Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Programmer and the Panopticon

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Who TF Am I Working For?? | The Programmer and the Panopticon

Sep 14, 2025

What is the ultimate ambition of a man who has $140 billion? What project could possibly compel an 81-year-old to orchestrate the most audacious consolidation of media, technology, and political power in modern history?

We are living through a radical consolidation of power, yet we experience it as a disconnected stream of headlines: a media merger, an AI breakthrough, a political endorsement. Each development feels urgent yet isolated, leaving us with a sense of unease but no clear map of the new landscape being built around us.

This series exists to connect those dots and answer the question in its title. You may not have signed any employment contract, but if you use technology, participate in modern society, or simply exist in the digital age, you are already working for Larry Ellison. Your attention fuels his media empires, your data trains his AI systems, and your digital footprint strengthens his infrastructure of control—all without your conscious consent or compensation.

We begin with Larry Ellison.

His story doesn't start in Hollywood or Silicon Valley, but in a secured facility in Langley, Virginia. In 1977, his fledgling company, Software Development Labs, won its first major contract: to build a database for the Central Intelligence Agency. The project's codename was Oracle.

This was his formative education. Before Oracle became a public company, it was a proprietary tool for the surveillance state. Ellison's foundational experience was not in building products for consumers, but in constructing systems to impose order on chaos for the world's most powerful intelligence agency. He was trained to see human activity as data to be collected, structured, and queried in the service of control.

This engineering mindset meant he held a belief that any system, no matter how complex or human, can be debugged and optimized. This became his governing philosophy, and can be seen as the throughline in everything he does:

Racing yachts (and winning the 34th American Cup) was a challenge for him to conquer the ocean's chaos through radical hydrofoil technology.

Buying 98% of the island of Lanai was the acquisition of a petri dish to test theories of social and environmental control.

Investing in biotech is the ultimate engineering project: an attempt to debug the human body's fatal code that makes it age.

Ellison is not as much a traditional businessman, as he is a systems architect. And his recent moves are the integrated components of a single, sprawling design. He is assembling a new kind of societal operating system through three synchronized tracks:

1. The Data Track

The acquisitions of Paramount and the pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery are raids for the world's most valuable behavioral dataset. A century of film and television is a curated library of human emotion, conflict, and narrative—the essential fuel for what comes next.

2. The Infrastructure Track

Oracle's cloud is the engine room. The $300 billion contract with OpenAI is a strategic maneuver to make Oracle the foundational plumbing of the AI revolution. The goal is AI "inferencing"—real-time automated decision-making.

3. The Permission Track

Systems of this scale require political license. His alliances are transactional. The relationship with Donald Trump is an exchange: technological capability for regulatory favors. The FCC's approval of the Paramount merger, with its curious conditions, was a down payment on a license to operate.

The blueprint for this American project was first drafted abroad. Years before he envisioned AI body cams for American police, Oracle was building a national ID system for China, a project state media lauded for tracking the 'trustworthiness' of citizens and businesses (a precursor to a social credit system). And while his recent donations to Israeli military causes are often framed as philanthropy, they align perfectly with the interests of a nation-state that operates a permanent, technology-driven security footing—a model client for a society-scale surveillance system.

He has already built the components. He has already serviced the clients. He has already tested the theories.

Now, he is assembling the final, and most comprehensive, version of the system at home.

So I have to believe that when money becomes a scorecard rather than a number in your bank account, that legacy no longer is about building wealth; it’s about control. He is playing for history, striving to be remembered as the man who solved society's deepest problems by treating humanity as a system to be optimized.

But this is the most dangerous gamble of all. What happens when a system designed for a security state is installed at the heart of a democracy?

In Part II, we will open the archives on The China Model. We will examine Oracle's early work building population databases abroad and reveal how the same technical and philosophical blueprint is now being applied to your media, your healthcare, and your privacy.

Subscribe now. The owner's manual for the new engine of power is being written. You are already in the system.