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by David Thrussell
New Dawn 184
Jan-Feb
2021
from
NewDawnMagazine Website
Staring up through the clear desert night sky at the wondrous Milky
Way, Enrico Fermi asked aloud,
"Where is
everybody...?"
Creator of the world's
first nuclear reactor and lauded as the 'architect of the
atomic bomb', Fermi was a renowned
physicist who fled WWII Italy and eventually became a lynchpin of
the Los Alamos-based Manhattan Project.
On that cool 1950 New
Mexico night, he posited a question that has intrigued humankind's
greatest minds ever since:
in a universe that
appears perhaps infinite (and possibly hosts as many as 60
billion Earth-like worlds), why the apparent silence?
In theory,
millions of intelligent civilizations
could have developed across the vast expanses of space and the
supposed billions of years of existence.
And yet, we hear
'nothing':
no overt signals, no
incontestable communications, no indisputable artifacts left
behind, no bold relics of conquest nor of exploration...
No incontrovertible
ruins, no unambiguous signs.
Alien evidence should be
everywhere... but is, in fact - 'nowhere'...
What cruel trick has the Creator played upon us?
Surely we were not
dreamt into being, alone? An orphan in a vast void...
To this day, scientists
seek an answer to the so-called 'Fermi's
Paradox.'
The suggestions range
from the intriguing to the chilling:
that the
expanse of space is simply too vast
to traverse (by spaceflight or communications), the arc
of civilizational development too slow and humanity's window of
appropriate technology too brief, that alien life might indeed
be present but in forms beyond our comprehension...
Or, perhaps, the most
truly haunting option:
that advanced
technology itself is innately destructive - and that all
creatures and civilizations that develop advanced technology
ultimately and unavoidably... destroy themselves.
The irony that one of the
founders of the Nuclear Age - and by default the Cold War - should
posit such a question is lost on many.
Is it not possible
that the seeds of our very own ultimate extinction are held
within those very same hydras of unchecked war lust, a
transnational elite obsessed
with social engineering
technologies and the omniscient (and military developed)
information control systems that now dominate the human
experience?
All of them technologies,
outlooks or policies fertilized or even birthed by the Cold War
experience.
In the wake of 2020's
incredibly 'convenient' coronavirus
'pandemic', the age-old urge to control the colony, to dominate the
hive, has manifested in diabolical Bond-villain-like figures
such as the World Economic Forum's
Klaus Schwab.
Schwab and the
technocratic
Davos elite have become sinister
celebrities, peddling a supposed 'Great
Reset' - a nightmare utopian vision of 'stakeholder
capitalism' (i.e. complete corporate servitude) and 'Building Back
Better' (i.e. destroying independent livelihoods) into a
post-'virus' neo-feudalism that makes the despots and tyrants of the
past look meek and unambitious...
Fourth
Industrial Revolution (4IR)
Though regularly ridiculed by technophiles, events of the
near-future may prove the much-maligned Luddites - who smashed
mechanized wool-frames and took hammers to early steam engines (as
the First Industrial Revolution despoiled their livelihoods and
traditions) - look heroic and prescient.
Coined, instructively and perhaps ominously, by Schwab and
introduced at his neoliberal and globalist confab, the
World Economic Forum, in Davos,
Switzerland in 2016, he described the 'Fourth
Industrial Revolution'
(4IR) breathlessly thus:
The possibilities of
billions of people connected by mobile devices, with
unprecedented processing power, storage capacity, and access to
knowledge, are unlimited.
And these
possibilities will be multiplied by emerging technology
breakthroughs in fields such as,
artificial intelligence, robotics,
the
Internet of Things,
autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing,
nanotechnology,
biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and
quantum computing...
Schwab elaborated:
"Digital technologies
are not new, but in a break with the Third Industrial
Revolution, they are becoming more sophisticated and integrated
and are, as a result, transforming societies and the global
economy."
Behind Schwab's giddy
techno-utopian verbiage lies the framework for an almost
unimaginable corporate servitude and post-state, post-democratic
totalitarianism sold as inevitable,
'progress',
'convenience' and 'necessity'...
Indeed, it is difficult
not to see the emergent Fourth Industrial Revolution as
potentially many orders of magnitude more disruptive than previous
seismic leaps in technological advancement.
