Human Incubators and Digital Prisons: The Final Frontier of Biological Control
When Your Face and Womb Become State Property
Hey chummer,
They've finally done it. Transformed living human bodies into state-controlled incubation chambers and your face into corporate property. The dystopian future isn't coming—it's already here, operating in plain sight under the banner of "protection."
In Atlanta, 30-year-old registered nurse Adriana Smith lies brain-dead in Emory University Hospital, legally deceased but kept functioning on life support for over 90 days against her family's wishes. Georgia's abortion ban has transformed her into a human incubator for a fetus with an uncertain future. Meanwhile, Clearview AI's database has swelled to a staggering 60 billion facial images scraped without consent, even as police departments deploy new AI systems specifically designed to bypass facial recognition bans.
The connection? Your physical existence—your face, your body, your reproductive capacity—has been reclassified as a resource to be exploited, not an autonomous being with inherent rights.
Welcome to 2025, where the rain never stops in our cyberpunk reality, but it's your flesh they're harvesting now.
Your Face: Corporate Property in a 60 Billion Image Database
The surveillance apparatus has reached unprecedented scale. Clearview AI now boasts an image database containing 60 billion faces, enough for "almost everyone in the world to be identifiable," according to their own financial presentations to investors.
This wasn't built with your permission. Clearview constructed this massive database by scraping billions of images from social media platforms and other websites without consent, violating the terms of service of platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
As Biometric Update reported in February 2025, following founder Hoan Ton-That's resignation in December 2024, Clearview appointed Hal Lambert as CEO—a major Trump fundraiser explicitly tasked with expanding government sales.
"There's some opportunities there. I'm going to be helping with that effort," Lambert told Forbes, referencing ongoing discussions with the Trump administration to sell the database of your face and millions of others to federal agencies.
The scale is staggering. According to Nextgov, "with only 333 million people living in the United States, it's very likely that most people's likenesses are captured inside that facial database multiple times." Multiple international authorities have ruled the company's mass data collection illegal, with the Netherlands' Data Protection Agency fining Clearview €30.5 million ($33.7 million) in September 2024.
Yet the company continues expanding aggressively, doubling its database from 30 billion images to 60 billion in just over three years. Their ultimate goal, according to investor presentations obtained by The Washington Post, is to reach 100 billion facial images—creating what would effectively be a global identification system built without consent.
When Bans Fail: The Surveillance Workaround
Even when cities and states ban facial recognition technology due to privacy concerns and racial bias, the surveillance infrastructure simply adapts.
According to MIT Technology Review, police departments are now using a controversial new AI tool called "Track," built by video analytics company Veritone, that circumvents facial recognition bans by identifying people through other physical characteristics like body size, gender, hair color, clothing, and accessories.
The system's purpose couldn't be more explicit. Veritone CEO Ryan Steelberg admitted that "the whole vision behind Track in the first place" was to find a way around facial recognition restrictions: "If we're not allowed to track people's faces, how do we assist in trying to potentially identify criminals or malicious behavior or activity?"
The tool is already used by 400 customers, including state and local police departments and universities across the country. It's also expanding federally—US attorneys at the Department of Justice began using Track for criminal investigations in August 2024, and Veritone's broader suite of AI tools is used by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense.
An ACLU attorney called it "a categorically new scale and nature of privacy invasion and potential for abuse that was literally not possible any time before in human history."
The system allows law enforcement to analyze people across different locations and video feeds, even when their faces aren't visible or are protected by legal restrictions. Steelberg boasts about calling it their "Jason Bourne app," comparing it to fictional surveillance technology from spy thrillers.
According to Intelligenthq, Track can create detailed timelines of individuals' movements across different locations using these non-facial attributes, allowing for comprehensive surveillance while technically complying with facial recognition bans.
The technology operates in what MIT Technology Review describes as a legal gray zone. Since it doesn't use biometric data as defined in most privacy laws, it escapes the legal restrictions that apply to facial recognition—despite achieving many of the same surveillance capabilities.
The Human Incubation Chamber: Bodies as State Property
As corporations claim ownership of your face, state abortion bans are claiming control over women's bodies—with horrifying consequences.
In Georgia, 30-year-old Adriana Smith, a registered nurse and mother, began experiencing severe headaches in February while nine weeks pregnant. According to NBC News, she sought treatment at Northside Hospital in Atlanta but was released with medication and no proper tests. The next day, her boyfriend found her gasping for air and called 911.
At Emory University Hospital, doctors discovered blood clots in her brain. She was declared brain-dead—legally deceased. But under Georgia's "Heartbeat Bill," which bans abortions after cardiac activity is detected around six weeks, her body cannot be allowed to complete its natural death process.
For over 90 days, Smith's body has been maintained on life support against her family's wishes, transformed into a state-mandated incubation chamber. Her mother, April Newkirk, told People that watching her daughter's ventilator-assisted breathing is "torture."
"I see my daughter breathing, but she's not there. And her son—I bring him to see her," Newkirk said, describing her grandson's belief that his mother is "just sleeping."
Even more disturbing, doctors have informed the family that the fetus, now at 21 weeks, has fluid on the brain and may face severe disabilities if born. According to Newsweek, Smith's mother said, "She's pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he's born."
Yet the family has no legal right to decide—the state has effectively claimed ownership of Smith's body.
