(The Economic Collapse Blog)—Would having your brain connected to the Internet 24 hours a day be heaven, or would it be hell? Today, a very large portion of the population is seemingly glued to their phones or their computers much of the time. But soon implantable brain-computer interfaces will allow those people to stay connected to their devices all the time. Apple has partnered with a shadowy tech company known as “Synchron” to develop a “brain implant that allows users to operate digital devices by thinking”…
Imagine controlling an iPhone or MacBook with nothing but thoughts. It may sound far-fetched, but Apple’s latest partnership suggests it could be closer than we think.
The tech giant has teamed up with neurotechnology firm Synchron, developing a brain implant that allows users to operate digital devices by thinking — no typing, tapping or swiping required.
Interestingly, it is being reported that Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are both involved with Synchron…
According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is partnering with Synchron—a privately held, New York City-based company backed by Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates—on the in project. The brain-computer interface, or BCI, industry is projected to grow significantly over the coming decades. Perhaps the best-known player in the space is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, which, as of January, has successfully implanted its devices in three people.
Unlike Neuralink’s brain-computer interface, Synchron’s device is not actually implanted inside the brain.
Instead, it is actually located on top of the brain…
Unlike Neuralink’s N1 implant, Synchron’s stent-like device, called the Stentrode, is implanted on top of the brain, not inside of it, which allows users to avoid an invasive open brain implant procedure. Once placed, the Stentrode works by using its electrodes to read brain signals and translate them into on-screen navigation and icon selection.
The way that they get Synchron’s device on top of the brain is by implanting it into the jugular vein and then navigating the device “into a blood vessel near the brain’s motor cortex”…
At the core of this breakthrough is a technology known as a Brain-computer interface (BCI). This system allows a person to control a device using their brain activity, without the need for muscle movements. Synchron’s device, called the Stentrode, is implanted via the jugular vein and navigates into a blood vessel near the brain’s motor cortex.
“This is transformative,” said Synchron CEO Tom Oxley. “We use the blood vessels as a natural highway into the brain, lacing them with electrodes that record activity. That platform becomes like Bluetooth for your brain, letting you control a device without needing a keyboard or mouse.”
A lot of people will find this preferable to having the sort of open brain surgery that is required for other brain-computer interfaces.
Of course I will never be allowing anyone to implant anything inside of me under any circumstances, and I am sure that most of you feel the exact same way.
But this is where things are going.
The goal is to create a dystopian “digital prison” society in which as many people as possible are connected to the Internet for as long as possible.
Even if you choose not to participate, you will not be able to escape it.
We are being told that soon millions of people will be wearing AI glasses that will be constantly gathering information on everyone and everything that they are pointed at…
The real revolution — and the real threat — lies in what comes next: Meta’s AI glasses. Sunglasses, spectacles, whatever you want to call them — they look like something out of a sci-fi flick. But they’re real, and they’re here. Very soon, millions or perhaps tens of millions of people will be walking around with them on. And you might not even know it.
These aren’t just toys. They’re tools — and weapons. They comprise a camera, microphone, an AI interface and internet access, all embedded discreetly in eyewear. They are capable of recognizing faces, interpreting language, overlaying information in real-time and collecting vast swaths of data as their owners simply walk down the street. They can whisper comprehensive summaries about the stranger across the subway, translate foreign speech in real time, suggest pickup lines, record interactions without consent and overlay reviews of a restaurant before you’ve even looked at the menu.
All this is done without lifting a phone or typing a word. These glasses are not just watching the world. They are interpreting, filtering and rewriting it with the full force of Meta’s algorithms behind the lens. And if you think you’re safe just because you’re not wearing a pair, think again, because the people who wear them will inevitably point them in your direction.
Can you imagine what our society will be like once we get to that stage?
Cameras and microphones that are connected to the Internet will constantly be pointing at everyone and everything all the time.
Privacy will essentially be a thing of the past.
Of course that is exactly what the elite want.
They envision a time when the “digital world” will be more important than the “real world”.
And they also envision a time when basically all commerce will be conducted using digital currencies…
Philip Lane, chief economist of the European Central Bank, recently expressed urgency for the need to develop a digital euro—also known as a central bank digital currency (CBDC)—to compete against stablecoins such as Tether and electronic payment systems developed by U.S. tech firms, such as Google Pay and Apple Pay. Not content with eliminating cash, now the goal of central banks is to eliminate any competing electronic payment system.
We’re sleepwalking into a world with digital currencies without any government coercion whatsoever. As a 51-year-old Generation Xer, I carry lots of cash in my wallet. I teach personal finance at the local university and recently asked a class of about 30 students if any of them had any cash. Not one of them had a single bill or coin on them. They use debit cards, credit cards, Venmo, and Apple Pay. As it turns out, cash usage among the 18–24 age cohort has declined from 28 percent to 13 percent over the last five years. Most like the convenience of electronic payments, even though studies show that people spend 12 percent to 18 percent more when using credit cards than cash. If the government does attempt to implement a digital dollar, there will be little resistance to it.
In such a system, tyrannical governments would be able to watch, track, monitor and control all transactions.
If you are a troublemaker, you could have your “digital privileges” suspended or you could even be banned from the system entirely.
So how would you survive if you were unable to buy, sell, get a job or have a bank account?
We are living in very strange times, and the “digital prison” that they are constructing all around us is becoming more suffocating with each passing day.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
