Kyle McDonald’s Apocalypse Early Warning System
- Kyle McDonald built a jet tracker to assess emergencies via private jet movement patterns.
- The project highlights extreme wealth inequality and who people trust as information sources.
- Data showed billionaires likely have better access to emergency information than ordinary people.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Kyle McDonald, a programmer and artist in Los Angeles who uses code, machine learning, computer vision, and surveillance tech to create projects that reveal how technology affects society. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I created a website that tracks private jets and assigns their movements an “emergency level.” The underlying joke is: If something really bad is about to happen, maybe billionaires will know before the rest of us.
The project came together after I saw a threat from President Donald Trump about Iran — that a “whole civilization” would die if they didn’t agree to a ceasefire deal — and that got me thinking about information: who gets it, who controls it, and who we actually trust anymore.
If there were really going to be a major global catastrophe, I thought, his friends would probably find out first. The people close to power have already benefited from private information in prediction markets, politics, and crypto. Why wouldn’t that extend to existential risk?
So I started looking at private aircraft and vibe coding this project.
I’ve been programming for about 25 years, but over the past year and a half, I’ve basically stopped writing code by hand since I work with AI constantly. It took a few iterations, since Claude Code makes mistakes and can make things look too polished rather than the handmade feel I wanted, but eventually I came up with the Apocalypse Early Warning System.
The system listens to a network of radio receivers around the world that pick up aircraft signals, showing their positions, altitudes, directions, and identifying information. I filter that data down to private and charter jets, then compare how many are flying at any given moment to a number I would expect.
That expected number is based on years of historical data, accounting for patterns across the day, the week, and holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s.
Once I had the model working, I needed to calibrate it. I asked myself: What should count as a level-five emergency? I decided level five should mean private jet activity is higher than it has been in the past year.
When I looked back, the biggest spike was April 6 — right around the moment that prompted me to create the project in the first place.
That freaked me out. I remember thinking, “Oh my God, it’s real.”
What the elites know that we don’t
I’m not saying billionaire jet activity can predict the apocalypse, but it’s alarming that there are patterns at all. The deeper question behind the project is: How do we get information, and who do we trust?
After the “fake news” era, anti-vaccine sentiment, and climate misinformation became mainstream, I think the idea of truth started to feel increasingly unstable. We have more access than ever to information about the world’s problems, but we also feel less powerful to do anything about them.
Then we look at people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, and they seem like they exist outside that rule. They’re able to do not just something about their problems, but anything they want. They become people we watch for signals for what we should do, even if we don’t realize it.
I’ve always been drawn to hidden signals like that. There are patterns waiting to be decoded.
I see that throughline in a lot of my other work. During the George Floyd protests in Los Angeles, I helped friends build an app to help protesters track police activity. We pulled in air traffic data for LAPD helicopters, and I noticed some helicopters I could see in the sky weren’t showing up on the map. I learned that the LAPD often masks the identities of its helicopters.
That pushed me to figure out ways to track and unmask those patterns, and I use those skills in my jet tracking.
It’s fun and rewarding, but my projects have gotten me into trouble before.
Recently, my ICESpy and FuckLAPD projects, which use facial recognition to identify law enforcement officers, have been the subject of multiple news broadcasts and a whole lot of vitriol — I’ve even received death threats.
I could earn more in tech, but I’m proud of my career
I run my own business, which is both an art studio and a consulting firm. About half my income comes from creative and technical consulting for tech companies and artists. They might hire me to make an AI project feel more creative than scary, or to help them use sensors, cameras, or interactivity in ways they can’t execute on their own.
The other half comes from exhibitions, mostly in Europe and East Asia. They’re good for augmenting my income, but not really sustainable, since I might get $1,000 to fly out, spend a week working 16-hour days installing the project, then head home.
I pay myself $60,000 a year. In Los Angeles, that’s modest, but I feel proud that I can live on my own while making art that isn’t primarily for the art market. The rest goes back into my projects.
The billionaire jet tracker has also become a small revenue stream. People can get free Telegram notifications or pay $5 a year for email or text alerts. About 2,488 people have signed up. To me, that’s like getting an annual art grant.
It doesn’t compare to working for a tech company, where someone might make $10,000 in a few days. I could find something more traditional, but those jobs aren’t always available or aligned with my values, and I want to be happy with who I am in the world.
What fascinates me is that people are basically paying me $5 a year for the chance not to receive a text message. That feels like a conceptual intervention, an artwork, and a software service all at once.
That border is where I like to work.
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