The hospital claims Georgia law requires maintaining Smith's body until the fetus reaches viability around 32 weeks—more than three months after brain death. But legal experts disagree. Thaddeus Pope, a bioethicist and lawyer at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, told NPR that "removing the woman's mechanical ventilation or other support would not constitute an abortion. Continued treatment is not legally required."
Lois Shepherd, a bioethicist and law professor at the University of Virginia, explained to PBS News that before the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, this situation would have been clearer: "Pre-Dobbs, a fetus didn't have any rights. And the state's interest in fetal life could not be so strong as to overcome other important rights, but now we don't know."
We do know that a woman's body, even after death, is no longer her own.
The Legislative Gray Zone: Designed Ambiguity
What makes these scenarios particularly disturbing is how the legal frameworks have been deliberately constructed to enable maximum control while providing minimum clarity.
Georgia's abortion ban, like similar laws in other states, includes vague exceptions for the life of the mother. But as Smith's case demonstrates, these exceptions create dangerous gray areas. What happens when the mother is already legally dead but physically functioning? The law provides no clear answer, leaving doctors fearful of criminal prosecution.
Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, told Newsweek: "Adriana deserved to be trusted by her health care professionals. Her family deserved the right to have decision-making power about her medical decisions. Instead, they have endured over 90 days of re-traumatization, expensive medical costs and the cruelty of being unable to resolve and move toward healing."
Similarly, U.S. privacy law contains gaping holes that enable surveillance technologies to operate in gray zones. While facial recognition faces increasing restrictions due to privacy concerns and racial bias, systems like Veritone's Track exploit the narrow definitions in these laws by focusing on non-biometric attributes.
As MIT Technology Review explains, "Stanley says the new tracking software...poses lots of the same issues as facial recognition while escaping scrutiny because it doesn't technically use biometric data."
These legal gray zones aren't accidents—they're deliberately created to allow continued surveillance and control while providing plausible deniability.
The Corporate-State Alliance
What makes this dystopian reality particularly insidious is the seamless alliance between corporate surveillance technology and state power.
Clearview AI actively markets its facial recognition database to law enforcement agencies. According to TechCrunch, the company sells access to "law enforcement and federal agencies who use it to identify suspects or find missing people." Their new CEO is specifically focused on expanding sales to the Trump administration.
Veritone similarly targets government agencies with its Track system, which Sri Lanka Guardian reports is already in use by the Department of Justice for criminal investigations, with Veritone's broader suite of AI surveillance tools used by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Defense.
Meanwhile, state abortion bans effectively conscript medical facilities into enforcing biological surveillance and control. Hospitals must maintain life support for brain-dead pregnant patients not because it's medically indicated, but because the state demands it.
Georgia state Senator Ed Setzler, who sponsored the abortion ban, told the AP: "I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child. I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life."
But what about the value of the woman's life? What about the family's right to grieve and find closure? What about the financial burden of extended life support that NBC News reports is falling on the family?
The Digital-Biological Convergence
What makes 2025 uniquely dystopian is the convergence of digital and biological surveillance. Your face becomes data. Your reproductive organs become state property. Your physical existence in all forms becomes subject to monitoring, regulation, and control.
The systems may seem separate, but they emerge from the same fundamental premise: that your body is not your own. That physical autonomy can be overridden by corporate interests and state power.
In both cases—the facial recognition database and the brain-dead woman on life support—we see the same core violation: humans reduced to resources, stripped of autonomy and dignity, their physical forms claimed by others.
And in both cases, the technologies and legal frameworks are expanding rapidly. Clearview's database grew from 3 billion images in 2020 to 60 billion in 2025, according to Biometric Update. Track surveillance technology is spreading to hundreds of police departments and federal agencies. Twelve states now enforce total abortion bans, with four more including Georgia implementing bans at around six weeks.
The infrastructure of biological control is being built around us, piece by piece, law by law, algorithm by algorithm.
The Human Cost
The human toll of these systems is devastating. For Adriana Smith's family, it means watching a loved one's body kept functioning when she is already gone. Her mother described the situation to Today as "more cost, more trauma, more questions" every day that passes.
Smith's 5-year-old son believes his mother is "just sleeping," adding another layer of psychological harm to an already devastating situation.
For the billions of people whose faces have been harvested by Clearview AI, the cost is a fundamental loss of anonymity and privacy. As Biometric Update reported, your face has become a commodity, with the company generating an estimated $187 million in annual recurring revenue primarily from law enforcement subscriptions.
Even as cities and states try to protect privacy through facial recognition bans, systems like Track emerge to maintain surveillance capabilities. As Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, told MIT Technology Review, there's "no overarching federal law that governs how local police departments adopt technologies" like these surveillance systems.
In both domains—reproductive rights and biometric privacy—we see technologies and laws that prioritize control over human autonomy and dignity. We see human bodies treated as resources to be exploited rather than persons to be respected.
The Fundamental Question
The cases of Adriana Smith and Clearview AI's massive database raise the same fundamental question: Who owns your body?
Is your face your property, or is it a public resource to be harvested without consent? Is a woman's body her own, or does it become state property when pregnant—even after death?
The dystopian reality of 2025 suggests powerful forces have already decided these questions. Your face belongs to their databases. Your reproductive capacity belongs to the state. Your autonomy is secondary to surveillance and control.
As we navigate this brave new world of biometric tracking and biological control, the most radical act may be insisting on a simple truth: your body—in all its forms—belongs to you.
Walk safe,
-T