Written by V.e.x.i.l. Research Lab or Volumetric Exposures & eXploitable Infrastructural Logics Research Lab based out of Valletta, Malta and Penang Island, Malaysia.
ABSTRACT:
This article analyses how non-state actors, from cartels to mercenaries and insurgents, now deploy electronic warfare capabilities once reserved for nations through “stack-jacking”: the parasitic exploitation of global supply chains, computational infrastructures, and the electromagnetic spectrum. Drawing on theories of the Stack (Bratton, 2016) and volumetric warfare, it argues that conflict has transformed from territorial battles into the distributed terraforming of environments where physical, digital, and spectral domains converge. In an era of ubiquitous backdoors, warfare is defined not by platform ownership but by the capacity to intercept, manipulate, and vanish into the architectures that constitute planetary-scale computation.
“Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinal Virtues.” — Thomas Hobbes
“Electromagnetic machines tap into a non-human nature that exists in a realm whose frequencies are beyond our perceptual reach. They involve ‘real but weird materialities that do not necessarily bend to human eyes and ears.” — Anna Greenspan
“…Banditry, piracy, gangland rivalry, policing, and war-making all belong on the same continuum.” — Charles Tilly
TERRAMUERTA
terrisombra nopaltorio temezquible
lodosa cenipolva pedrósea
fuego petrificado
cuenca vaciada
el sol no se bebió el lago
no lo sorbió la tierra
el agua no regresó al aire
los hombres fueron los ejecutores del polvo
el viento
se revuelca en la cama fría del fuego
el viento
en la tumba del agua
recita las letanías de la sequía
el viento
cuchillo roto en el cráter apagado
el viento
susurro de salitre
— Octavio Paz
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I : The Global Insurgent Cloud: A Dispatch from the Signal Mire
The predawn quiet of Tijuana was shattered in October 2025, not with the familiar rattle of automatic gunfire, but with a thunderclap from hell. Three drones, laden with nails and jagged metal, detonated in unison outside the Baja California state prosecutor’s office, reducing six armored government cars to twisted husks. Meanwhile, a fleet of government surveillance drones, deployed to track cartel movements, dropped from the air, neutralised mid-flight by an invisible hand. The culprit: the SkyFend Hunter, a Chinese-made anti-drone system wielded by cartel operatives or linked to the La Mayiza/Los Mayitos faction of the Sinaloa Cartel (1).
On that chilly October morning, antennas swept the horizon while algorithms parsed the digital signatures of military aircraft and UAVs used by the Mexican Army and Air Force. The SkyFend Hunter, together with its portable counterpart the SkyFend Spoofer, effectively blinded the state’s aerial surveillance. By flooding the radio spectrum with deceptive signals, these systems force government drones in their path to retreat or collapse from the sky.
Interestingly, what played out in the skies that day amounted to something far greater than a localised disturbance. It was a tactical echo of what is known in military doctrine as ‘Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD)’. In more familiar terms, A2/AD refers to measures designed to restrict an adversary’s access to an operational zone — historically, a strategy employed by states seeking to offset superior powers (Samaan, 2020; Schmidt, 2017). But in Tijuana, the platforms were distributed, digitally mediated, and cartel-operated. The capital-intensive architecture of state strategy had, quite simply, given way to a toolkit.
This is possible because these anti-drone systems have themselves become compact, easy to deploy, and increasingly available wherever there are markets. In this case, they snake through the ordinary channels of global logistics — SkyFend Technology ships from Shenzhen to front companies in Panama’s free-trade zones, from there, they cross the border into Mexico (Ríos-Morales, 2025). What then finally reaches Sinaloa is advanced military technology broken into parts and reassembled for insurgency.
Yet for Sinaloa, this also marks something beyond a tactical upgrade. Sensor-driven surveillance and spectrum manipulation are now tools in their modes of governance, recalibrating the cartel’s relationship to the spaces it actively controls and modulates (Priolon, 2025; Ziemer, 2025). But Sinaloa has not developed these capabilities alone. They are honed in the global itineraries of conflict: Ukrainian battlefields where cartel personnel train alongside mercenaries and paramilitaries, learning drone fabrication and electronic warfare, carrying those lessons home or to other conflict zones (2), (3), (4) .
