Back in 2014 I gave a talk about autonomous microscale surveillance including “smart dust” to an IoT audience. Last week, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan published the technical specifications in Science Robotics.

Microscopic robots that sense, think, act, and compute

The press coverage I’ve seen emphasizes medicine. “Guardians of cellular health,” says ScienceAlert. Ok, ok, let’s get real. The actual paper describes something different: a general-purpose programmable computer, 200 by 300 micrometers, that can sense its environment, execute conditional logic, coordinate in swarms, and operate autonomously for months.

Tiny Computer

The device fits on the ridge of a fingerprint. It runs on 16 nanowatts harvested from ambient light. It carries a custom 11-bit processor with conditional branching, arithmetic operations, memory addressing, and loop control. It’s not a sensor that wiggles. It’s a Turing-complete microprocessor that happens to be smaller than a grain of salt.

Current constraints are a fluid-only operation (electrokinetic propulsion requires ions), optical-only programming (no RF—too power-hungry), and limited memory (a few hundred bits due to leakage current). The researchers are explicit that these are seen as generation-one limitations, and not fundamental barriers.

Follow the Money

The collaboration began at a DARPA presentation five years ago. Funding sources are listed in the paper:

• National Science Foundation (lead billing)
• Air Force Office of Scientific Research
• Army Research Office
• Fujitsu Semiconductors

NSF listed first is another way of saying defense money built the platform. The Michigan lab that built the onboard computer has received over $16 million through DARPA’s Electronics Resurgence Initiative. The same lab builds “injectable computers that can broadcast from inside the body.”

That’s defense money, doing defense research, for defense. So naturally the PR is about medicinal applications. Science is surveillance, but that doesn’t mean surveillance is science.

Tiny Countermeasure Problem

So let’s say you are worried about robots the size of dust, the salt of surveillance, being deployed soon by someone (defense).

We know high-power microwave weapons can fry microscale electronics. The U.S. military has stuff to talk about like CHAMP, THOR, and the overbuilt Epirus IFPC-HPM system. Detection and destruction of surveillance salt is a solved problem for those who can deploy sufficient microwaves.

For everyone else, the countermeasure architecture is… TBD.

No consumer detection equipment. No regulatory framework. No international treaty. No public discussion of deployment implications.

Robots now officially scale to university labs and penny-per-unit manufacturing. Defense against the inevitable abuse of these robots remains classified.

How We Got Here

My 2014 talk showed a slide listing Israeli surveillance exports that had been dismissed as regional paranoia: rock listening devices in Lebanon (confirmed real), Mossad-trained sharks in Egypt (ridiculous), tagged vultures in Saudi Arabia (a Tel Aviv University research bird, actually).

The pattern I was warning about was exotic surveillance accusations get labeled conspiracy theory until the technology becomes undeniable.

Smart dust followed the same trajectory. DARPA funded the concept in 1997. Berkeley built early prototypes. Regional paranoids made accusations. Fact-checkers debunked. Meanwhile, the engineering continued and is now published and headed to production.

Science Robotics reports 17,768 downloads in two weeks. That’s not casual academic interest. That’s procurement offices pulling specifications.

What Next

The paper’s final line:

These results pave the way for general-purpose microrobots that can be programmed many times in a simple setup and can work together to carry out tasks without supervision in uncertain environments.

Unsupervised. Autonomous. Swarm-capable. Programmable. Invisible.

This microscopic technology will be deployed for invisible surveillance. The question is now whether you’ll know what to do when it happens.

Nick Fuentes is the man who in 2023 said this:

I think the Holocaust is exaggerated. I don’t hate Hitler. I think there’s a Jewish conspiracy. I believe in race realism.

And Fuentes celebrated the rising popularity of his message by proclaiming nearly half of the White House staff now are Nazis.

It’s important context for August 2025, when Glenn Greenwald called Nick Fuentes a “generational talent” with “really smart insights grounded not in sensationalism or blind ideology, but lots of reading, and thinking.”

Greenwald’s framing was erasure.

What he constructed for Fuentes was a martyrdom narrative of the Nazi persecuted for “questioning the power of the Jewish lobby.” The Hitler praise, the Holocaust denial, the stated desire for white nationalism was spun and reduced to “provocative rhetoric” and “rhetorical excess.”

