Website tracks super-rich jets to 'predict the apocalypse'

Site tracks super-rich jets to 'predict the apocalypse'
Unsplash/Niklas Jonasson
The idea is simple, perhaps obvious. If the end of the world is approaching - or at least a nuclear attack or a crisis of civilization - the super-rich will probably know about it first. Not because they are part of a conspiracy, but because they tend to be closer to the centers where strategic information circulates.
If they find out, they'll get on their private jets. And, if they all go up at the same time, the data will show it.
This was the intuition of Kyle McDonald, a programmer and artist from Los Angeles, USA, who took the idea into the era of data and private aviation. The result is his Apocalypse Early Warning System, a tracker of private jet movements around the world, which McDonald interprets as a possible sign of unrest - or even panic - among global elites.
"If a real global catastrophe were about to happen, your friends would probably know about it first," McDonald wrote to technology portal Business Insider.
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How the private jet tracker works
According to Vice magazine, the system monitors a worldwide network of radio receivers that capture ADS-B signals - the same ones that transmit the position, speed and altitude of aircraft in real time - and filter this data to identify around 11,000 private and charter jets.
It then compares how many of these planes are in the air at any given moment with a historical baseline, which takes into account daily, weekly and even holiday patterns.
From this comparison emerges an alert scale from 1 to 5. Level 1 corresponds to a normal day, while level 5 indicates air activity greater than any other time recorded in the previous year.
If the number suddenly spikes - more than five standard deviations above the average - the system can send automatic alerts via Telegram, email or text message.
The origin: a threat from Trump and nuclear anxiety
The initiative, however, was not born out of academic curiosity, but from anxiety. McDonald says that everything began to take shape after reading the recent threat against Iran by Donald Trump, in which the President of the United States warned that an "entire civilization" could disappear if a ceasefire was not reached.
The statement led him to wonder who would have access to critical information before the rest of the population. After all, people close to power have already benefited, on other occasions, from privileged information in areas such as prediction markets, politics or cryptocurrencies.
If this happens in economic or geopolitical issues, why wouldn't it also happen in the face of a truly existential threat?
Apocalypse Early Warning System.
Reproduction
After completing the model, he decided to test it, analyzing historical data looking for the biggest spikes in activity. The result surprised him. The most pronounced increase recorded so far occurred on April 6, the same day Iran launched a large-scale offensive against American and Israeli targets.
"It disturbed me," he wrote in Business Insider. "I remember thinking, 'Oh my God, it's real.'"
Still, McDonald insists his tracker is far from a scientific apocalypse detector. A level 5 can be triggered for perfectly trivial reasons, such as the Christmas holidays or major political events involving mass movements of the rich.
But he maintains that the simple fact that recognizable patterns emerge raises interesting questions about how elites react to situations of uncertainty.
Art, surveillance and vibe coding
McDonald has 25 years as a programmer. But over the last year and a half, he has been constantly working with artificial intelligence. The tracker was built using so-called vibe coding, an increasingly popular technique in which the developer guides the AI with instructions, and it writes much of the code.
Half of his income comes from consulting for technology companies and artists.

The other half, from exhibitions in Europe and East Asia. He pays himself an annual salary of 60 thousand dollars (about R$305 thousand) - modest for his life in Los Angeles, according to him - and reinvests the rest in his projects.
The tracker also generates some revenue: around 2.5 thousand people have signed up, most for free via Telegram, and others pay five dollars a year to receive alerts by SMS or email.
"What fascinates me is that people basically pay me five dollars a year for the possibility of not receive a text message," he wrote. "This strikes me as a conceptual intervention, a work of art and a software service all at the same time."
This is not his first project on the border between surveillance and activism. Previously, he built apps to track Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) helicopters - and discovered, he says, that the police often hid the identity of their aircraft.
More recently, he developed facial recognition tools to identify law enforcement officers, projects that earned him media coverage, criticism and even death threats. The common thread, he says, is to invert the logic of surveillance: use it to scrutinize power, not the citizen.
The movements of elites as a social signal
According to The Washington Post, McDonald dialogues with the reflections of writer Douglas Rushkoff, who for years has studied the obsession of some billionaires with preparing for social collapse.
In the book Survival of the Richest, Rushkoff documented how many ultra-rich people not only build bunkers, but also transform existing properties into self-sufficient refuges prepared for extreme scenarios.
From the author's perspective, McDonald's tracker would be less a catastrophe detector and more a barometer of elite fear. And this fear does not arise in a vacuum. The very possibility that some can escape while the majority do not have this option speaks to a deeper issue: the growing concentration of wealth and power.
Despite the gravity of the background, McDonald prefers to treat the topic with humor rather than solemnity. He doesn't intend to offer grandiose answers. It's enough for people to see the project, laugh and recognize the absurdity of the situation.
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Source: G1

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