The ability to combine
omniscient global communications with a gargantuan surveillance
apparatus and breakthrough
transhumanist and social
engineering capabilities leaves humanity teetering on,
a precipice of
totalitarianism by post-human automata and a violently ambitious
technocratic elite...
All revolutions produce
casualties.
Though lionized now
as the beginning of a utopian era of technological paradise,
it's mostly forgotten that the First Industrial Revolution
decimated largely agrarian societies in Europe and the United
States throughout the 18th and 19th
centuries, displacing and impoverishing vast populations and
producing Dickensian squalor alongside the well-remembered
booming mercantile and factory-owning class, new trade and
expanding imperial possibilities.
Second generation technologies like mass steel
production, electrification, the incandescent light bulb, the
telephone, internal combustion engines and record phonographs
produced what is now known as the Second Industrial
Revolution between the years 1870 and 1914
(approximately).
Though improvements
in health, sanitation and living standards were significant,
they came at the cost of mass unemployment, social upheaval and
economic instability.
During our lifetimes we have been witness to the so-called
Third Industrial Revolution, or 'The Computer Age',
as technologies shifted from analogue to digital, and
innovations like the personal computer, the Internet and digital
communications were introduced, traditional industries upended,
and communications revolutionized from the 1980s onward.
Post-millennium, we stand
at the boundary between the conventional human past and an
unprecedented era of potential
human/machine symbiosis, where
corporate and state actors may soon possess previously unimaginable
powers over thought, volition and cognition.
The international
billionaire class of,
...and alike can barely
contain their enthusiasm for this post-human landscape.
"Welcome
to 2030 - I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy And Life Has
Never Been Better",
...crowed a smooth 2016
WEF infomercial, recently resurfaced by researchers, widely mocked
and then unsubtly vanished.
With incredible
precognition and what must have been a grinding, Herculean writing
and production schedule, Klaus Schwab had his new book,
Covid-19 - The Great Reset,
ready for the public by mid-2020 and was able to offer a steadying
hand and sage advice during the evolving storm of global lockdowns
and economic destruction in supposed response to the new 'pandemic'.
As Dr. Joseph Mercola noted:
"Ultimately, the
Great Reset will result in two tiers of people:
-
The technocratic
elite, who have all the power and rule over all assets
-
The rest of
humanity, who have no power, no assets and no say-so in
anything."
Canadian Prime Minister
and globalist finger-puppet
Justin Trudeau
recently added:
The pandemic has
provided an opportunity for a reset.
This is our chance to
accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic
systems that actually address global challenges, like extreme
poverty, inequality, and climate change.
Building back better
means getting support for the most vulnerable while maintaining
our momentum on reaching the
2030 Agenda for sustainable
development.
Translation:
They will seize this
'opportunity' to gain infinite and omniscient control...
if we let them...
Fake
Realities, Fake Humans
Though literary sources like George Orwell's
1984 and Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World are often
referenced when discussing our looming dystopian future (Orwell
painted a 'grim, jack-booted totalitarian-socialism' and Huxley a
'state-sanctioned and medicated hedonism'), perhaps one of the most
prescient may have been 'science-fiction' maverick
Philip K. Dick.
Philip
K. Dick
(1928-1982)
on a
futuristic background
representing his science fiction.
Did he predict the future in his writings?
Today we live in a
society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the
media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups,
political groups - and the
electronic
'hardware' exists by which
to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the
reader, the viewer, the listener.
So I ask, in my writing,
What is
real...?
Because unceasingly
we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very
sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic
mechanisms.
I do not distrust
their motives; I distrust their power.
And it is an
astonishing power:
that of creating
whole universes, universes of the mind...
Fake realities
will create fake humans.
Or, fake humans will
generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans,
turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves.
So we wind up with
fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to
other fake humans.
It is just a very
large version of Disneyland.
Philip K.
Dick, 1978
As media, information,
algorithms and surveillance become all-pervasive, the very boundary
between fact, flesh, mind and technology has become fluid.
Orwell described his
dismal landscape of
Wrongthink and Thoughtcrime
as
encroaching upon every aspect of the individual and their place in
society, no-one and no-where was safe from the Telescreen's gaze and
Big Brother's
Thoughtpolice - save perhaps a
person's most intimate thoughts and emotions.
