and governments appear to be building with it.

I don’t believe that people can predict the future. There are too many unknown variables interacting with one another and having unanticipated consequences. The future also doesn’t emerge in a straight trend line, as unanticipated events often have a disproportionate impact on our reality. Some even accelerate timelines.

I do, however, believe in the value of scenario planning. This involves developing and entertaining future scenarios to understand how they might emerge and what they might mean. Scenario planning can be an incredibly powerful tool if done collaboratively. Few know that Mont Fleur Scenarios in 1992 were instrumental to the end of Apartheid in South Africa. My economics professor, who ran my masters programme, was involved in these scenarios. He often spoke of how they helped shift the thinking of everyone involved. I even had the fortune to facilitate strategy sessions at the same venue.

In this essay, I imagine myself in the shoes of technology company leaders aiming for more money and power, and in those of government leaders trying to create a safe and efficient society.

And note that I am not alleging conspiracy. A conspiracy requires secret coordination between parties. I am simply observing the direction of publicly documented, and often unrelated trends, that are all out in the open.

Please sense-check these trends and the resulting scenario. Let me know if you think it’s likely and what aspects might be refined.

13 key technology trends and phenomena

Here are some trends that have been on my mind for some time, gradually taking form in one way or another, and all present in the public space.

Trend 1. Computers become terminals dependent on cloud infrastructure

We are surrounded by devices that connect to the internet. These include our obvious computing tools such as phones, computers, tablets and watches, as well as the Internet of Things: TVs, cameras, cars, and central heating. Increasingly these devices serve as terminals connecting to online platforms and cloud infrastructure that contain the primary processing power and data storage. These modern devices are becoming interfaces or portals, much like older computers that relied on a central mainframe.

When a device has limited local processing ability, every sophisticated task becomes dependent on access to a digital platform and that platform’s policies and affordability. Editing a document, processing a photo, running a calculation. Chromebooks are a familiar example. The off switch and power are always in someone else’s hand.

AI will deepen this dependency by becoming embedded at the firmware level, underneath the operating system itself. I already see adverts for AI-supported motherboards in computer magazines. Microsoft’s recently leaked Project Aion illustrates that Microsoft is looking to create AI that acts as the operating system entirely. This is not a new instinct. Microsoft tried to make its browser inseparable from its operating system in the 1990s, was sued, and had to acquiesce. I have also recently had to find and uninstall 4GB of AI-related software that the Chrome browser surreptitiously installed on my computers as a local presence for Gemini Nano. The desire for control remains. The technology has now caught up and figured out how to make us more dependent on online digital platforms. Project Aion is still a leaked prototype rather than a shipping product, but the direction it illustrates is consistent with everything else Microsoft has been building.

Trend 2. Nothing owned, everything subscribed

The shift from purchase to licence to subscription has been gradual and deliberate. I no longer own a version of MS Office as I used to. I pay monthly for Office 365. Film lovers have a Netflix subscription. Music lovers have Spotify. Even Amazon has been making it increasingly difficult for Kindle users to download and properly own the books they buy, and has been offering Kindle Unlimited as a type of subscription service. (This was also a phenomenon that struck me when I moved from South Africa to the UK in 2021 – I mean even my vet and dentist offer subscription packages.)

As I write this essay, there is drama around Sony’s decision to stop producing physical copies of PlayStation games. The creator of Minecraft responded by saying that “if buying a game is not a purchase, then pirating it is not theft.” This resonated with gamers and went viral.

The logical endpoint is that people own no digital asset of any kind – not their documents, music, games, or tools. Ownership is replaced by revocable access in the guise of convenience. But this is not ownership at all. I recall the infamous World Economic Forum 2016 video: “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”

Beyond software, the mobile phone contract model illustrates how hardware itself becomes part of the subscription. Devices are discounted and locked into service bundles where the ongoing revenue stream is the actual product. For example, I received a free router when I signed up for fibre with my ISP. I can easily see the major tech platforms providing discounted terminals to hook users into their ecosystems permanently.

