2,488 people have signed up for Kyle McDonald’s Apocalypse Early Warning System, a website that tracks private and charter jets and sends free or $5-a-year alerts when activity spikes.
Trump’s threat that Iran could lose a “whole civilization” if it rejected a ceasefire pushed the Los Angeles programmer-artist to test whether elites might move first if they expected a major crisis.
Years of historical flight data power the model, which compares current private-jet traffic with expected patterns by hour, weekday and holidays; McDonald set level five at activity above any point in the past year.
April 6 produced the biggest spike in his backtest, near the moment that inspired the project, reinforcing his broader argument that access to information and trust in public narratives have become unstable.
McDonald, who says he pays himself $60,000 a year, frames the tracker as both artwork and software service, extending earlier surveillance-focused projects that have also brought media scrutiny and death threats.
If AI can track the elite, what other societal secrets could public data unlock?
Does the 'Apocalypse' jet tracker mistake billionaire holidays for global emergencies?
Beyond a warning system, what has this art project revealed about hidden patterns of power?