This is known as fascist inversion: erase the ideology, present the aggressor as victim. Hitler didn’t run on “let’s murder your neighbor”; he ran on false victimhood. Greenwald runs this playbook for Fuentes.

Moreover, this is not defending someone’s right to speak. This is highly targeted, careful rehabilitation of Nazism to normalize it into power again.

Greenwald Covered Himself a Long Time

In 2017, after Charlottesville, Greenwald wrote an Intercept piece defending the ACLU’s representation of white supremacists.

He floated what appeared as a principled argument: odious speech can be defended as speech without endorsing it. He claimed state censorship backfires, so civil liberties must apply especially to those we despise.

He knew the distinction.

He articulated it explicitly.

Ten years prior in 2007, Greenwald wrote in Salon that he condemned use of “Nazi” and “Hitler” as political insults.

He claimed that calling out Nazism ran too much risk of error because it “trivializes Nazism and the Holocaust.” He had deployed a no true Scotsman fallacy: the label should require impossibly high proof to prevent application. A shred of doubt is all the Nazi would need to evade detection.

He knew that distinction too, and he weaponized it. He was gatekeeping the label to protect the people who should have been called out instead.

Same move with Fuentes.

The man says “I don’t hate Hitler” and “I believe in a Jewish conspiracy” and Greenwald says that’s not real Nazism, it’s just “provocative rhetoric” about “questioning the Jewish lobby.”

No true Nazi.

It’s the same operation, all the way from 2007 through Hale through Fuentes. Greenwald always has been in the business of trotting out impossibly high standards to prevent a Nazi getting labeled, while defending actual Nazis.

When he launders Nick Fuentes by erasing “I don’t hate Hitler” to create the narrative that he “questioned the Jewish lobby,” he does it again with full knowledge of what he’s doing and more openly than ever.

Early Fascism Warning

Quillette in 2015 published a piece titled “Glenn Greenwald: Fascism’s Fellow Traveller.” At the time, Greenwald was wrapping himself in ACLU-style camouflage. It was effective enough that calling him out for “fascist sympathy” was a tough sell to the liberal media embracing him.

Greenwald is never less than proud to acknowledge the considerable time he has spent as a litigator and writer defending the right of neo-Nazis to air their views.

Ten years later, however, that Quillette analysis reads like a job description.

The accusation that seemed shrill in 2015 became the clear endpoint by 2025. Not because someone was prophetic, but because terminal contrarianism has a logic of its own. When angry opposition to a certain “deep state” is your only fixed principle, you eventually find common cause with those inherently positioned against it.

Nazis hate intelligence, because it exposes the truth.

There’s also an even simpler explanation. Before the Snowden leaks, before the Guardian byline, before the civil liberties positioning, Greenwald spent five years as pro bono lawyer for white supremacist Matt Hale.

Five years.

Greenwald was a self-assigned defender of the leader of the World Church of the Creator, a militant hate organization with the stated goal of eliminating “mud races.” When one of Hale’s followers went on a shooting spree targeting minorities, Greenwald defended them and explained his motivation:

I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me.

The people behind those lawsuits, the people Greenwald wanted to fight, were the 1999 shooting victims and their families:

• Ricky Byrdsong, Black former Northwestern basketball coach, shot dead in front of his children
• Won-Joon Yoon, Korean graduate student, murdered
• Two Orthodox Jewish teenagers shot in Rogers Park
• Rev. Stephen Tracy Anderson, a Black pastor shot three times

A Nazi drove a light blue car through Chicago shooting at Blacks, Asians and Jews. Police said they weren’t sure the Skokie area shootings were a hate crime.

“At this point we’re not jumping to the conclusion that it’s a hate crime,” said Patrick T. Camden, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. “All of the elements appear to be there, but until we get the offender, we won’t know.”

No true Nazi.

Greenwald wasn’t just insulting the victims personally. He was actively opposing the right of these shooting victims to seek justice.

Greenwald even told the LA Times that civil rights groups suing white supremacist organizations into bankruptcy was “an abuse of the court system.”

How? Why? Isn’t that the whole point of the court system?

Matt Hale’s white supremacist gun violence to Nick Fuentes’ hate speech is the true and straight line. Everything in between appears as positioning.