The subscription model also operates through progressive dependency. Microsoft 365 is free for students so they enter the workforce already habituated to the platform. Gmail was free until I exceeded 15GB of storage and now I pay each month for the convenience of hanging on to my email address and thousands of accumulated emails. YouTube and Amazon Prime were relatively ad-free until they weren’t. The classical dependency-creation strategy works as follows: always free or discounted until a person is used to it, then the price rises. I use Claude as my AI research assistant and inevitably my £18 monthly subscription will need to rise for Anthropic to become profitable. This is a tried-and-tested business model. It is also, it should be noted, the model used by drug dealers.

Trend 3. Your data leaves your device

The tendency for online platforms to store data in their own data centres rather than on your device is accelerating. The email app on my iPhone stores the bulk of my emails on a Google server, not on my phone. The messaging from these platforms is that local data is vulnerable to theft, loss, fire, or malware, and that we should trust tech companies to keep it safe.

This framing inverts the reality which I discovered during my brief foray into cybersecurity. Data held locally is vulnerable only to local threats. Data held centrally is vulnerable to corporate policy changes, government requests, platform insolvency, and mass surveillance at scale. The argument that cloud storage is safer is true in a narrow technical sense and false in every meaningful sense of ownership and sovereignty.

Some tech companies have already moved beyond storage to censorship. I have known people who have had files on their devices and in their online storage intentionally locked or deleted by platforms. iBooks refuses to load certain books in its reading app and will remove them if attempted. Platforms already scan for illegal content, typically justified by child protection, and this scanning can extend to anything that conflicts with a platform’s terms of service, or with a government’s priorities. For example, in July 2026, the European Parliament passed Chat Control 1.0, permitting warrantless scanning of private messages on platforms including Gmail, Instagram, Discord, and Snapchat – despite more MEPs voting against it than for it. Device-level scanning of personal files, already advocated by some governments, becomes ominous when a government works against the will of its own people.

Trend 4. Biometric identity links the body to the system

I expect biometric authorisation to become widespread as the technology matures. It will replace or combine with multi-factor authentication and passkeys. The big tech companies envision a future where devices become extensions of legal identity, verified by our voices, fingerprints, faces and eyes. These devices then become portals to the cloud. Already I use my fingerprint on my phone to unlock it when I make online payments, so this is not that far off. And the UK government is already legislating to require biometrically verified digital ID to buy alcohol in a pub.

I expect this biometric system of authorisation will extend to family accounts with variable permissions. A parent could then set the permissions linked to the biometrics of their children. This principle could be extended to relationships between employers and employees, citizens and states. Our bodies become the login credential and it becomes impossible to opt out without opting out of civic and commercial life entirely.

Trend 5. Open source reframed as suspicious

Linux currently holds around 3% of the desktop and laptop market for consumers, 5% among gamers, and 30% among developers. This share is growing as people opt out of Microsoft and Apple. I am currently setting up my own computer to dual-boot Linux and Windows with a view to shifting increasingly toward Linux.

The deliberate reframing of open-source computing as the tool of pirates, criminals, and those with something to hide has already begun in corporate security rhetoric. A Linux and open-source group recently took the Californian government to court to block the requirement that all operating systems implement age verification. They argued that requiring operating systems to act as age-verification gatekeepers would effectively outlaw decentralised, volunteer-run platforms that refuse to support user surveillance.

As banking, government services, and healthcare platforms require certified compliant devices, users of non-approved operating systems will find themselves progressively excluded from civic and commercial participation. This has happened to me before. I remember a time when the South African tax agency’s website only worked with Internet Explorer. Compliance with the platform becomes the price of participating in society. The simple act of booting up an independent, non-certified operating system can become a mechanism of soft coercion.

Trend 6. Public services and employer monitoring integrated into the digital workspace

Currently we must log into different platforms to access NHS records, tax accounts, benefits, pension information, and electoral registration. The government has been trying to introduce universal digital ID to consolidate these databases, which makes sense from their perspective, though it does increase security risk. I can imagine a future where all of these are integrated into a single personal digital workspace, much as mortgage and credit information already appear on a banking dashboard. This is taking things one step beyond simply having different apps on our desktop or phone screen.

