The Ratchet Clicks Counter
Twenty-three control-grid mechanisms, one per chapter of The Ratchet. How many have already clicked shut where you live? Answer them and find your position on the ratchet. Your answer is a range, not a score — and if the range straddles two bands the page refuses to name one.
Twenty-three mechanisms. One direction. A ratchet is a mechanism that only turns one way. Each click below is a piece of safety, security, or transparency infrastructure that exists in your country right now. None of them came in unjustified. None of them have ever rolled back.
Score yourself. Each item answers a single question: does this apply where you live? Yes counts. Partially counts half. No is the only way out, and the list of countries with twenty-three Nos is shorter than you would prefer.
Each click maps to a numbered chapter in The Ratchet (Book 2 of the Evil Robots Series). The sources are the primary documents behind that chapter’s claim. Each click leads with one primary document — the statute, the court filing, the government’s own record — and then this project’s dossiers, which cite the rest of the filings with URLs. The page does double duty: a reference index (confirm a mechanism, follow the source), and a self-assessment (Yes / Partially / No, score at the bottom).
The 23 Clicks
Each click carries the anchor its sources link points at, so a row in the counter lands on its own citations: the primary document first, the dossiers after it.
1. The Flagging Machine
Chapter 1. Does your government fund or coordinate with organizations that flag online content for removal by platforms?
Primary source: Murthy v. Missouri, No. 23-411 (U.S. 2024) — the Supreme Court opinion, and the record of White House, FBI and CISA contacts with the platforms that it reviews. The Court decided standing, not the merits.
Sources: House Judiciary Staff Report on EIP, Washington Post: Stanford’s Top Disinformation Research Group Collapses Under Pressure.
The Twitter Files — Complete Index — all 19 installments, the FBI-to-platform channel, Hamilton 68, the Virality Project
Content Moderation — The Control-Grid Component — who decides what speech survives, country by country
AI-Powered Content Moderation — Meta’s 97%-automation claim and the machinery behind it
2. The Algorithm
Chapter 2. Do platforms operating in your country use engagement-optimizing algorithms that amplify outrage?
Primary source: Frances Haugen, written testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee, 5 October 2021 — Facebook’s own research on what its ranking rewards, entered into the congressional record.
Sources: The Facebook Files (WSJ series, Frances Haugen disclosures), MIT Tech Review on engagement amplification of moral outrage.
Algorithmic Amplification and Suppression — the Haugen disclosures, XCheck, YouTube radicalization, TikTok heating
Dead Internet Theory: The Conspiracy That Came True — the fringe claim, what it got wrong, and what came true anyway
3. The Kill Switch
Chapter 3. Has anyone in your country been deplatformed at the infrastructure level (hosting, payment processing, app stores simultaneously)?
Primary source: Parler LLC v. Amazon Web Services, W.D. Wash. docket — the hosting leg of the January 2021 cascade, in the court record.
Sources: Operation Choke Point — FDIC Office of Inspector General Audit.
The Deplatforming Cascade — Parler, the Canadian convoy financial kill chain, the WikiLeaks banking blockade, Operation Choke Point
Internet Control — The Control-Grid Component — who can take content down, slow a network, or pull the plug
4. The Money
Chapter 4. Can your government freeze bank accounts without prior court order during declared emergencies?
Primary source: Federal Court of Appeal, 2026 FCA 6 — plain-language summary — the court’s own summary of its ruling on the 2022 Emergencies Act invocation, the invocation that authorised the account freezes.
Sources: Canadian Emergencies Act invocation, Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) final report, 2023, Bank of Canada on CBDC research.
Payment Freezing — The Control-Grid Component — the off-switch on money, country by country
CBDCs and Programmable Money — programmable money, the digital yuan, and the BIS on ‘absolute control’
Digital Payments — The Control-Grid Component — who can see every transaction and who can switch one off
5. The Papers
Chapter 5. Does your country have or is it building a national digital identity system?
Primary source: Regulation (EU) 2024/1183 — eIDAS 2.0 — the statute that obliges every member state to offer a European Digital Identity Wallet.
Sources: UIDAI / Aadhaar enrollment statistics (Government of India), India Stack documentation.
Digital ID — The Control-Grid Component — how four polities built the identity layer
Digital Identity Systems — Aadhaar’s 1.4 billion enrolments, eIDAS 2.0, Worldcoin
Biometric Collection — The Control-Grid Component — harvesting the body as a key
6. The Club
Chapter 6. Do your country’s senior officials attend invitation-only policy forums (Bilderberg, WEF, CFR equivalents) where policy consensus is built before legislative debate?