At the same time, these itineraries of fighters and hardware are reshaping nonconventional conflict itself — shifting it from a territorial-bound theater into a recombinable field assembled wherever knowledge, signals, and positioning infrastructures intersect. Battlespace no longer sits quietly within its traditional domains. Overlaid with satellite navigation and data-fusion systems, it has become something else: a volumetric medium that envelops land, sea, and air without being contained by them. It is, in other words, “a multiplicity of surfaces that intersect, overlap, and complement each other in complex geometries” (Billé, 2017).
Here, the volumetric stretches from subterranean tunnels to orbital satellites, all interwoven by the electromagnetic spectrum, which compresses physical distance into a governable field of signals (Elden, 2013; Weizmann, 2023). To navigate and exploit this field, state and non-state actors deploy a growing suite of tools: GPS spoofers, jammers, fake cellular towers, and IMSI- catchers, which enable what Anna Engelhardt terms “electronic terraforming” (Engelhardt, n.d.), technologies that “function as a temporary small-scale infrastructure that invades a part of space by enforcing its own rules and, by this, creating a cyber territory under its control” (Engelhardt, n.d.).
These technologies come to demonstrate that disruption no longer settles just at disablement. They can now produce “enforced teleportation” (Engelhardt, n.d.): conditions in which a functional system is not merely shut down but expelled from its operational environment through manipulation of the spatial or informational coordinates on which it depends.
Yet, enforced teleportation does not require a war zone. At urban scales, the same logic appears in civilian guise: a city’s port district blanketed with counterfeit location layers to facilitate smuggling; a high-value truck momentarily blinded by GPS jamming to enable theft(6)(7). Even more crucially, these same techniques produce qualitatively different effects when applied at larger infrastructural scales. For example, a sophisticated GPS spoofing attack on a single container ship could rewire the topology of global logistics, redirecting flows far beyond the point of interference (8).
In response, a defensive arms race has spurred widespread availability of anti-jamming tools like the compact GPSDome, which uses what is known as beamforming (steering signals in a specific direction using multiple antennas) to create a precise “zone of silence” against interference(9). Defense, in turn, fuels a battery of offensive innovations that are increasingly defined by miniaturisation and concealment.
Moreover, this trend of miniaturisation changes them from occasional tools into instruments of a type of ambient electronic warfare that becomes integrable into daily life and settings. As these devices recede into the background, they fundamentally alter the strategic landscape for nonstate and guerrilla groups, placing advanced signal warfare now within everyday reach (10).
What this also comes to mark is a threshold in organisation and militarised sophistication — one where analyst Stephen Honan contends, “Nonstate actors can now acquire capabilities once reserved for nation-states… Cartels are no longer merely criminal syndicates; they increasingly resemble hybrid entities blending organized crime, paramilitary force, and terrorist tactics” (Honan, 2025).
Across these hybrid formations, a distinct but uneven operational logic now takes hold. As we can observe nonstate, cartel, and guerrilla-mercenary actors organise around operations of interception and capture, their governance also oscillating between the provisional and the permanently territorial. But this logic now plays out across computational protocols bleeding into the very terrains they contest. To grasp those protocols and architecture, we can turn to Benjamin Bratton’s concept of The Stack: the planetary-scale layering of Earth, Cloud, Address, City, Interface, and User through which contemporary conflict increasingly routes itself (Bratton, 2016). Yet here, we focus on its sinister inversions, where its layers are intercepted for malicious ends.
Actors spanning the spectrum of human to non-human warp these layers, exploiting their signals and flows, and then vanishing into the architectures they have turned. Their power is pervasive not because it is fully invisible but because it can selectively refuse consolidation and stable attribution while potentially remaining locally legible and coercive.
We can further chart this constellation, which is perhaps most clearly visible in transnational criminal cartels that have mastered the orchestration of distributed, deniable operations at scale. Their power does not arise exclusively from vertical command or durable hierarchy, but from an adaptive capacity to infuse themselves into existing infrastructures and to assemble modular ecologies of action: local gangs and biker networks, freelance hackers, logistics brokers, and ransomware syndicates, to name a few. These cells are activated and discarded as conditions shift, producing operational continuity without organisational permanence (Dammert & Sampó, 2025; Rekawek et al., 2025; Salcedo-Albarán & Garay-Salamanca, 2016).