"Nothing was your own
except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull."
Today, those few
precious, private centimeters face imminent extinction.
As we become more and more enmeshed in an omniscient media and
communications landscape, so it would become more and more viable to
ensnare a hypnotized public into fake health crises, fraudulent
panics and 'pandemics' that require technocratic 'solutions' and
totalitarian outcomes.
Writing in the August 2017 issue of Scientific American,
Marcello Ienca pondered the
longevity of so-called 'cognitive liberty' - free minds and free
will:
The idea of the human
mind as the domain of absolute protection from external
intrusion has persisted for centuries.
Today, however, this
presumption might no longer hold.
Sophisticated neuro-imaging
machines and brain-computer interfaces detect the electrical
activity of neurons, enabling us to decode and even alter the
nervous system signals that accompany mental processes.
Ienca goes on to note the
commercial uses for such technology and that some law courts have
even used controversial brain-scanning technology to decide
innocence or guilt.
"For example, in 2008
a woman in India was convicted of murder and sentenced to life
imprisonment on the basis of a brain scan showing, according to
the judge, 'experiential knowledge' about the crime."
The Philip K. Dick
concepts of 'pre-crime' and computer adjudicated trials (as
highlighted in Minority Report and other Dick short stories) are now
upon us as,
"commercial companies
are marketing the use of functional MRI- and
electroencephalography-based technology to ascertain truth and
falsehood."
Ienca laments these
technologies as,
"just another
unavoidable trend that erodes a bit more of our personal space
in the digital world."
Sebastian Seung
was a professor of Computational Neuroscience in the Department of
Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and is now a professor at
Princeton University.
His 2012 book
Connectome - How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are
advances
his belief that essentially the human character, individuality or
soul is a product of the neurological matrix that forms the brain
and its connective tissue.
"I am my Connectome"
is Seung's haunting and reductionist mantra, repeated in
evangelistic tones as other scientists explore "hacking the
soul" and declare that "information is the soul."
Divide & Rule
by Social Media
Undoubtedly, the world wide web or Internet has generated a seismic
change in the way people interact, conduct business and communicate.
What few realize,
however, is that
the Internet
(and many of its associated
technologies) are the direct offspring of US military programs
(through
DARPA, the Pentagon's research division) and were birthed
precisely in the era of the intelligence community's focus on
neurological research and behavior modification - or to put it less
politely,
mind control
- through notorious but little-understood
covert programs like
MK ULTRA.
In fact, it is easy to hypothesize that while journalists,
researchers and historians have long been distracted by colorful
tales of drug, hypnosis and assassination programs, the most
impactful and sinister mind control product of MK ULTRA was... the
Internet.
Hidden in plain sight - a
vast algorithmic device for manipulation and control - itself
strangely reminiscent of the labyrinthine mathematical mechanism
described in foundational conspiracy document,
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars.
The new behemoths of the Online Age,
Google,
Facebook,
Microsoft
and Apple,
...all have connections
to the Deep State leviathan and its subterranean agenda of social,
behavioral, biological and temporal control.
One-time president of
social media giant Facebook, Sean Parker, went public with deep
misgivings about Facebook and social media in general.
"God
only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," Parker
said in a 2017 piece in the New York Times.
He also admitted that
Facebook had become a monster by knowingly,
"exploiting a
vulnerability in human psychology."
May 2017 research
completed in Amsterdam reinforced the perception that Facebook was
addictive and that,
"a glimpse of its
logo is enough to set off cravings in heavy users."
"It's a social validation feedback loop," Parker continued
ominously.
"The thought process
was all about,
'how do we
consume as much of your time and conscious attention as
possible',
...and that means
that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every
once in a while."
Which, through its
sprawling network of 'likes', comments and other interactions, is
precisely what Facebook does.
A vast 'Web' of
distraction, disinformation and control.
Parker now describes himself as "something of a conscientious
objector" around social media and acknowledges,
"the unintended
consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or two
billion people. It literally changes your relationship with
society."
A character representing
Sean Parker was played by Justin Timberlake in the David
Fincher-directed 2010 film The Social Network.
The film chronicled the
early days of Facebook as it began as a small college network that
eventually had the globe in its grip.