Primary source: Bilderberg Meetings — the organisers’ own site, which publishes each year’s participant list and agenda topics and nothing said about them.
Sources: Bilderberg Meetings official participant lists, WEF Young Global Leaders alumni directory, Council on Foreign Relations membership disclosures.
The US Legal Establishment as Control-Grid Substrate — named DOJ/OLC/judiciary and Trust-and-Safety personnel and their institutional rotations
The Revolving Door Map — the personnel graph, edge by edge
THE RECORD — capture matrix — institutions scored on capture action, every cell a receipt
7. The Priest
Chapter 7. Are there ideological compliance requirements (ESG, DEI, or equivalents) in your country’s institutional infrastructure?
Primary source: Directive (EU) 2022/2464 — the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive — the disclosure mandate, and the compliance function it creates, in the text of the law.
Sources: SEC Climate-Related Disclosure Rule (final rule, March 2024).
Climate / ESG / Net-Zero Ratchet — The Green Priests — finance-led coordination and the green-priest layer
Social & Behavioral Scoring — The Control-Grid Component — reducing a person to a number that gates access
The AI-Worldview Poles – Different Pawls, Same Ratchet — the worldview camps that supply the compliance vocabulary
8. The Embassy
Chapter 8. Does a foreign government operate cultural/religious/community organizations in your country that have been documented conducting surveillance?
Primary source: US Attorney’s Office, EDNY — two arrested for operating an undeclared police station for the Chinese government — the Manhattan station, in the charging announcement.
Sources: FBI announcement on Chinese police “service stations” in New York (2023), Safeguard Defenders report on overseas Chinese police stations (110 Overseas).
Foreign-Influence Apparatus — The Control-Grid Component — how states project influence through diaspora and lobbying channels
Intelligence Services and Diaspora Networks — Postwar Template and Worldwide Adoption — the postwar template and its worldwide adoption
The Tradecraft of Subversion — From Wetwork to the Nudge — the spectrum from wetwork to the nudge
9. The Quarter
Chapter 9. Does your country issue work visas whose holder’s right to remain depends on continued employment by a single named sponsor? (contested)
Primary source: DOJ Immigrant and Employee Rights Section — Apple settlement agreement, 8 November 2023 — the signed agreement over permanent-labor-certification recruiting that favoured visa holders an employer sponsors.
H-1B / L-1 Labor Arbitrage — Diaspora-as-Labor-Cost-Suppression — DOJ settlements, congressional findings, employer concentration, wage-suppression studies
Pre-1900 Commercial-Dominance Cases — When Foreign Merchant Communities and Trading Concessions Displaced Native Economic and Political Position — the merchant-quarter precedent the modern arrangement rhymes with
The Historical Explorer — thirty-nine sourced cases of the same pattern over a thousand years
10. The Eagle
Chapter 10. Does the United States operate military bases, fund NGOs through US-government funding mechanisms, or enforce dollar-denominated sanctions affecting your country?
Primary source: Office of Foreign Assets Control — the Treasury’s own list of sanctions programs, country by country.
Sources: OFAC Sanctions Programs and Country Information, USAID FY country-by-country budget tables.
Warfare by Other Means: Economic Statecraft as Fifth-Generation War — currency chokepoints, sanctions, export controls, designations
US Aid to Israel — the official, statutory record — the statutory aid record as a worked example of the mechanism
THE RECORD — statecraft matrix — the statecraft matrix
11. The Car
Chapter 11. Do vehicles sold in your country contain technology capable of remote disable, location tracking, or behavioral monitoring?
Primary source: NHTSA, Advanced Impaired Driving Prevention Technology, advance notice of proposed rulemaking, 5 January 2024 — the rulemaking the 2021 infrastructure law ordered, in the Federal Register.
Sources: Mozilla Foundation: Privacy Not Included — Cars review (2023), NHTSA Report to Congress on Advanced Impaired Driving Prevention Technology (2024).
Vehicle Control Infrastructure — the RIDE Act, OnStar, Tesla OTA, EU ISA, China’s EV monitoring platform, starter-interrupt devices
12. The Office
Chapter 12. Does your employer monitor your keystrokes, screen time, or communications?
Primary source: Amazon’s attorney’s letter to the NLRB, obtained through FOIA and published by The Verge, April 2019 — the company’s own description of a system that “automatically generates any warnings or terminations.”
