Kyle McDonald's Apocalypse Early Warning System features a world map with the approximate locations of more than 35,000 private and business jets.
Kyle McDonald's Apocalypse Early Warning System
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.
