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A relative few mega corporations, and the people that control them, are swallowing up and profiting from a quickening in technological innovations.
Those new technologies are allowing an enormous shift in power and wealth away from average humanity. And that power is being used to suppress oversight and opposition, as technocratic elites pursue dangerous transhuman goals.
This week there was news detailing some of the latest incubations of Big Tech, including an AI powered humanoid Tesla Bot, and “Horizon Workrooms,” Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for how people will interface in a world where suppression of human activity is the new normal.
Meanwhile, the pressure for people to take experimental gene technologies, wear face coverings, socially distance and physically isolate from others was being enforced with new fervor by tech-powered authoritarians.
Thousands of people in Canada, France, Germany and other places have marched repeatedly in opposition to vaccine mandates and lockdown dictates. Australians protesting this past weekend were subjected to brutal police responses.
In America, a domestic intelligence apparatus has effectively snuffed out the will to engage in large scale demonstrations, following mass arrests after the January 6 election fraud protest.
Mostly peaceful popular protests have proved no match for the technocracy, which can surveill communications, arrest and indefinitely incarcerate activists, control media narratives, and censor Presidents and whole nations.
Add it all up, and the writing is clearly on the wall. Technocratic elites, whether in China, Europe or the U.S., have demonstrated the power to control the rest of humanity. They are currently openly bent on restricting freedoms on an unprecedented level.
And their designs for the future point to a radical transformation, where humans will be forced to acquiesce to an “evolution” that involves robotics, AI, and genetic bio-engineering.
Make no mistake: technocratic “transhumanism” is the goal, and it represents a phase-out of natural human existence, and quite likely, the bulk of humanity itself.
On the “Horizon”: Locked Down in Facebook’s Metaverse
Increasingly, the parameters of practical existence are no longer defined by traditional communities and civil and political institutions, operating via consent and a rule of law.
Every day, we are confronted with an ongoing reshaping of reality that we have little or no control over.
Two recent examples concern how and even whether we will be allowed to sustain our own existence.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made news for beaming into a virtual meeting with reporters, as a demonstration of the company’s beta “Horizon Workrooms” technology.
It consists of a “free” app that can be used in conjunction with its Oculus Quest 2 VR headset and regular computers, to immerse participants in a virtual reality experience.
But it went beyond an immersive gaming type experience. The software allowed for real world objects to be reproduced in the virtual space, including keyboards and computer screens, for example.
One MSN reporter described the experience:
“For me, the wildest part was that the app maps to my actual desk, and the keyboard of my computer was able to project into the meeting room, along with my computer screen (which no one else could see but me, unless I chose to share it with others). It felt like a taste of mixed reality in VR. My hands reach out for my actual keyboard and touch my desk. In VR, I see the virtual versions of those things. It’s like a blend of home and office.”
Zuckerberg is positioning Facebook to be the world’s first “metaverse” company. The term refers to a human sensory experience where a virtual universe of information and “created” illusory worlds are more accessible, blended with, and increasingly indistinguishable from physical reality.
“I think a lot of people think about the metaverse as really tightly tied to VR. And we don’t,” said Zuckerberg, speaking via his avatar, at the meeting. “We think that virtual reality is one platform for accessing it, as augmented reality will be. But we also think that you’re going to be able to jump into that from phones , or computers. And that’s a concept that I think will just go across all these things.”
The Facebook CEO cast the virtual workroom, and Facebook’s larger “Horizon” initiative as a liberating one, allowing people to join together and work from anywhere, for example.
But as Facebook stakes out the metaverse, the social media platform has simultaneously been a leading advocate promoting massive real-world restrictions and lockdowns. The connection is obvious. Restricting the ability of people to connect in mundane physical reality is literally paving the way for the metaverse as an alternative outlet.
The company’s backing of inoculations of experimental COVID gene interventions, and suppression of info regarding efficacy and dangers, has furthered the COVID War, which has increased its own bottom line. Meanwhile, thousands of small businesses that Facebook purports to market for, have been obliterated.
Especially from 2016 onward, Facebook has colluded with a handful of other corporations, and with ideologically aligned political authorities, in suppressing and banning dissident voices and organizations. Under the guise of policing “disinformation,” it progressively exerted control over political discourse.
Zuckerberg deployed his wealth in 2020 to fund voting law changes and mail-in ballot initiatives across the U.S.. His outsized power undercut the will of average Americans and electoral bodies, manipulating the outcome of the 2020 election.
There are plenty of instances that demonstrate how Facebook, along with a handful of other tech giants, have engaged in political manipulation to influence antitrust and other policies that preserve and increase their monopolistic powers. (See “HOW BIG TECH MAINTAINS ITS MONOPOLY,” August 17 2021)
For those who have bristled at Facebook’s abuses as a social media platform, imagine the control it would wield over a “metaverse.”
Tesla Bot Wants To Be Your Job Stealing Friend
While Zuckerberg was meta-transporting, Elon Musk was jokingly downplaying fears about “Terminator” Tesla robots at an “AI Day” demo.
The company highlighted its artificial intelligence technologies at the event, perhaps in part to counter recent negative developments surrounding Tesla AI “Autopilot” car systems. The systems have been implicated in multiple crashes.
At the AI Day demo event, Musk joked that a newly unveiled Tesla Bot, a 5’8 125 pound humanoid robot was slow enough for people to flee, and tiny enough for a person to overcome it.
The prototype, which sported a human looking body, with a telescreen “face,” is scheduled for commercial production sometime in 2022.