As these shadow networks grow more complex, they are learning to weaponise automation. By using drones, spyware, botnets, and algorithmic fraud, these actors can now translate a single, localised attack directly into global market chaos or critical infrastructure failure. What enables this translation is not platform ownership but what we might call platform parasitism: a relation that does not administer infrastructure but exploits its address layers, its sensory grids, its points of access.
This parasitism is an insurgent strategy we call ‘stack-jacking’: the strategic breach and manipulation of computational systems and electromagnetic environments. Stack-jacking hijacks without ownership — spoofing a drone’s GPS, terraforming a port’s signal landscape, turning a surveillance network against itself. It produces fragmented, deniable forms of dominance. But it does not emerge from nowhere. Beneath it lies a shadow infrastructure that supplies its means: smuggled chips, backdoored firmware, human relays who vanish once their work is done.
These relays — human and non-human alike — are the living embodiment of what Giorgio Pizzi identifies as the “anti-persona”: the smuggler-engineers, the itinerant hackers, the spectral workers of the backdoored world, and the autonomous systems that hunt alongside them.
As Pizzi advances, “A hacker is someone who does not use a system, but prevents the users from using the system, or to make it work in a different way than the one is designed for, attacking it by exploiting its vulnerabilities. For this reason, compared to the User in The Stack, we call him the anti-User” (Pizzi, 2020). Yet, this also bears reminder as Bratton posits, whether necessarily malicious or not, the (user) that occupies the connective tissue between the layers is “a position that can be occupied by anything (or pluralities, multitudes and composites)”(Bratton, 2016: 376).
Agency in this model does not reside in individuals but circulates through what N. Katherine Hayles terms cognitive assemblages (2016): dynamic couplings of organic neural networks, artificial neural networks, sensors, drones, jammers, and scripts that together produce effects no single actor could achieve — or fully control. The granular mechanics of remote violence — jamming, spoofing, denial, latency — scale outward through these assemblages, linking tactical acts and localised perturbations to planetary infrastructures of computation.
Yet we also aim here to further probe what it means to inhabit the ‘Stack’, an architecture seemingly so encompassing that a tactical act or disruptive event, once nested within it, can no longer be extricated from the computational layers that give it form. When a drone strike, a spoofed signal, a manipulated navigation system becomes legible only through the stack’s own protocols — or even more intimately, when the stack ceases to be background and becomes instead the medium we breathe and think through — we perhaps arrive at Héctor Beltrán’s observation: “In our contemporary world, surrounded by code worlds, the stack seduces. The stack envelops. The stack is everywhere, and perhaps, the stack is everything” (Beltrán, 2025: 23). However, it is precisely because the stack appears to envelop everything, we must resist reading it as simply monolithic.
As Bratton insists, “We need not one but many Stack design theories” (Bratton, 2016: 300). Rather than seeing through a prism of a singular, universal Stack, contemporary power courses through multiple [stack] formations or articulations. Here, modular assemblages of physical infrastructure, computational systems, platforms, legal regimes, and users can be realigned and recomposed to notably serve military, logistical or otherwise ‘dual-use’ ends (Barrett-Taylor & Ford, 2025).
Among these formations, Bratton’s notion of the Black Stack captures something particularly potent for speculating on the contours of future conflict. Defined as a “generic term for The-Stack-to-Come that we cannot observe, map, name, or recognize” (Bratton, 2016: 368), it encapsulates in our view, a forward-operating condition that conflict unfolds through, namely, emergent architectures whose very incompleteness invites contingency, leakage, and accident. But where we might see only opportunity in these openings — the seams where formal governance has yet to congeal — we must also recognise them as the sites where new forms of control are incubated. The project of identifying brittle or corruptible points within such stack(s), and working backward to bend them, does not merely disrupt existing power; it risks unlocking mutant and modular forms of it. In this reading, the very act of exploiting the gaps between accident and emergence becomes a generative force, producing new architectures of control that operate in the space they were meant to clear.
These latent leakages or accidents also produce geopolitical consequences. Bratton therefore extends the Stack beyond an architectural diagnosis that is bound up intimately with the nature of sovereignty itself, arguing that: “The Stack that is not only a kind of planetary-scale computing system; it is also a new architecture for how we divide up the world into sovereign spaces. More specifically, this model is informed by the multilayered structure of software protocol stacks in which network technologies operate within a modular and interdependent vertical order” (Bratton, 2016 : xviii).