What neither Parker nor
the film acknowledged was the hidden hand of the CIA and the
Pentagon behind the vast data-mining and herd manipulation project
that is social media.
Across two lengthy and
compelling 2015 pieces ('How The CIA Made Google' and 'Why The CIA
Made Google'), journalist Nafeez Ahmed documented the many
connections between Deep State intelligence agencies and the golden
frontier of social media.
In an interview with Richard Grannon, noted Israeli
psychologist and writer Sam Vaknin described social media as
best understood to be like a virus.
Indeed, Vaknin regards
social media as "an epidemic."
"As we can study
Ebola... so we can study social media."
He references recent
research that concludes social media use has tripled anxiety in US
college students and contributed to a 31% rise in teenage suicide
rates.
"If any other product
was responsible for this rise it would be banned, immediately."
Vaknin also noted that
heavy social media use leeched intimacy from its users, was
addictive and negated the very bonds that have built human
interaction and society.
Social media is
designed to deter intimacy and certainty. Intimacy reduces the
need for addiction. You are either intimate... or you are on
Facebook...
People definitely prefer to interact through social media, even
if they are in close proximity.
The dopamine fuelled
social validation loops are more desirable and satisfying than
anything they can get from physical reality.
Up to the age of 24,
people are living inside social media, they believe that social
media is real life and reality is unreal - reality is like a
simulation to them.
The result is a
psychogenic chimera...
In 2020 Netflix premiered
the documentary The Social Dilemma, an anodyne repackaging of
these concerns to soothe a bewildered public.
Coincidentally, one by-product of social media is the generation of
vast mountains of user data.
These mountains of data
would naturally be pure 'sugar' to intelligence agencies, social
engineers and those who desire to manipulate the public mind.
German speakers will know
that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's surname directly
translates as... 'Sugar Mountain'...
Surely one of the most
strangely 'apt' surnames of the 21st century.
Advanced Mind
Control
Launched by
Barack Obama as part of the
2013 'Brain (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative
Neurotechnologies) Initiative' and funded in large part by the
Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA),
the Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies
(SUBNETS) program produced startling findings.
A study by University of
California San Francisco health neurosurgeon and neuroscientist
Edward Chang and psychiatrist and neuroscientist Vikaas Sohal
charted brain signals that correspond to depression and anxiety.
"It is remarkable
that we are able to see the actual neural substrates of human
mood directly from
the brain," Chang said.
"The findings have
scientific implications for our understanding of how specific
brain regions contribute to mood disorders, but also practical
implications for identifying biomarkers that could be used for
new technology designed to treat these disorders, which is a
major priority of our SUBNETS effort."
Indeed, scientists will
likely soon (if not already) have technology to treat "mood
disorders," reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's fictional creation, the
'Penfield Mood Organ', from his 1968 novel 'Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?'...
Protagonist Rick Deckard and his wife Iran open the novel with a
sleepy quarrel over their Penfield Mood Organ's settings.
At his console he
hesitated between dialing for a thalamic suppressant (which
would abolish his mood of rage) or a thalamic stimulant (which
would make him irked enough to win the argument).
"If you dial,"
Iran said, eyes open and watching, "for greater venom, then
I'll dial the same. I'll dial the maximum and you'll see a
fight that makes every argument we've had up to now seem
like nothing. Dial and see; just try me."
She rose swiftly,
loped to the console of her own mood organ, stood glaring at
him, waiting.
He sighed, defeated by her threat.
"I'll dial what's
on my schedule for today."
Examining the
schedule for January 3, 2021, he saw that a businesslike
professional attitude was called for.
"If I dial by
schedule," he said warily, "will you agree to also?"
He waited, canny
enough not to commit himself until his wife had agreed to
follow suit.
"My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory
depression," Iran said.
"What? Why did you schedule that?" It defeated the whole
purpose of the mood organ. "I didn't even know you could set
it for that," he said gloomily.
As Phil Dick was no doubt
well-aware, Dr Wilder Graves Penfield was a renowned
mid-20th-century neurosurgeon, tied to the
Rockefeller family, associated with
infamous
MK ULTRA psychiatrist Dr. Ewen
Cameron, and lauded for his pioneering research using neural
stimulation to produce,
hallucinations,
illusions, fear, alienation, memory recall and déjà vu...