Musk made no bones about the endpoint of AI robotics, as he envisions it: a labor takeover that will see people as somehow “freed,” while relying on governments and corporations like Tesla for a basic income.
“In the future, physical labor will be a choice,” Musk said at the event, positing that technology his company is developing would likely result in a universal basic income in the future.
Perhaps showing a stereotypical techno-geek flawed conception of friendship, Musk expressed his hope that the Tesla Bot would not be regarded as “dystopian,” and that it may even “be your friend.”
Musk also attempted to allay concerns that AI being developed to outstrip human abilities might not be content to serve mankind. He acknowledged that although it was a legitimate worry, his company was trying to create “useful” and “narrow” AI that would be utilized “unambiguously” for good.
The Problem of Power in a Technocratic Age
Technocrats are presenting new existential threats to humankind, because they have simultaneously gained enormous power, while pursuing transhuman aspirations that are quickly spiraling from sci-fi to dangerous reality.
The desire for power over others is an age-old bane of human beings. Call it the “God-Complex,” the “Satanic Rebellion,” or, as Tolkein mythologized, the “Ring Of Power.”
However it is named or invoked, no one is capable of wielding it unfettered, without succumbing to evil.
In the late 18th century, the American founders understood and grappled with the problem of power on a level never before attempted, in devising a novel form of government.
Thomas Jefferson noted at the time, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”
The Constitution still stands among the most revolutionary human documents in history. When faithfully adhered to, it has successfully dispersed power, enfranchising people to direct the course of their own lives in relative freedom.
It ingeniously recognized that different factions have a stake in preserving their own power, and that very drive could be used to check power, by apportioning spheres of authority.
So it was that the Executive, Legislative and Judicial spheres were separated, and Federal powers enumerated, with much jurisdiction vested to the States, respectively, and to the People.
No matter the differences between different factions and sects, into the modern age, Americans have mostly remained bound together in a desire to have no kings, to be treated equally before the law, and to live and let live.
That’s no longer the case. There’s a growing loss of confidence in the American experiment. It can be viewed as a schism not over who exercises power, but over the nature of power itself.
On one side, are what might be called American traditionalists. They believe they should have as much say in directing their lives and pursuits as possible within a “tolerable order,” as Russell Kirk termed it.
On the other side, are those who favor a concentration power, in one form or another, that the Founders abhorred. The obvious dominant form of the moment is the technocratic autocracy.
The technocratic elite embody an age-old conceit of a ruling class justified in exercising power via an assertion of superiority. In most ages, the conceit, in some guise or other, was a superior bloodline, connected to the gods.
The historian W. H. Lewis noted in his work The Splendid Century that as late as the 18th century, rulers like Louis the XIV were promoting such conceptions. To this day, depicting political leaders with religious iconography that suggests superhuman qualities, is not uncommon.
But in the vacuum of intellectual abandonment of God by many intellectuals, most notably embodied in the writings of Neitze, ideologies turned to the scientific, as a new religion.
Every field, from human behavior to politics, took on a “scientism” of supposed mathematical certainty as far as principles and solutions.
In the Hands Of Transhumanists
In the 1950’s, W. H. Lewis’s more famous brother, C. S. Lewis, warned about the dangerous conceits of what he variously called the “technocracy” and “scientocracy.”
In works like The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength, Lewis delved into consequences already experienced, and a likely dystopian future that would result from negating the human soul, in favor of human will.
In an article published in 1958 called “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.” Lewis cogently summed up where things were quickly heading. For instance, he uncannily predicted the science quagmire of the COVID War:
“The first is the advance, and increasing application, of science. As a means to the ends I care for, this is neutral. We shall grow able to cure, and to produce, more diseases –bacterial war, not bombs, might ring down the curtain– to alleviate, and to inflict, more pains, to husband, or to waste, the resources of the planet more extensively. We can become either more beneficent or more mischievous. My guess is we shall do both; mending one thing and marring another, removing old miseries and producing new ones, safeguarding ourselves here and endangering ourselves there.”
Lewis envisioned the Technocracy as the latest master that men would submit to in misguided hopes of utopian progress:
“The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?…
“…What assurance have we that our masters will or can keep the promise which induced us to sell ourselves? Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny’. All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of the others. They will be simply men; none perfect; some greedy, cruel and dishonest. The more completely we are planned the more powerful they will be. Have we discovered some new reason why, this time, power should not corrupt as it has done before?”
The works of Lewis, including his prescient essay, are well worth reading.
Lewis got to the root of the devaluing of man at the heart of a modern scientocracy rooted in social darwinism. Other contemporaneous writers like Alduous Huxley and George Orwell also brilliantly predicted goals and mechanisms of the technocratic state.
But ours is the time when the technocracy is not only making its play for comprehensive power in the West, but closing in on AI and bio-engineering “advances” that may surpass the worst nightmares of those 20th century sages.
Out of a surrender to technocratic elites, and a misguided will to spur “superhuman” advancement, humankind may soon be battling for existence with entities that are not human at all, in a literal hell of a world.
For related past articles, see:
- “THE “PROGRESS” OF LEAVING HUMANS BEHIND” (1 Jun 2021)
- “ARE HUMANS ALREADY BEING GENETICALLY LEGISLATED?” (8 Jun 2021)
- “CRISPR CREATOR SAYS GENE EDITING JUST GETTING STARTED” (22 Jun 2021)
- “BIO-PHARMA” PROFITING OFF A TRANSHUMAN FUTURE” (27 Jul 2021)
- “SINGULARITY UNIVERSITY: FUELING AI ASCENDANCE” (3 Aug 2021)