Sources: NYT: How Companies Are Pushing Productivity Tracking.
Surveillance Infrastructure: Workplace Bossware & Smart Home / IoT — the bossware surge, Amazon algorithmic termination, gig-economy wage discrimination
Algorithmic HR — Hiring, Scoring, and Firing by Machine — employment decisions with a documented human harm in a court record or regulator action
13. The School
Chapter 13. Are students in your country subject to content monitoring on school-provided devices?
Primary source: Senators Markey and Warren — investigation of EdTech student-surveillance platforms — the vendors’ own answers to a Senate inquiry.
Sources: Center for Democracy & Technology: Hidden Harms — Online Student Activity Monitoring (2021-2024 series), GAO Report on K-12 Cybersecurity and Student Data Privacy.
Education Surveillance & The EdTech-to-Surveillance Pipeline — proctoring software, school-issued device monitoring, student data brokers
14. The Troop
Chapter 14. Has an institution in your country had its governance rewritten by a bankruptcy court, a settlement trust, or a consent decree rather than by a vote of its own members?
Primary source: In re Boy Scouts of America and Delaware BSA, LLC, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware, No. 20-10343 — petition filed 18 February 2020; plan confirmed 8 September 2022. Case record cited by number; no link on file yet.
Purdue Pharma, the Sacklers, and the Prescriber-Data Engine — a bankruptcy restructuring that moved control and the data with it
23andMe, Bankruptcy, and the Genetic Database — 15 million genetic profiles transferred by court-supervised sale rather than re-consent
Great Engineering Firms Destroyed by Financialization — financier capture and litigation pivots, firm by firm
15. The Hospital
Chapter 15. Can your health data be sold, subpoenaed, or accessed by law enforcement without your knowledge?
Primary source: HHS — HIPAA and disclosures to law enforcement — the regulator’s own account of when a covered entity may hand over a record without the patient’s authorisation.
Healthcare Data Surveillance — the Flo Health FTC settlement and the broker market beneath it
Health Surveillance — The Control-Grid Component — health data as a control surface, country by country
Health-Governance Ratchet — The Hospital Click — philanthropic funding determinism and institutional embedding
16. The Tap
Chapter 16. Does your country participate in signals intelligence sharing agreements (Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, Fourteen Eyes, bilateral)?
Primary source: Yale Law School MFIA clinic — newly disclosed documents on the Five Eyes alliance — the agreements themselves, released through FOIA litigation.
Sources: UKUSA Agreement declassified texts (NSA / GCHQ release, 2010), EFF: Five Eyes overview.
NSA / Snowden Surveillance Infrastructure — PRISM, XKeyscore, Section 702, the FISA Court, Five Eyes, EO 12333
Telecom Subversion by Nation-States — Room 641A, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, and the carriers that carried it
17. The Watchers
Chapter 17. Does your country operate mass metadata collection programs?
Primary source: ODNI, declassified report on commercially available information, January 2022 — the intelligence community’s own review of the bulk data it buys rather than collects.
Sources: PRISM Slides as published by The Guardian (Snowden disclosures, 2013), Section 702 reauthorization congressional record (2024), Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board reports on Section 702.
NSA / Snowden Surveillance Infrastructure — the foundation layer everything else is built on
The Data-Broker Loophole — the purchase that launders the warrant requirement
18. The Backdoor
Chapter 18. Has your country mandated encryption backdoors or lawful intercept capabilities in telecommunications?
Primary source: Online Safety Act 2023, section 121 — Ofcom’s power to require a service to use accredited technology to find content, including content sent privately.
Sources: EU CSAM Regulation proposal — client-side scanning provisions, CALEA (US Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act).
Telecom Subversion by Nation-States — Salt Typhoon walking through the CALEA backdoors, SS7, the Athens Affair
Prompt Injection — The Unfixable Flaw — the adjacent case of a flaw admitted unfixable and shipped anyway
Intelligence Portal Compromises — what happens to a capability once it exists
19. The Model
Chapter 19. Does your country operate facial recognition surveillance in public spaces?
Primary source: Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 — the AI Act — Article 5 bans real-time remote biometric identification in public spaces, then lists the exceptions.
Sources: Comparitive: Worldwide facial recognition deployments index.
Facial Recognition — The Control-Grid Component — SkyNet, the EU AI Act’s banned-with-exceptions posture, India’s no-framework rollout, Clearview
Biometric Collection — The Control-Grid Component — the enrolment layer underneath it
20. The Blueprint
Chapter 20. Is your country implementing AI governance that includes registration requirements, compute thresholds, or content watermarking mandates?