The consolidation of every significant data point about a citizen’s life into a single platform with a single point of failure, a single point of government access, and a single subscription linked to biometrics is the type of thing that totalitarian governments dream of. China’s Social Credit System is the most developed example of this convergence. I believe the UK and other Western governments are not trying to copy China but rather arriving at the same destination by different routes and for similar reasons.

The boundary between professional and personal digital space dissolves when this state is achieved. Employers already use tools like Microsoft Viva to monitor employee productivity. In a world of cloud workspaces, an employer’s dashboard and an employee’s personal workspace interface directly. The platform holds data from both. The employer can then pay the platform for access for additional information and reports. The increase in remote working has already created the conditions for this.

Trend 7. An oligopoly of approved platforms

Companies and platforms like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta will likely constitute the approved ecosystem in this future scenario. These platforms will have the relevant interfaces with government, financial, and other services. Outside them, participation in modern economic and civic life becomes progressively difficult.

This is more of a regulated oligopoly where regulators and platforms share an agenda than a free market environment. I have already experienced online services that work only with certain browsers. As age verification requirements expand and surveillance cooperation between platforms and governments deepens, cooperative platforms will be favoured and others likely penalised. The branded retail presence of these companies may even expand into high streets and shopping malls accordingly, normalising the relationship the way O2 shops normalise the mobile phone contract.

Trend 8. IoT integrates your home into the managed workspace

Most people already have apps on their phones for their central heating, washing machine, refrigerator, car, doorbell, and home surveillance. These Internet of Things (IoT) devices are notorious for cybersecurity vulnerabilities since some manufacturers don’t update their firmware regularly.

The logical next step is for these to migrate into the managed online workspace, with the phone becoming a terminal into that space. Privacy within your own four walls becomes technically impossible in this scenario. Even if the data is encrypted, governments with negotiated access to the tech platforms will have access to domestic life in greater resolution than ever before. For example, the EU has already required all new cars to have cameras inside pointed towards the drivers, justified by road safety. While these will operate on a closed loop and be focused on alerting drivers, the capability of the system could be expanded over time. Furthermore, most electric cars are logged into the internet which would enable the platform (and consequently the government) to track your whereabouts and ensure that your vehicle didn’t contravene any of the geographic curfews such as those implemented during lockdown. The negative public reaction has been considerable to these cameras, from people who understand what is actually being installed. I can state with certainty, that there is no way I will drive a car with a camera pointed at me.

Trend 9. AI replaces the search engine

When I have questions, I tend to turn to AI before a search engine. The major search engines already produce AI summaries for many queries, and I often find it easier to simply continue this conversation with an AI. Microsoft is configuring Copilot to act as a search engine directly from the desktop, bypassing the browser entirely. Voice assistants like Siri and Alexa already trigger what is effectively an AI search. A personal AI integrated with your digital workspace will become significantly better at surfacing the answers you want, as it trains itself on your data, habits and preferences – certainly better than any search engine as we currently understand them.

I remember a time before Google. I can therefore also imagine a time past Google.

Trend 10. VR workspaces and the metaverse complete the movement

When I first tried a VR headset about seven or eight years ago I was immediately struck by the implications. Within five minutes of playing the Fallout computer game, I could see a future of designed avatar identities for different social and professional contexts, VR meeting rooms defying the laws of physics, virtual workspaces styled as the bridge of a spaceship, and AI interlocutors appearing in visual form. It was a world-expanding moment. The actual game was incidental to this realisation.

Someone I know recently completed a PhD on terrorism and the metaverse. Specifically, how terrorist organisations might use it to recruit, groom, train, and give operatives a space to rehearse actions. She draws on the 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, where the metaverse is already a parallel civilisation.

The processing requirements of real-time photorealistic VR at scale cannot be met by any local device. VR structurally requires cloud infrastructure. It is therefore not merely compatible with the terminal model but necessitates it. I know several people who would be happy never having to leave their homes, but rather be able to socialise, work and experience the world through their VR avatars.

