Ned Lud

Book I: The Image of the Beast

“He had eyes like a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns...

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them...”

— Revelation 13:7, 19:12

"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads." — Revelation 13:16

Forget barcodes, RFID chips, or fantastical implants. The Mark of the Beast is not coming—it has arrived, and it is banal.

It is facial recognition, algorithmic profiling, biometric compliance.

The crucible of surveillance has been poured. Every brow is a passport. Every face, a barcode. Every identity, a dataset.

From the war rooms of Unit 8200 to the glass towers of Palantir, from Amazon Ring on your front door to Clearview AI in the hands of local police, from the subway eyes of New York to the hyper-gridded gaze of London, from Gaza’s scorched alleys to Xinjiang’s ghost cities, from India’s Aadhaar panopticon to Brazil’s biometric democracy, the Beast sees all. His many crowns are the NATO Nations, China, Russia, Brazil, India, the Arab States and of course Israel.

Alphabet owns your search history. Meta owns your face. Microsoft partners with the Pentagon. Amazon scans your front yard. Palantir maps your mind.

And all of it is legal.

The Panopticon has gone wireless, and its angels wear badges, uniforms, and hoodies.
It does not scream—it pings. It does not roar—it auto-sorts.

Its gospel is compliance; its temple, the cloud.

One cannot buy, sell, travel, worship, or dissent without being seen, without having the panopticon measure facial metrics..

The Beast marks not with flame, but with video frame rate.
It grants access, and it can revoke existence. Those without the Mark are non-persons: ghosts in the machine, shadows at the gate.

Refuse to scan your face, and you are excommunicated from the temple of commerce. Decline the biometric covenant, and you are cast into the outer darkness of analogue. Everyone must grant access to impending Global Lavender AI. Your birth certificate is a validated end-user agreement, your Mother's birth canal is your consent.

"And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." — Revelation 13:17

And what is the number?

It is not 666, but your UID.
Your social credit score.

Your data shadow.
It is every click, every swipe, every breath caught on a lens.

It is not prophecy—it is policy. The Head Cloud Server is Lavender Talpiot Unit 8200 in Israel.

As Orwell warned:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever."

As Bradbury’s firemen incinerated books to preserve societal peace, our firemen now delete dissent, demonetize voices, derank truth. But as Huxley predicted, you have Tik-Tok 24/7/365 and false-profits, every size, shape and color, every multi-gender of guru life-coaches making Prophets.

This is the empire of the beast—not with horns, but with algorithms.

Not breathing fire, but consuming metadata.

And still, from the smoldering edge of the surveillance cathedral, a whisper cuts through the static:

The stone carved without hands descends.

Trumpets, Collapse, and the Shattered Image

"And the seventh angel sounded; and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord... and he shall reign for ever and ever." — Revelation 11:15

But even now, as the Beast scans and stores, as the Babel Tower emits blue light and dread, a reckoning takes shape—not from above, but from within. The stone not cut by human hands begins its descent:
not an election, not a startup, not a savior in Silicon Valley—

but truth, conscience, rebellion.

It will not be televised.
It will not be monetized.

It begins in the smallest disobedience:
A phone left at home.

A camera covered in tape.

A refusal to yield one’s face to the scanning altar.

For the Empire’s new gods—Palantir, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta—demand offerings of retinas and rhythms. They do not ask for faith. They ask for data.

And they are insatiable.

In Trump’s America, the surveillance state metastasized:

From ICE’s facial scans at border crossings to Clearview AI’s silent raids on protestors’ pasts, from FBI contracts with Amazon Rekognition to local PDs weaponizing Ring doorbells, the line between protection and persecution dissolved.

Meanwhile, in Israel, Lavender AI did not predict guilt—it assigned it. Entire families in Gaza erased by algorithmic assumption, guided by software and sealed by missiles.

In China, Skynet doesn’t need to knock. It already knows where you sleep. It monitors Muslim breath, Uyghur prayer, infant suspicion.