Primary source: Executive Order 14110, Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence — reporting duties keyed to training compute, in the Federal Register. Revoked in January 2025.
Sources: EU AI Act — Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, China Generative AI Service Measures (effective August 2023).
The AI Governance Ratchet — hard law, voluntary standards, compute chokepoints, and what held
AI Safety Theater: Safety as the Capture Surface — licensing thresholds as moats, compute governance as a chokepoint
AI Governance Tracker — the live tracker
21. The Counter-Argument
Chapter 21. Has your country experienced a genuine foreign disinformation operation, terrorist attack, or child safety crisis that justified the infrastructure in questions 1-20? (contested)
Primary source: DOJ — Iranian intelligence officials indicted on kidnapping conspiracy charges — a real foreign-state operation on US soil, targeting a US journalist, in the charging announcement.
Sources: ODNI Annual Threat Assessment (most recent), Mueller Report on Internet Research Agency operations, NCMEC CyberTipline annual statistics.
Historical Precedents — When Polities Confronted Foreign-State or Foreign-Commercial Displacement — when the threat was real, across the catastrophic-to-tolerable spectrum
Israeli state-linked information & influence operations — a documented state-linked operation, held to the same standard as any other
The Universal Capture Mechanism — why a real justification is what the mechanism needs, not an objection to it
22. The Cat or the Dog
Chapter 22. When your government builds safety infrastructure, does it have a documented history of limiting that infrastructure to its stated purpose? (inverted — a yes here removes a click; contested)
Primary source: PCLOB, Report on the Surveillance Program Operated Pursuant to Section 702, 2023 — the government’s own oversight board on FBI queries of Americans run through a foreign-intelligence program.
Sources: DHS Inspector General reports on Disinformation Governance Board, Henan health-code-as-protest-suppression coverage (CNN).
Intelligence Portal Compromises — every surveillance capability eventually turned against its builders
Nation-State Ratchets — Comparative Architecture — the comparative architecture, polity by polity
Cat Psychology, Autonomy, and the Control Grid Metaphor — the disposition research behind the question’s framing
23. The Hemisphere
Chapter 23. Is your country’s core digital infrastructure — networks, payment rails, cloud, identity — procured to the standards of a single great-power bloc? (contested)
Primary source: UK Government — Huawei to be removed from UK 5G networks by 2027 — the procurement line drawn by bloc, in the government’s own announcement.
The China Parallel — the Body-Control Stack — the exported stack, sourced to primary records
Three Legal Traditions and the Control Grid: Why the Same Infrastructure Meets Different Walls — why the same infrastructure meets different walls
THE RECORD — convergence matrix — the convergence matrix — the national grids closing on each other
Scoring
Four even sixths of the twenty-three. The cuts sit on halves because PARTIALLY answers exist, so 11.5 has to land somewhere. These are the same bands the counter uses; if they ever disagree, the counter is right and this table is stale.
- 0 – 5.5 — FEW CLICKS RECORDED. Your country is either very free or very disconnected from global infrastructure.
- 6 – 11.5 — STANDARD DEMOCRATIC SURVEILLANCE STATE. Most of the infrastructure exists but with some friction.
- 12 – 17.5 — ADVANCED CONTROL GRID. The infrastructure is comprehensive and the checks are eroding.
- 18 – 23 — THE RATCHET IS FULLY ENGAGED. The question is not whether the infrastructure exists but who is turning it.
A score is a range, not a number, because PARTIALLY is half a click and blind rows are recorded as unknown rather than as NO. Where the range straddles two bands, the counter refuses to name one.
Bridges
- Vehicle Control Infrastructure — the deep dive on click 11, The Car.
- The Twitter Files — Complete Index — the primary-document index behind clicks 1 and 3.
- Prompt Injection — The Unfixable Flaw — adjacent to clicks 2 and 18: a flaw admitted unfixable and shipped anyway.
- Warfare by Other Means, the Economic Statecraft Tracker and the statecraft matrix — the “economic pawl” behind clicks 4 (The Money) and 10 (The Eagle).
- The Historical Explorer — thirty-nine sourced cases of click 9’s pattern running over a thousand years.
Sources
All citation links are inline above with the relevant click, drawn from the published research — among them CBDCs and Programmable Money and NSA / Snowden Surveillance Infrastructure.