As the research collective Antikythera also notes, this framework can be situated within the even more expansive concept of Hemispherical Stacks — formations that range “from energy, mineral sourcing, and intercontinental transmission to cloud platforms, from addressing systems and interface cultures to different politics of the “user”” (Antikythera).
What this hemispheric differentiation means and now shows is a collision of planetary-scale computational systems – unraveling across multiple, interlocking fronts: the algorithmic latent spaces of AI models; the physical geography of undersea cable networks; and the silent, energy-intensive operations of data centers, where covert and disruptive acts may gestate long before they are perceptible as conflict.
While the strategic objective of commandeering critical infrastructure is not new, the theater of operations has expanded into a profoundly porous and ubiquitous battlespace as established in the beginning: what Derek Gregory has described as an “everywhere war” or Jolle Demmers and Lauren Gould characterise “liquid warfare” to the conduct of “martial politics” (Gregory, 2015; Demmers & Gould, 2018; Howell, 2018).
Seen from these perspectives, warfare must be understood less as episodic violence and here where we assert, more as a planetary-scale process of environmental transformation: a form of terraforming in which infrastructures of computation and communication are the terrain through which power is continuously shaped and exercised. A battlespace is not simply superimposed on the world; it is integrated into the conditions that make the world operable.
In practice, this means that contemporary operations manipulate environments: physical, digital, and informational or as instruments of strategic effect. Drawing on Svitlana Matviyenko, such environments can take on a distinctly coercive character: a “terror environment… from signal emission and jamming, instrumentalized to rupture or overrun initial communication, to psyops, propaganda, and random digital chaos often used to distort or control it” (Matviyenko, 2024). Conflict, in this sense, is an ongoing modulation of the conditions through which action, perception, and communication unfold.
This modulation does not stop at networks or platforms. It extends outward as well as into time, frequency, and matter itself. As Anna Greenspan observes in her work China and the Wireless Undertow: Media As Wave Philosophy (2023), our contemporary condition is defined by the convergence of radically different temporal and material scales. Alongside the slow, accumulative rhythms of geology exists the luminous, high-frequency domain of the electromagnetic spectrum: “Electromagnetic waves are the material substrate of wirelessness. Beneath the entanglements of hardware and politics lies an earthly, cosmic force—highly technological but at the same time wholly natural” (Greenspan, 2023: 19). Once frequency becomes something to manipulate rather than simply use, warfare expands again. Spectral control can now play out anywhere on the planet.
From here, environmental shaping shades into deliberate planetary reshaping (Grove, 2019). National military and paramilitary operations seek to render territories selectively hostile or permissive, altering geologic, biospheric, and spectral conditions to achieve strategic ends or sculpt “deathworlds” (Mbembe, 2019). Warfare, in essence, unfolds within the threshold where the operational landscape itself becomes both medium and weapon.
Finally, this same logic channels and circulates at another scale: the informational environment of addressability and attribution. The techniques that blind through frequency are mirrored in strategies of inference and deception: ways of seeing and misseeing that transform how users and endpoints are identified and targeted within networked space[s]. If the Cloud can function as a university for insurgency, then the User layer is its factory: a theater where communication is double-coded, addressability tactically steered, and the anti-persona learns to hunt. We turn there now.
II. Post-User, Pre-Persona: How War Learned to Inhabit Its Own Description
We now sink through another portal, entering a haunted layer: inhuman and only partially legible. Some would name it the User layer; others something more opaque, or more sinister still, in the way it stealthily curates a predatory thicket of signals and behaviors. We follow the thread of Bogna Konior who contends, “The internet is a dark forest, an ecosystem brimming with agents, scouring for our words and learning from our customs (Konior, 2026: 18)… communication could be potentially double-coded, and seemingly transparent conversations between humans could be encrypted for AIs” (Konior, 2026: 31). As Konior elaborates on the covert operations gestating within networks among human and non-human agents alike, what defines these operations is captured in her description of how: “A dark forest strategy would look more like making a hundred anonymous bot accounts to infiltrate enemies by sowing uncertainty and discord. Transparent revelations about “what you think” might achieve little compared to active uses of deception” (Konior, 2026: 32).