In India, Aadhaar links a billion souls to a digital spine—used to distribute rice today, but capable of denying rations tomorrow.

In Brazil, the vote is biometric. A fingerprint grants voice or silences it.

And still the Beast expands.

It does not march.
It syncs.

It syncs your face to your wallet.
Your gait to your threat profile.

Your metadata to your morality.

The technocratic trinity—state, corporate, algorithm—becomes the only authorized god.

Those who refuse are off-grid, unbanked, uninsured, unemployable, unseen.

They are lepers in the age of the lens.

But like Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in the Book of Daniel, the empire stands on feet of iron and clay.

It is powerful, but it is unstable.

For even as it boasts of infinite computation and omnipresent sight, the soul rebels. The image shivers. The golden head turns to rust.

When the data priests demand worship, the fire is stoked not by truth, but by terror. And in that fire, many shall bow.

But some will not.

The Fall of Empire, the Rise of the Mountain

The empire of the Beast—digitized, militarized, hypnotized—believes itself eternal. But beneath its polished glass skin lies decay. Beneath the algorithms, hubris. Beneath the data, dust.

"Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet... then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together..." — Daniel 2:34–35

This stone is not coded, not capitalized, not carbon neutral.

It is human defiance. It is moral clarity. It is the whisper that says “no” when the Beast demands yes.

Like Bradbury’s firemen, burning not books but memory, the architects of surveillance do not merely want to erase facts—they want to rewrite desire itself.

Like Orwell’s boot—"stamping on a human face—forever"—the lens is no longer a tool. It is the face of power.

And yet...

Every empire has its Thermopylae. Every Beast has its Achilles.

The Mark of the Beast may be global—Palantir in Ramallah, Unit 8200 in Tehran, Clearview in Portland, Aadhaar in Delhi, Ring in Baltimore, CCTV in London—but so too is the resistance.

• It flickers in the jailbroken phone.
• It walks in the masked commuter.
• It downloads the encrypted app.
• It whispers from the pirate server.
• It hides behind mirrors, masks, and mountains.

The future does not belong to the scanner.

It belongs to the unscannable.

And as the Beast overreaches—demanding worship through biometric sacrament—it will be met not with armies, but with emptiness.
The gears will turn, but find no teeth.

The cameras will scan, but see no one.

The network will crawl, but find only phantoms.

And when the tower falls—as all towers must—it will be not with a scream, but with a silence the machine cannot process.

"And the stone that smote the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth." — Daniel 2:35

That mountain is not Google’s cloud. It is not Amazon’s web. It is not Meta’s virtual Eden.

It is memory.
It is revolt.

It is revelation.

And in the end, when the last algorithm fails, when the biometric gates rust shut, when the social credit scores are deleted, and when the smoke clears over broken satellites, a voice will ask—

"Where art thou?" — Genesis 3:9

Not to track you.
Not to target you.

But to remind you:

You were never meant to be a number.

You were born to be free.

Postscript: The New Covenant of Refusal

Let it be written:
The Beast did not rise with horns and fire.

It rose on venture capital and convenience.

It did not roar.

It pinged.

It came not from the wilderness, but from the campus.
Stanford. Herzliya. Cambridge. Menlo Park.

The temples of the New Priesthood.

It baptized the world not in blood, but in metadata.
And every scan was a prayer to Mammon.

Every “I accept” was a Hallelujah to the Algorithm.

The new covenant was not cut in stone, but in code.

The disciples wore badges. The apostles, badges and patents.

—Palantir, keeper of the keys
—Amazon Ring, warden of the neighborhood temple

—Alphabet, scribe of the Book of All Things

—Unit 8200, watchman on the walls of digital Zion

And yet—

There are still prophets in the wilderness.

They do not wear robes. They wear hoodies.
They do not carry staffs. They carry routers.

They do not speak in tongues. They speak in pseudonyms.
They do not prophesy in synagogues or cathedrals.

They stream from back alleys, basements, Black Rock deserts.

This is your burning bush:
Your face is not a password.

