There is a particular brand of arrogance that only a dying empire can truly master—the kind where you reach across an ocean to flip a light switch just to see if the person on the other side is still breathing. Recent reports suggest that U.S. hackers have successfully plunged Venezuela into darkness, a feat that is about as impressive as kicking a man while he is down, tied up, and currently suffering from a severe case of scurvy. This isn’t geopolitical strategy; it is digital vandalism performed by bored bureaucrats who have clearly run out of meaningful ways to exert influence in a world that is increasingly tired of their nonsense. Venezuela, a country whose infrastructure has been held together by prayer and stolen copper wire for a generation, was apparently the perfect target for a little ‘cyber-testing.’ It is the ultimate expression of the modern age: one failing state using high-tech toys to irritate another failing state that was already doing a perfectly fine job of destroying itself without any external help.

On the other side of this pathetic coin, we have the Venezuelan regime. Nicolas Maduro, a man whose grasp on reality is as firm as a wet noodle, finally has a legitimate excuse for the rolling blackouts that have defined his tenure. For years, he has blamed iguanas, sabotage, and the malevolent spirits of dead colonizers for the fact that his people cannot keep their milk cold. Now, the U.S. has handed him the greatest gift a failing dictator could ask for: a factual grievance. It is a symbiotic relationship of stupidity. The U.S. gets to flex its digital muscles, and Maduro gets to point at the sky and scream about 'Yankee Imperialism' while his citizens sit in the dark, wondering if the internet will ever stay on long enough to see a meme that isn't five years old. It’s a beautiful, tragic cycle of performative cruelty that serves absolutely no one but the people who get to write the press releases.

But the domestic front is where the real comedy lies. While we are busy turning off the lights in Caracas, our own internal mechanisms are being handed over to the cold, dead hands of artificial intelligence. Reports have surfaced that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using AI to send agents into the field without so much as a ‘how-to’ guide. This is the logical conclusion of the American dream: replacing human incompetence with automated catastrophe. We have reached the point where we are so eager to automate our prejudices that we don’t even bother to train the people tasked with carrying them out. It’s the 'Uber for Oppression.' An algorithm tells an agent to go to a specific coordinate, and the agent, possessing the critical thinking skills of a toaster, simply follows the blinking light.

The sheer intellectual laziness required to implement such a system is breathtaking. We are told that AI is the future, a tool of unparalleled efficiency, but in the hands of a government agency, it is just a way to shift blame. When an agent inevitably violates someone’s rights or ends up in the wrong house, the brass can simply shrug and blame the 'black box' of the algorithm. It is the perfect bureaucratic shield—you cannot fire a line of code, and you cannot shame a machine. We are witnessing the birth of a world where the only thing more dangerous than a human with a badge is a human with a badge and a tablet running a program that hasn't been beta-tested for human decency.

And let us not forget Palantir, the Silicon Valley darling that provides the digital crosshairs for this operation. Their app for targeting immigrants is essentially Tinder for the surveillance state. It is the peak of our civilization that the brightest minds in tech—the people we were told would connect the world and solve the energy crisis—are instead spending their lives building better ways to hunt vulnerable people for profit. Peter Thiel’s vision of the future is a place where you can be identified, tracked, and processed by an app that likely has a very clean, minimalist user interface. It’s misery, but with a high refresh rate.

Ultimately, what we are seeing is a global race to the bottom, fueled by a toxic mixture of high technology and low intelligence. Whether it’s U.S. hackers playing God with a foreign power grid or ICE letting a chatbot manage its field operations, the result is the same: a profound loss of humanity in the name of efficiency. We are governed by people who think that a blackout is a victory and that an algorithm is an excuse. The Left will cry about the ethics of the code while using the very phones that facilitate the surveillance, and the Right will cheer for the 'strength' of the hacking while ignoring the fact that their own country is being cannibalized by the same digital indifference. We are all sitting in the dark, some of us literally and some of us metaphorically, waiting for the next update to tell us who to hate next. The lights might be out in Caracas, but in the halls of power, no one was home to begin with.