Trend 11. Data centres as the physical substrate

To manage the digital spaces, storage, processing, and AI models described above, there will need to be exponential growth in data centres. There are already over 450 data centres in the UK. They currently use approximately 2% of the UK’s electricity – a proportion which is expected to increase significantly. Large data centres consume water at a rate comparable to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. Data centres are also known for their high noise levels, primarily due to the fans and other cooling equipment used to maintain optimal conditions. They can be heard from up to a mile away during normal operations.

I would not be surprised if governments begin to treat data centres as matters of national security, fast-tracking them through planning and environmental legislation and protecting them from criticism and litigation. The financial architecture is also taking form. For example, BlackRock’s AI Infrastructure Partnership in the United States, funded significantly by pension capital, has completed the largest data centre acquisition on record. The people whose retirement savings are funding this infrastructure were not asked.

The UK government has already designated data centres as critical national infrastructure, putting them alongside utilities like water and energy production. This removes planning decisions from local authorities and places them with the Secretary of State. It has also made it more difficult for affected communities to legally challenge.

Trend 12. Age verification as surveillance infrastructure

I want to address age verification separately because it is the most politically unassailable justification currently being used to install identity infrastructure. I have tackled this subject in my previous essay on increased state surveillance of our online lives. The stated purpose is child protection. The proposed mechanisms are biometric verification, identity documents, and third-party age verification services. These are disproportionate to the stated problem in ways that only make sense if the real goal is something else.

If the goal were genuinely protecting children, privacy-preserving methods of approximating age exist and are technically viable. However, the methods being proposed and implemented require linking real identity to online activity. That is not a byproduct of age verification. It is the underlying purpose that everyone understands but is rarely being spoken aloud. Even some of the progressive online communities that might be expected to support child protection regulation have begun to notice this. The tone of the discourse has shifted markedly in recent months. Nobody believes it is about children any more.

This reminds me of Vaclav Havel’s concept of ‘living within the lie,’ developed in Czechoslovakia under Soviet rule in the 1970s. Everyone knows the official narrative is false. The state knows that everyone knows. But the system requires the performance of compliance regardless, and this is the purpose – to generate compliance.

Trend 13. The ancient pattern of wanting the power of gods

Here is where I move beyond the predictable motivations of money, power, status, and control, and observe some older patterns. I should note that I am using religious and historical language deliberately. Tech billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are increasingly using exactly this type of language themselves.

The tech billionaire class appears to be recreating a very ancient structure, consciously or otherwise. In Mesopotamia, a king-priest class built giant ziggurats. Historians are now theorising that the ziggurats were spiritual machines designed to bring the divine into proximity with those at the apex of the hierarchy. They would attempt to trap a god’s essence in an idol, which they could then draw upon for power, wisdom, and rule. In this metaphor, the powerful AIs are the gods and the data centres are the ziggurats. A ziggurat-scale data centre is already, in some cases, the size of a medium-sized town.

Some of the previous trends have also indicated the desire to achieve divine-level knowledge. Palantir’s stated mission is to give governments and militaries the ability to see everything about everyone simultaneously. The consistent digital identity across databases is the mechanism that makes this possible. This type of omniscience is very desirable for governments and technology companies with large customer bases.

The future scenario painted by these trends

Here is the future scenario that these trends seem to be pointing to, which may manifest in 15-20 years. I describe three facets of this scenario, before suggesting that many people have an intuitive sense of things to come and are starting to put precautions in place. I also explain how a renowned Harvard academic has already written about this future scenario, and how digital rights charities in the UK have been concerned with some of these same trends. I will end the discussion by highlighting some of the counter forces that may decrease the probability of this scenario or moderate the form it assumes.