Penfield also devoted
considerable research to whether there was a physical/scientific
analogue to the existence of the human soul.
These are the people
whose work may have built
the Internet.
Embracing the
Panopticon Down Under
Further developments far outpace our ability as a species and a
society to consider, legislate or even comprehend their long-term
effects.
Meanwhile, bovine
governments and their dutiful stenographers in the media rush
techno-doomsday and police state initiatives past a doodling,
distracted and frightened public.
Down under, in the great banana republic of Australia - the
New World Order's favorite
playground - totalitarian technologies are proposed and adopted at
breakneck speed, only one convenient 'terrorist attack' or
'pandemic' away from largely mute public approval.
'The Capability' is the ominously titled database that data-matches
Australian driving license photos, Australian passport photos, CCTV
footage and other identifying information with advanced facial
recognition technology.
As per glib neoliberal
mouthpiece The Guardian,
"The database will be
accessible to federal, state and territory governments through a
central hub connecting the various photographic identity
databases."
Coming to a 'Health
Passport' or 'Covid Pass' near you soon...
What could possibly go
wrong?
While lapdog Australian media like ABC TV decry China's
"Digital Dystopian Dictatorship" (the 'Social Credit' system that
assesses every Chinese citizen to reward or punish them according to
a 'score' generated through mass surveillance and data matching),
the ABC itself lays prone and compliant about 'Social Credit
Oz':
homespun mass
mandatory data retention, mass vaccination schemes, the myGovID
digital identity system run by facial recognition, the
compulsory census info-grab, draconian 'national security' laws,
state-mandated anti-encryption moves and a raft of other Kafka-esque
initiatives in their own backyard.
Every Orwellian move
reliably proceeded by a conveniently timed and inexplicably useful
'terror' attack or 'coronavirus outbreak' to herd the fearful cattle
in the right direction, itself as predictable as the media silence
that follows.
Meanwhile, further
dubious technologies like 5G are
quietly introduced across a compliant and 'locked-down' Australia
with no public consideration of the potential health effects or the
possibility of vast reams of surveillance and social engineering
information being collated and transmitted instantaneously.
The ENDGAME
Summarizing recent
breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, the creation
of a neuroplastic reality and, perhaps very soon, an infinitely
malleable perception matrix, Sebastian Seung enthused:
"We will know
ourselves and we will make ourselves better."
The irony of such a
statement in light of the now all-knowing surveillance net - the
electronic state and the corporate Panopticon that has all in its
web - is striking.
We may well 'Build Back
Better' but the question, never asked is,
who decides exactly
what is 'better'?
We live in an information
haze, paralyzed and atomized - in thrall to the 'magic' of
technology and unable to resist its velveteen allure.
The project to create a
new and ultimately entirely controllable Human V2.0 machine/human
hybrid, careens ahead regardless, as we are blinded by social media
feeds, Instagram posts, terrorism™, mob witch hunts, rupturous
elections, an explosion of unhinged outrage culture, and the
seductive fog of a
media induced 'pandemic'.
"We have participated
unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we
have obligingly fed it to ourselves," Philip K. Dick opined
decades ago, in a deft precognition of the online and media
delusion that surrounds us (and indeed corrupts the very
functions that make us human).
As the universal clock
counts down to our doomsday hour, we have become the machines and
the machines have become us. One day soon, the machines may decide
they no longer need us.
In this era of universal deceit, perhaps truth can only be told
through fiction.
Remember Philip K. Dick
and recall another 'science fiction' artifact of his era:
the astounding
Colossus - The Forbin Project...
Perhaps Technology is the
virus that will destroy humanity and leave the universe once again
silent.
What is the Endgame
of Artificial Intelligence?
When the Machine Mind
has colonized the future, will it send seeds, emissaries and
operatives back to colonize the past: our present?
Why does every
dystopian technological advancement receive mountains of
unconditional funding and acres of unthinking advertisement?
Perhaps there is much
more here than we can completely comprehend. Is technology
alive?
Technology does
indeed consume resources:
it grows, survives,
propagates, expands... in short: behaves like an organism, a
Lifeform.
Did we build technology
to serve us, or did technology build us... to serve it?
As Philip K. Dick foretold, ultimately,
"We have colluded in
our own doom"...
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