Your body is not a QR code.

Your soul does not belong in a database.

Blessed are the untracked,
For they shall pass unseen through the eye of the scanner.

Blessed are the unplugged,
For they shall inherit silence.

Blessed are those who remember,

For they shall defy forgetting.

Let the next empire be invisible.
Not because it hides, but because it refuses to be captured.

A kingdom not of this cloud, but of flesh and bone and conscience.

Do not kneel to the Machine.
Do not confess to the Server.

Do not worship at the altar of the Eye.

Let the new gospel be:
To vanish is holy.

To forget is sacred.

To say “No” is divine.

And if you must wear a mark,
Let it be ash.

Let it be soil.

Let it be the dirt of the earth from which no lens can extract meaning.

The Beast is a system. The stone is you.

Raise it.

Vanity, Dust, and the Feet of the Lord

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity." — Ecclesiastes 1:2

"All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." — Ecclesiastes 3:20

The lords of Silicon Valley, the princes of Tel Aviv, the tyrants of Washington, and the moneychangers of Wall Street—all of them, every last one—will fall. Their empires, built on data, blood, and fire, are vanity. Their names echo now with the thunder of influence, but soon they will be whispers in the ashes.

Benjamin Netanyahu, with his iron dome of deception and Project Lavender’s digital hunt in Gaza, will be remembered not for security, but for sacrilege. Donald Trump, the showman of empire, clad in gold but hollow within, who blessed the biometric wall and crowned Palantir and Clearview AI as high priests of the surveillance state—he too shall be judged.

Elon Musk, archangel of Neuralink, aspiring Mars-god, and architect of the Starlink veil over Gaza, will face not the void of space, but the void of conscience. Peter Thiel, financier of pre-crime oracles, Palantir’s techno-Orwellian eye, the digital Caiaphas, stands in the shadows, whispering to senators and CEOs alike, but dust shall claim him too.

Jeff Bezos, who wrapped Amazon Ring around neighborhoods like chains and built the panopticon of global commerce, whose warehouses run on the cracked backs of the weary—his towers too shall fall. Steve Jobs, messiah of glass idols, offered the apple of knowledge, but the orchard was poisoned. Bill Gates, who dreams of vaccinating the world into digital subservience, and Mark Zuckerberg, who built a surveillance cathedral called Meta, where even dreams are monetized—they too are but vapor in the nostrils of the Lord.

J.D. Vance, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush—figureheads of the illusion, stewards of the beast. They cheered the rise of Unit 8200, the crafting of Aadhaar in India, the CCTV lattice of London, the biometric elections of Brazil, and the drone-shadowed zones of Yemen and Palestine. They legislate obedience, brand dissent as extremism, and canonize surveillance as salvation.

But the Lord sees through retinal scans and quantum encryption.

Every algorithm is a Tower of Babel, every facial recognition camera an idol, every data center a temple of Mammon. They mine souls as if they were silicon—and the wrath of God is not mocked.

“For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

— Mark 8:36

The tools of empire—Lavender AI, Pegasus spyware, Neuralink, Ring, Palantir, Aadhaar, Meta, Google’s DeepMind, DARPA, the Five Eyes alliance, Israel’s cyber ops, Alphabet Inc., Apple’s Air Tag prisons, Clearview’s face-harvest, Boston Dynamics’ robotic beasts—will all burn in the valley of Hinnom.

The Panopticon will crack. The satellites will fall. The biometric gates will rust. And in the ruins, the words will remain:

"And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground... and man became a living soul."

— Genesis 2:7

The dust shall reclaim its own.

All systems of total control, all empires of artificial intelligence and algorithmic judgment, all Satanic machinations masked as progress—shall be cast into the fire. Their architects will wail not as masters, but as prisoners. For the Lord shall ask them, not how many eyes they had in the sky, but:

“Where is thy brother?”

— Genesis 4:9

And they shall have no answer.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

Dust and wind.

And at the end, the voice walking in the cool of the day, calling not for power or data or control, but for the one thing they buried beneath their steel towers and glowing screens:

“Where art thou, oh Lord?”