Three facets of the future scenario

The end of personal computing sovereignty

Within 20 years, the distinction between your devices (e.g. computers, smartphones and IoT) and online platforms would have disappeared for most people. Your devices will be terminals with your data and major operations taking place in the cloud. Your identity will be biometric and known to the platforms. Your access to data storage, processing power, applications, advanced AIs and levels of integration with other databases and services will all depend on the nature of paid subscription. Those with more money get more features. The management of your home will also be integrated into your personal workspace in your rented online platform. Your employer’s workspace and government portal will both be integrated with your chosen platform.

This scenario will emerge steadily through small, and individually reasonable steps that everyone else seems to take to make their lives easier. It won’t arrive in a single dystopic moment. The people who resist this will be a small, technically literate minority, though they will be accused of being Luddites, and not moving with the times. They will be viewed suspiciously and increasingly excluded from the services that assume compliance. We saw the ability of the state to sideline people based on their vaccination status during Covid, so the precedent exists, regardless of your sentiment towards mandatory vaccinations.

The merger of commercial and state surveillance infrastructure

Governments are not building their own surveillance infrastructure from scratch. They are rather piggybacking on the big social media platforms that already exist. The government wants people to participate actively and speak openly on these platforms and share their lives, but they also want to be able to inspect these conversations and track down your actual identity if you get profiled by an AI as a risk to be managed. This mutually beneficial relationship between big tech oligopolies and governments will produce a surveillance infrastructure more comprehensive than what any previous state has achieved – far beyond what countries like China have achieved.  The current “crackdown” on tech companies by governments is worth addressing directly.

I see this as governments trying to regain some power and initiative, and wanting in on the action. Both tech platforms and governments want people actively using these platforms within the specified parameters, rather than choosing more underground and anonymous alternatives.

As with personal computing, this future scenario won’t emerge through an overt authoritarian declaration or display of power. It will rather emerge through the gradual introduction and normalisation of each individual component with its own rational justification. For example, age verification and photo scanning is justified by child protection. Biometric ID will be justified by security and convenience. IoT integration will be justified by the efficient management of your household and devices. Digital workspaces will be justified by productivity and ease of having everything in one place. Employer monitoring will simply be the norm when working in their online workspaces. 

The sum of these components produces something very different from the sum of their parts. Governments get access to the data and control they want. The platforms get to understand their customers much better, and lock them into their systems. Both parties get what they want. Citizens like you and I don’t really have that much say.

A two-tier society

This third facet will be a visible and widening division between those inside the approved ecosystem and those outside it. People who can afford decent subscriptions to platforms and their advanced features will have seamless access to banking, healthcare, employment, government services, entertainment, and social life. This will be genuinely convenient. You would log into one secure space, customised exactly as you want it to be in 2D and VR, and be able to access the apps and communications you want. Your personal AI will also be on call to assist you and help manage all the aspects of your life, and give you health, business and relationship advice if required. Those who can afford top technology will have a massive productivity advantage over those who can’t. I see the world painted in this scenario as very different from the one we live in now, where most people in Western countries have broadly similar levels of access to technology.

This experience will also mean that every significant transaction, movement, travel, communication, and decision is logged, processed, and available to the platform and to the governments that have negotiated access to it.

Outside the ecosystem, people will face progressive exclusion from civic and commercial participation, or at very least, increased friction when navigating it. This will include open-source users, platform refusers and those that can’t afford the subscriptions. Just think of the difficulty in paying with cash in some shops. My own version was trying to navigate the UK without a local credit record or fixed home address when I first moved here. Everything was more cumbersome, and finance was more than double the normal price.

Platform access will become the price of admission to modern life.

People intuitively sensing the direction of things

This scenario helps explain why I’m noticing more people, outside of open-source and privacy communities, starting to retreat from the main online platforms, or at the very least, behave more cautiously on them.

These include people “DeGoogling” – a grassroots movement to break free of Google’s platforms and search engines. It includes people setting up home servers and localising their data. It includes people shifting to Linux and other open-source applications. It includes people setting up anonymous email accounts with privacy-focused providers such as Proton. The massive growth of VPNs in the UK is another good indicator of this sentiment. More of my friends are censoring what they’re saying on chats and moving to encrypted chat services such as Signal. And increasingly I’m meeting ordinary people who have exited one or more of the big tech platforms and are rather focused on decentralised WhatsApp groups.