Functioning Fascism

Whether Greenwald is a conscious operative, a useful mule, or simply someone whose authentic contrarianism was identified and cultivated, his output has been consistent in targeting: damage to US intelligence capabilities (Snowden), damage to US diplomatic relationships (the leaks that went far beyond domestic surveillance), and now damage to US-Israel alignment.

He seems to never criticize Russia for censorship, for example. Perhaps he hopes to retire there like Snowden.

The extreme American civil liberties framing confused many who saw activities that would otherwise be recognizable as proto-fascist. His appeal with a Guardian byline did work that a direct leak to the Russian media never could. And so in 2025 when it came time to rehabilitate and promote a Holocaust denier, Glenn was ready.

The Reveal

Greenwald didn’t change. He stopped hiding.

The cover pulled in an audience of mainstream liberals who needed civil liberties framing. That audience is gone now, or irrelevant to the Trump administration’s grip on the news. His current chase of viewers needs no pretense—Fuentes followers would be alienated by it anyway.

So the mask comes off.

A Holocaust denier becomes a martyred truth-teller. “I don’t hate Hitler” becomes “provocative rhetoric.” And the man who spent 2007 condemning the trivialization of Nazis by those trying to stop them, now trivializes actual Nazis to ensure they rise to power.

The 2015 Quillette profile turned out to be right.

Extreme right.

You don’t spend five years defending Nazis pro bono, call Nazi shooting victims “odious and repugnant,” fight to protect a Nazi whose follower murdered people in front of their children, and then twenty-five years later pivot to celebrate a Nazi and Holocaust denier as a “generational talent.” Greenwald is as he always was.

The Tesla hit-and-run was on Christmas Day.

Officers responding to a two-car crash on Cornwall Street just south of Hebron Street around 9:20 p.m. found the occupants of a Toyota Camry trapped and injured and a black Tesla Cybertruck with no one inside, according to Hartford Police Lt. Aaron Boisvert.

A teen in the Toyota was pronounced dead, and police are still searching for the Tesla driver who they say fled on foot.

The danger of enlightenment was never to the thinker, it was that the thinker endangered the legitimacy of those who held interpretive monopoly.

The Church didn’t burn heretics because independent thought was so hard to do well; they burned them to prevent a contagious independence that threatened the entire apparatus that converted doctrinal control into material power.

It’s like worrying that a machine gun will show up at a jousting tournament.

The current professional-managerial class of journalists, academics, lawyers, doctors, and policy fellows built their authority on credentialing systems that controlled who got to interpret reality for others.

AI will indeed make some people think less. Look at all the people who buy a Tesla and let it kill them by driving into a tree. Yet AI is so broken without careful thought that it also produces the reverse effect, where people use it to think more. It’s like saying guns with a better scope and repeat mechanism would make people hunt less; it breaks the bottleneck for those who know the right end of a rifle.

Suddenly anyone can generate plausible legal analysis, medical interpretation, policy framing at much greater speeds. The quality varies by the person aiming the barrel, but so did the quality of what the credentialed class produced—we just weren’t supposed to try and control their integrity. And that’s actually going to mean a very, very big problem with AI.

De Weck’s new essay in the Guardian is, structurally, a priest who is worried about a printing press.

Our king, our priest, our feudal lord – how AI is taking us back to the dark ages

Or perhaps more to the point, he is poking the mob about lighting torches and grabbing pitchforks to throw a modern printing press into the river. That’s different than a printing press engineer warning about safe use of the machine. Who benefits from the anxiety?

He frames it as concern for the soul of the congregation, but the actual anxiety is positional. A “fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute” depends on a system where the privilege to dispense foreign policy interpretation was made scarce and gatekept. AI abruptly makes his particular form of cognitive labor rather abundant and very cheap.

I’m not much for dwelling on Kant, but I know the honest Kantian question is far from “will people stop thinking?” No, Kant would demand “which institutions currently profit from monopolizing thought-on-behalf-of-others, and what happens when that monopoly breaks?”

The true Kantian would require the professional class to examine its own complicity in manufacturing a scarcity and dependency that it now laments.

Distributed standard measures of integrity should have been planned long before the last three decades of technology, when personal compute power directly questioned the closed approach to controlling knowledge. Fortunately, we have some new independent ideas…