They Didn’t Destroy It. They Deleted It.

(Plagiarized from The Drey Dossier: https://youtu.be/BWUcW49DPBI?si=kq1jhSoDTI-l-1kl)

On January 3rd I read a headline I haven’t been able to shake.

It said the United States deleted Venezuela’s air defenses.

Not destroyed.

Not neutralized.

Not taken out.

Deleted.

It’s a strange word to find in military reporting. It doesn’t belong to the language of bombs or battalions. It belongs to the language of browsers, inboxes, text threads you wish you’d never sent. You delete mistakes. You delete records. You delete things you don’t want to exist anymore.

So I stopped on that word.

Because words matter. They tell you what kind of world you’re actually living in, often more clearly than the event itself.

And once you sit with deleted, it becomes obvious: what happened in Venezuela wasn’t a traditional military operation. It was the convergence of systems that have been quietly built, tested, and refined for years. AI-assisted targeting. Surveillance infrastructures that turn desperation into training data. Narrative warfare that collapses the distinction between what happened and what was generated.

This wasn’t a coup in the old sense. There were no boots advancing, no skies filled with dogfights. There was an erasure.

In under twenty minutes, Venezuela’s air defense system—Russian-made S-300s once described as an “unstoppable shield”—went dark. No shots fired in response. No heroic last stand. Just silence.

Technically, the story is almost boring. Electronic warfare jammed the radars into static. Operators did what operators always do: they turned up the power. The moment they did, the systems revealed themselves like flares. Missiles followed the signal home. Terrain-hugging Tomahawks slipped through the mountains. The shield turned out to be a suggestion.

But that’s just the hardware layer of war, and that layer is shrinking every year.

The real operation wasn’t about air defenses. It was about information—about who gets to define reality, and who loses the ability to verify it.

That’s why deleted is the right word.

Because what was erased wasn’t just equipment. It was ground truth itself.

To understand how we got here, you have to go back—not to the battlefield, but to the collapse.

In 2016, oil prices crashed and Venezuela’s economy imploded. Assets were frozen. Payments blocked. Imports strangled. By 2018, inflation topped one million percent. Salaries collapsed into absurdity. Engineers, teachers, nurses—people with advanced degrees—couldn’t afford groceries.

When you create mass desperation inside an educated population, something always shows up to harvest it.

This time, it was Silicon Valley.

Ghost work platforms arrived with friendly interfaces and promises of “earning in your spare time.” Scale AI. Appen. Remotasks. Toka. Behind the scenes, these platforms fed contracts from the richest companies on Earth—OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft—companies building systems that require hundreds of millions of tiny human judgments before a single model can function.

Someone has to draw the box around the pedestrian.

Someone has to label the car.

Someone has to tell the algorithm what counts as a thing.

By 2018, roughly 200,000 Venezuelans were doing this work for fifty cents to two dollars an hour. In a collapsed economy, that was ten times the minimum wage. Survival money.

Desperation became data.

Data became training.

Training became systems.

This is the first circuit of what I’ll call the fatherboard.

The labor flowed upstream. The profits flowed up. The consequences came back down.

In 2024, the Department of Defense awarded Scale AI a nearly $200 million contract. In 2025, the Pentagon unveiled a system literally called genAI.mil, piping models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI directly into military networks. The Defense Secretary called AI “America’s next Manifest Destiny,” a phrase that should chill anyone with a memory longer than a news cycle.

The CEO of Scale AI said it plainly: we are moving AI out of the lab and into the hands of operators.

Translation: the same systems trained on cheap labor in collapsing economies are now deciding what gets flagged, targeted, erased.

The model that learned jackets versus shirts learns civilians versus combatants.

The vision system that keeps cars between the lines learns radar installations from 40,000 feet.

The fifty-cent click worker and the nine-figure Pentagon contract are not separate stories. They are two ends of the same cable.

Then comes the narrative circuit.

After the strike, the information environment flooded instantly. Social feeds filled with images of Maduro being marched through corridors by tactical teams. Multiple angles. Cinematic lighting. Prestige-TV framing. No sources. No originals.

AI detection tools later flagged many of them as synthetic—wrong insignia, inconsistent flags, impossible details. But by then it didn’t matter.

Videos followed. Crowds crying in gratitude. Kneeling. Celebrating. Accounts with massive followings pushed them everywhere. Only after a full day of synthetic saturation did official footage arrive—and it rhymed almost perfectly with the fakes. Same framing. Same aesthetic. Same emotional register.

This is the move.

You flood the zone with fiction first.

Then you release reality into the same visual language.

By the time the “real” arrives, truth already feels slippery. Verification feels exhausting. Skepticism turns inward. Eventually, you stop trying.

That shrug—who even knows anymore—is the point.

This is not new. It’s how authoritarian systems have worked for years. Venezuela tested it with AI news anchors. With biometric loyalty cards. With mass bot amplification drowning out real voices. With apps that turned neighbors into sensors.

What’s new is that the same machinery is now pointed outward—and inward—at industrial speed.

Venezuela wasn’t the exception. It was the rehearsal.

So when the headline said deleted, it wasn’t poetic. It was precise.

They didn’t delete missile batteries.

They deleted the floor beneath reality.

The shared assumption that footage can be verified.

That facts can be stabilized.

That evidence means something before it’s aestheticized.

The fatherboard is running right now. Built on Venezuelan backs. Aimed everywhere.

But here’s the thing systems like this never fully account for: people who refuse passive consumption. People who want receipts. People who pause before sharing. People who don’t confuse speed with truth.

You are not small. You are not helpless. You are friction.

Stop doing their quality assurance for free.

Slow the reflex to amplify.

Support work that shows its sources.

Make noise where power still pretends to listen.

And above all—don’t look away.

They didn’t delete the air defenses.

They tried to delete your ability to know what happened.

Don’t let them.