In the gleaming towers of Riyadh, a festival peddles math and tech to youth, promising careers in the kingdom’s gleaming surveillance state. Halfway around the world, India and NASA prepare to launch a satellite that will map the earth not for the people, but for the bosses—military strategists, corporate land grabbers, and climate-denying oligarchs. One spectacle sells the illusion of opportunity; the other delivers the tools of control. Both are funded by the same extractive logic: turn knowledge into profit, turn youth into labor, turn the planet into a spreadsheet. **The Festival of Compliance** A Riyadh festival inspires youth with a focus on math and technology, as reported by Arab News science coverage. The event is not a celebration of curiosity—it is a recruitment drive for the kingdom’s tech sector, a sector that builds facial-recognition systems for the religious police and drones for the border guards. The festival’s slogan might say "innovation," but its fine print reads "integration into the apparatus." The youth are not being educated; they are being molded. **The Satellite of Domination** Additionally, India is set to launch an Earth-mapping satellite with NASA in March 2025. This is not science for the public good—it is surveillance for the powerful. The satellite will track land use, water tables, and resource flows, data that will be weaponized against peasant movements, environmental defenders, and indigenous communities fighting displacement. NASA’s name lends legitimacy to a project that is, at its core, a tool of corporate and military control. The bosses call it "Earth observation"; the rest of us call it theft. **Who Really Owns the Future?** The festival and satellite launch are framed as progress, yet both serve the same hierarchy. The Riyadh festival funnels youth into the kingdom’s tech sector, a sector that enriches the royal family and its Silicon Valley partners. The India-NASA satellite enriches defense contractors and agribusiness giants. Neither project funds community labs, autonomous hackerspaces, or mutual aid networks that build real alternatives. The future being sold is not ours to inherit—it is theirs to exploit.