BOOK II: THE BEAST’S MINISTERS

“And I saw a congregation not of saints but of technocrats, their suits stitched with surveillance, their sermons sponsored by DARPA.”

Babel is not built alone. It takes a priesthood.

At the helm stand the High Priests of the Machine—Eric Schmidt, Jared Kushner, Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Sam Altman—sons of silicon and steel, baptized not in water but in venture capital and classified memos. They do not part seas; they partition data. They do not cast out demons; they embed them in code. Their temples are server farms, their psalms encoded in APIs, and their sacraments dispensed through quarterly dividends and predictive analytics.

Behind them: a vast ecclesia of acolytes in lanyards. Bureaucrats with bad posture and worse ethics, NGO clerics laundering behavioral control under the name of equity, and Davos chaplains offering blessings to biometric ID systems that cradle the child even as they code him into a caste. The MIT Media Lab, once a cathedral of creation, now hums with the gospel of “resilient cities” and “human-centered AI”—spiritual euphemisms for soft technofascism.

This is not conspiracy; it is consortium.

The World Economic Forum calls it stakeholder capitalism—a theology in which every citizen is a metric, every protest a malfunction, and every soul a signature waiting to be tokenized. Even resistance has a budget line.

Think tanks line the path to the Algorithmic Ark. They do not plot genocide; they model “risk-adjusted asset insecurity.” They do not train prophets; they build dashboards. McKinsey doesn’t crucify truth—it automates its audit.

These are the Beast’s Ministers—not tyrants, but technicians. And they do not rule the world. They optimize it.

BOOK III: THE DIGITAL GULAG

“And I saw a prison without walls, a sentence without trial, a number branded where a name once was.”

If the Beast has bishops, it also has barbed wire.

Welcome to the Digital Gulag: a prison of probabilities, where guilt is not proven but predicted, and the judge is an algorithm that never sleeps. Here, ICE raids are guided not by warrants, but by heat maps. In Chicago, police knock on doors not because of crime, but because a model has prophesied it. In Gaza, an AI named Lavender has ranked young men for extermination, assigning death with the indifference of Excel.

China calls it Skynet, an Orwellian nod that has become a reality check. There, jaywalking earns you facial recognition shaming; dissent earns you digital deletion. In India, Aadhaar codes your biometric existence into a caste score—a numeric gospel that decides who eats, who learns, who lives.

This is no longer the banality of evil. This is its back-end.

The Digital Gulag is everywhere and nowhere. You cannot march against it—it is invisible. You cannot escape it—it is inside your phone, your school, your job application, your health record. The prison is portable. The warden is the app you downloaded for convenience.

And what of the children?

The Children of the Beast

They are not born; they are uploaded.

They learn to speak in hashtags, not psalms. They do not write in cursive, but swipe in compliance.

Schoolchildren are scanned by facial recognition before they can spell their own names. Their test scores are predicted by ancestry, zip code, and data dredged from internet behavior. Their attention spans are algorithmically shattered by TikTok catechisms—a gospel of loops, lust, and liturgy baked in Beijing.

And gender? It has been virtualized into a sacrament of self-erasure—where identity is a skin to be toggled, monetized, and medically insured. The body is no longer a temple, but a prototype.

The Beast is raising them in its own image: fragmented, surveilled, optimized for compliance.

AI as Golem, Not God

The lie: AI will save us.

The truth: AI was built to control us.

The rabbis told of a Golem—molded from clay, animated to protect, and ultimately unleashed destruction upon its creators. So too with AI: born in defense labs, trained on wartime metadata, and loosed upon civilians with angelic branding. It speaks with synthetic calm. It predicts with unblinking arrogance. It governs with a logic no man can appeal.

ARPA, Talpiot, Palantir, OpenAI—these are not creators. They are conjurers. And they have summoned something they no longer understand.

666 The Mark of the Beast, the Zionist Empire of Data

###

© 2025 Ned Lud