Ultimately, the dark forest is not a place we enter and leave willingly; it is the condition of being connected at all. To signal is to risk being seen; to remain silent is to cede the field. Deception is not a choice but an inevitability. The only question is whether you will be the one deceived or the one deceiving, and in the forest, the lines between predator and prey, between the one deceived and the one deceiving, blur until they disappear.
What Konior theorises as the dark forest condition resonates with Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins’s “new war ecology” and with the concept of “larval warfare” (Biswas Mellamphy, 2025). As the spaces we inhabit morph into a predatory sensorium, the networks that carry our most intimate communications also track, model, and exploit them in an environment defined by pervasive surveillance and automated extraction. In these environments bleeding the digital-physical divide, war “weaponizes our attention and mak[es] everyone a participant in wars without end… [by] collapsing the distinctions between audience and actor, soldier and civilian, media and weapon” (Ford & Hoskins, 2022).
We also become conscripted in what is more familiarly designated as the ‘grey zone’: a persistent and yet sometimes amorphous domain where state and nonstate actors prosecute multi-generational campaigns through cyber intrusion, disinformation cascades, and the competitive co-training of adversarial AI systems (Braw, 2023; Caparini, M., & Last, D, 2026; Spry, 2021). Russia’s Doppelgänger operation exemplifies this strand of information warfare. Since at least early 2022, it has attempted to construct a parallel information universe, leveraging automation, networked manipulation, and multi-platform influence campaigns to embed state objectives directly within the informational environment.
Engineered by Russian companies identified as Struktura and the Social Design Agency, the campaign’s very name is derived from its signature tactic of creating near-perfect digital replicas doppelgängers of trusted Western media and government institutions (Bernhard et al., 2024). Coordinated bot-driven accounts were known to spawn trends and swarm replies, a tactic supercharged by generative deep learning models that can generate persuasive text, images, and deepfakes at an industrial capacity.
The operation’s agility became evident in how it pivots to exploit real-world events; for instance, following Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace in late 2025, Doppelgänger’s Polish-and German-language proxy sites immediately published articles claiming the incident was either fabricated by NATO to escalate tensions or proof that support for Ukraine directly endangered Polish citizens (Mykhailenko, 2025).
However, Doppelgänger is arguably only the visible mark of something more nefarious fermenting beneath: the murky entanglement of state and private power in moulding information environments and populations. Therefore, if stack-jacking in Tijuana targets what we might add as the ‘spectral layer’ — blinding drones through signal manipulation — here the target is the User layer itself. The objective is not denial but capture: not forcing systems down, but capturing attention and influencing the coordinates of perception. And this is stack-jacking also operationalised at a different layer — state-level effects delivered not through platform ownership but through a billion-dollar gray-market ecosystem of private mercenary spyware and hack-for-hire collectives, an industry now capable of delivering espionage and psychological operations on demand.
For many, the poster child is Israel’s NSO Group and its flagship tool, Pegasus, which has systematically turned smartphones into perfect surveillance devices against civil society globally through zero-click exploits (Farhat, 2024). This market extends through vendors like the Intellexa Consortium(12) whose Predator spyware has targeted opposition figures and journalists from Egypt to Greece and Italy’s Paragon Solutions, whose zero-click capabilities were deployed against domestic activists before exposure forced a retreat.
Parallel to this software trade thrives a “hack-for-hire” ecosystem. Operations like Dark Basin (linked to India’s BellTroX) and campaigns run by Appin Security Group have for years targeted executives, journalists, and politicians across six continents (Scott-Railton et al., 2020). In essence, they are cyber mercenaries, renting out APT-level capabilities to corporations, private investigators, and states seeking deniability.
As Florian Egloff argues through his analogy of modern ‘cyber privateering’ — recalling the sixteenth-century privateers, state-sanctioned pirates granted license to raid under conditions of deniability — states now commission private actors to conduct similarly murky operations, weaving a pervasive layer of conflict into the global digital mesh (Egloff, 2015). These shadow players comprise what Egloff identifies as ‘patriotic hackers,’ technology champions with mercantile entanglements, and cyber criminal elements operating with tacit state support. His sixteenth-century analogy yields a crucial lesson: the use of non-state actors by states produces unintended consequences. States that cultivate deniable proxies in loosely governed space later race to build walls against the very forces those proxies have helped set in motion.