These are rational responses to a rational analysis of where the current trajectory leads. People may not be fully conscious of the reasons behind these decisions, but they sense that something is wrong and are acting accordingly.

Surveillance capitalism is intrinsic to this scenario.

I am not alone in this analysis. Harvard Business School Professor Shoshana Zuboff spent years documenting what she calls surveillance capitalism in her landmark 2019 book of the same name. I discovered her work after having written the first draft of this essay. Her central argument is that the major tech companies discovered they could extract vast amounts of demographic and behavioural data as a byproduct of providing their services. They realised that they could process and sell this data since it could be used to predict a person’s preferences and responses, such as the likelihood of buying something.

She warns of what she calls “the fusion scenario” where the surveillance and data-gathering capabilities of the private sector merge with those of the public sector. This creates a dangerous environment for democracy and individual freedom, and it is exactly what already seems to be happening.

Digital rights organisations in the UK are also concerned

In the UK, digital rights organisations have also pointed to elements of this scenario.

For example, the Open Rights Group and Big Brother Watch have both documented the progressive construction of surveillance infrastructure through age verification legislation, the BritCard digital ID proposals, Chat Control, facial recognition deployment in public spaces, and the designation of data centres as critical national infrastructure.

They were among the first to publicly name age verification as surveillance infrastructure rather than child protection. Their analysis overlaps with mine in several areas. These are both mainstream charities engaging with parliament and policy makers.

Counter forces to this scenario

There are genuine counter-forces to this scenario. For example, I have argued that important technology will start centralising in the cloud and that platform access will be central to living, yet a Chinese startup has just released Kimi K3 in July 2026 — a free, customisable AI that can be run locally. China, of all places with its reputation for state control, has produced an open-source AI that anyone can run on their own hardware without a cloud subscription. The growth of Linux, open-source AI models, and self-hosted services represents a quiet but sustained counter-movement to platform dependency. Widespread adoption of open-source software, combined with the ease of localisation through home servers and privacy-focused providers, could challenge the dominance of these big platforms.

EU privacy legislation and a host of recent anti-trust court cases have also aimed at limiting the control of these big platforms. These have targeted themes such as their control over app stores, bias in shopping comparison services, and tax evasion. This may help to dilute their power.

There has also been growing backlash against surveillance legislation. Increasingly, people are recognising that governments have other reasons beyond their stated desire to protect children. For example, 2,984,191 people in the UK signed a petition to eliminate digital IDs, the fourth largest petition in British history, which the government dismissed. The majority of EU parliament members present voted against Chat Control, 314 to 276, but the extension was still approved because the law requires an absolute majority of all 720 members (i.e. 361 votes) to reject it. There has also been growing backlash against the EU’s drive to put driver-facing cameras in all vehicles.

These are some examples of the trends that may decrease the probability of the scenario I’ve outlined. There will also no doubt be unexpected events that change everything. Covid was a good example as it was widely modelled as a risk, but impossible to predict in its timing or consequences. The scenario I’ve described may be interrupted, accelerated, or changed by events outside of our frame of reference.

Conclusion

Writing this essay helped coalesce and surface several intuitions and ideas that had been floating around in my mind for years, often rising up briefly in vibrant chats with friends. My recent essay on surveillance captured one aspect of this, but didn’t share the full picture, so this essay serves as part 2 in this conversation.

These essays have also helped me to understand my accelerating desire over the past year to curate my online activities much more carefully, not because I have anything illicit or radical going on, but simply because I value a level of privacy and independence, and because I’ve always been wary of government overreach after growing up in an Apartheid South Africa.

I’m very curious what you make of the trends and emerging scenario I describe. I am not predicting that it will happen. I am simply describing one possible configuration of these trends if they continue in their current direction. The future rarely turns out as we expect, and anyone who could reliably predict it would rapidly become a billionaire on the stock market. But I would like to hear your sense of things, and whether you see an alternative and less dystopian picture of the future.