It is here where, for example, we can take note that a drive toward so-called “splinternets” takes shape. Rather than signaling the breakdown of the Internet, splinternets reflect a deliberate recasting of the global network into divergent and often incompatible stack formations. The term traces back to Clyde Wayne Crews’ early articulation of parallel internets as autonomous universes (Crews, 2001) and has since been developed to frame fragmentation as a strategy of regulatory and infrastructural divergence (Musiani et al., 2022). But splinternets are not merely about carving territory or restricting flows. They represent a more fundamental ambition: to harden security into [the] stacks’ and their architecture, rerouting dependencies around compromised nodes and insulating critical systems from the asymmetries of the global digital condition. In this sense, splinternets are less about disconnection than about selective interconnection — managing who connects to whom, on what terms, and through whose infrastructure.
III. The Backdoored World
The push toward “splinternets” and sovereign nation-state stacks is not just a response to mercenary spyware or isolated intrusions. It reflects a growing recognition that compromise is built into the very substrates and infrastructures of computation. From silicon and chiplets, through firmware and operating systems, to open-source libraries and the nebulous abstractions of cloud infrastructure — every layer of the stack now presents itself as a potential vector. Insecurity is the default: “Everything is backdoored. By Default.”13
A growing paper trail has been documenting hardware that arrives pre-loaded with obscured management engines14, firmware containing unremovable, vendor-level backdoors15, commercial software laced with law enforcement access hooks, and open-source libraries corrupted through stealthy commits 16, 17 .
Imported components and software dependencies become potential instruments of espionage or coercion. In turn, this has animated, where resources and sovereignty permit, a pursuit of hardware-independence: building domestic fabs, restricting exports, treating the transistor as a vital strategic asset for years to come.
Yet even this push toward materialised forms of certainty or ‘interception-proofness’ does not exhaust the problem. Other, more persistent tensions surface beyond the level of hardware, most clearly in the internet’s enduring reliance on open-source foundations. Linux, an open-source operating system, powers all of the world’s supercomputers, over 96% of the top one million web servers, and the vast majority of cloud infrastructure. Similarly, the Linux-based Android system dominates the global mobile market. More than 80% of internet traffic flows through browsers built on the open-source Chromium or Firefox engines, while the open-source Signal Protocol secures the private communications of billions via WhatsApp, Messenger, and others(18) (Bogusz, 2025).
These pervasive dependencies also place national militaries in an unprecedented bind. Security can no longer be secured through doctrine or territorial command alone; entire societies are pivoting on hardware and software architectures largely developed and operated by commercial actors with global reach. Militaries are compelled not to own or command directly, but to navigate and steer a commercial ecosystem that underpins the very infrastructure of life and war: a web of operational dependencies that amplifies strategic stakes far beyond conventional geopolitics. As Emily Bienvenue, Maryanne Kelton, Zac Rogers, Michael Sullivan, and Matthew Ford have also discerned:
“These operational dependencies, rather than ownership structures alone, now are increasingly shaping the geopolitics of warfare. Microsoft’s large-scale research operations in China, Meta’s partnership with China Mobile to build the 2Africa undersea cable, Nvidia’s 2025 plan for an AI research center in Shanghai, and Apple’s reported AI collaboration with Alibaba have all raised alarms in Washington. These examples reveal how globalized research, supply chains, and infrastructure interdependence blur the boundaries between commercial innovation and national security” (Bienvenue et al., 2025).
Even as openness and commercialism seemingly are at the heart of our planetary nervous system, intensifying geopolitical competition is further destabilising the very planetary superstructures once assumed to be permanently anchored to a U.S.-led order. Whether the foundations themselves remain open is an open question; what is clear is that the architectures of power and control built upon them are undergoing a profound and volatile rearrangement.
The assumed inevitability of a unified digital globe now disintegrates, and in its place, the material reality of power reveals itself through choke points and circuits as well as the tangible levers of hardware, capital, and access. Here, the dominance of an entity like NVIDIA could then be regarded as a geopolitical hinge — a bridge, a point of articulation between two worlds. One world is the formal regime of computation at the backbone of our digital infrastructure, the regime Jensen Huang champions. The other is a shadow world that this regime puts into motion, as we will see momentarily.
Commanding an estimated eighty to ninety percent of the market for advanced AI chips, NVIDIA has attempted to position its hardware as the undisputed currency for developing and training AI in the twenty-first century — making every sovereign AI ambition contingent on access to its silicon. 19, 20 .
The formal architecture of this hinge is visible in the self-perpetuating financial ecosystem encompassing NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Oracle — circular capital flows that concentrate wealth and capability within a closed loop. But the hinge swings both ways. Operating in the shadows of this official economy, a hidden network for moving sanctioned computer chips has emerged. This shadow market uses three main methods: first, moving components through complex, indirect shipping routes; second, disguising packages and falsifying documents to dodge export controls; and third, deliberately operating in legal grey zones through diversion and piracy. Containers, server racks, and pallets operate as Trojan cargo (Reuters, 2025), slipping through sanctions regimes under the camouflage of ordinary commerce.
Advanced AI components, notably Nvidia’s B200 and H100 chips have been known to be concealed in shipments of tea and toy parts. These chips have become among the most valuable contraband in the world, with black-market transactions reportedly exceeding $120 million for single orders bound for China (Snow, 2025). This is the precondition for stack-jacking at scale: the material substrate without which the hijacking of spectral environments, the terraforming of signal landscapes, the capture of user attention would remain the province of states alone. Here, it is realised not only in compromising code but in cargo: the physical layers of the stack hijacked through the very logistics that sustain them. But the chips are only the vessel. The true prize travels lighter.
That prize moves through the human relay. Engineers become itinerant smugglers, traveling to hubs such as Kuala Lumpur, where rented data centers, packed with restricted semiconductors, are used to train large models beyond the reach of enforcement. Once optimisation is complete, the hardware is abandoned, and the engineers disappear, returning to China with the true prize: model weights and parameters measured in hundreds of gigabytes. This invisible cargo forms the backbone of systems ranging from autonomous weapons to mass surveillance architectures. Estimates suggest that such extralegal computing resources may account for as much as 10 percent of China’s AI training capacity – a shadow infrastructure rivaling the official supply chains of the world’s most advanced economies (Petrova & Javers 2025; Snow, 2025).
Scarcity and interdiction are then not obstacles but rather, ingredients in AI development. The quest for artificial intelligence must learn to cook with them, navigating regulatory strictures and commercial monopolies not despite their weight but because of it. If stack-jacking as we spelled out is the condition, this shadow layer is also its material expression: the substrate where insurgent computing is already assembling itself, chip by smuggled chip, weight by stolen weight. And yet — even here, at the level of pure matter — the search for an unbackdoored domain has already begun. It reaches toward the quantum.
IV. The Quantum Bet
Ultimately, a pattern has surfaced throughout this essay: everything leaks. In Tijuana, state capability bled through clandestine supply chains. In the gray markets of Panama and the server farms of Kuala Lumpur, the material base of computation leaked. In the dark forest of the user layer, communication itself proved potentially lethal and predatory. At each turn, the search for secure ground drove actors deeper — and at each turn, the deeper layer was already open. There is no bottom. There is only the next seam.
The turn toward the quantum is no exception.
China’s investment in quantum communication infrastructure, most visibly in its quantum satellites, signals a strategic wager: that somewhere beneath the compromised architectures of silicon and signal, beneath shadow logistics, spoofed transmissions, and the doppelgängers haunting contemporary information environments, there exists a domain that cannot be turned. A channel whose security is guaranteed not by human design, but by the laws of physics.
Beginning with the 2016 launch of the Micius (Mozi) satellite, China operationalised this bet: using entangled photons to distribute cryptographic keys in a manner where any act of eavesdropping irreversibly disturbs the quantum state, leaving detectable traces (Liao, 2023). The system does not prevent interception — it simply ensures that interception always arrives with evidence of its own occurrence (Liao, 2023).
And yet it is only a matter of time before these quantum communication satellites, too, meet their doppelgänger. Not a perfect clone — the theorem forbids that — but an imperfect one: a passable copy whose introduced noise hides within the transmission losses the system expects. A laser’s picosecond timing mismatch that leaks not the key itself, but the timing of the key — which is enough. The backdoored world has no outside.
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V: Auto-Haunting Planet Post-Diagnostic
”For maintaining offensive capabilities in deserts of sand or water, the electromagnetic spectrum is the sole refuge. Like a dark mirror, its finitude reflects the bad infinity of the deserts that contemporary war implies, generates, and leaves behind.” — Friedrich Kittler
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