Every Breath You Take, Every Move You Make
"If our society is founded on fictions, which it is, tearing them down only helps if we have a secure platform on which to land and bring others along with us."
Encouraging people to purchase so much of what once required the building & maintaining of relationships was probably unwise. There's a trend of people defining "civilized" as offloading more and more of what would normally have been handled between people in ad-hoc, often far from perfect manners, onto a standardized bureaucratic regime. Any mistakes are seized upon as reasons why more and more must be brought into the fold and the tinkering and data analysis must always increase so we can become ever more perfect. The end of the road of all this is a Transhumanist hellscape, the Final Cage.
"...In 1988, the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson published Infinite in All Directions, a wide-ranging discourse on humanity’s role in the universe. In his book, Dyson predicts that genetic engineering will enable manufactured organic minds that are merged with electronic components including AI, but inside their biological mental core, they will be alive and self-aware.
According to futurists ranging from Dyson and Ray Kurzweil to Elon Musk, a millennium from now, if not much, much sooner, only a small fraction of the conscious intelligent beings once known as humans will exist as humanoids we would recognize as ourselves. Others, to present a vivid example, could exist as the conscious brain of a starship, with nerves extending into every system of the craft, interfacing with the minds of similarly cybernetic passengers and crew.
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Credible speculation is limited only by one’s imagination, and it’s happening fast. But what does it mean for society in the short run?
In America, the reality of AI running systems as mundane as a thermostat and as complex as an airliner or a power grid leads to something Victor Davis Hanson alluded to in a recent article in American Greatness, where he wrote, “In today’s age of computer-driven avionics, the prerequisite ability to do math, to know something about navigation, to understand computers, or to have the proper temperament to fly a plane doesn’t really matter.”
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Coming soon, instead of education, people will have access to implants or neural links that target and enhance specific skills—memory, language, math. Equally likely, and also coming soon, people will be able to edit the genes of their offspring before they are born, choosing their attributes—height, appearance, intellect.
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Americans today need to reflect carefully on the opportunities for physical and mental enhancement that are just around the corner. Because as these new devices worm into our minds in ways more profound and more permanent than smartphones and social networks already have, they will not be merely Pavlovian manipulators, they will be programmed orchestrators. The machines will pick the options, within our own minds, and we will comply.
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Try to imagine human civilization as it expands into the solar system and eventually to the stars. Shall it be a vibrant society of free individuals or a drab collective? Shall it consist of a federation of diverse, independent nations, with their cultures and traditions grounding them as they reach into the beyond, or an undifferentiated mass of humans controlled by machine implants, ruled by a single politburo?" [Source]
Today if you want to put up a barn most people would call a contractor who would then come out and erect the barn. In the past, such things would often have involved many members of the community. You help raise Bill's barn and Bill and his sons help raise your cousin's barn, etc. It doesn't have to be a barn, it could be anything you can't really do on your own.
But people don't like to help people who don't help them. So in order to have this help & support when you needed it you would have to put in the time to build & maintain friendships or at the least friendly relations. Today, you could be a stereotype of the rude & crass Wall St banker, make immense sums of money, and have all of your needs still be met.
By allowing the purchase of these things we've encouraged people to become increasingly antisocial. The removal of the human contact element with the internet seems to have supercharged this trend. It's in part a critique of consumerism, but I am trying to take it further. People tend to associate frivolous goods or luxury items with consumerism but I believe it's negative effects extend into other areas as well. China's a great example of a place where they're still straddling both worlds but they are rapidly speeding away from one.
"They were all part of group at that school that has a hard time with relating to humans...I suspect maybe they were extremely high functioning autistics."
Some of these folks would definitely be on the spectrum but how much of this alienation from humans that so many feel is a result of our alienating cultures? Something which has been a problem for quite some time in many countries. It's part of why I don't see the whole Transhumanism thing as inevitable. I believe if we are able to change our understandings of certain aspects of ourselves & our societies we will not fall prey to the seductions of Transhumanist fantasies.
I'm a big fan of looking at history to help inform us about the present. However I think we often run into dangerous territory by not properly contextualizing those lessons. For example, it's certainly correct that the price of things (in general) that were previously only the domain of the elite have gone down (though I'm not sure your average person will today be able to purchase a boat the size of Columbus's, and certainly not three of them). But, we shouldn't just assume that every technological advancement is good or even should happen. This, I think, is one of our most dangerous blindspots. I've argued elsewhere that we have focused far too much on technological advancement and far too little on spiritual advancement. With the technology today, which was previously the domain of the rich, we experience rampant depression, despair, alienation, loneliness, etc. Why should we assume that more advanced forms will lead to different outcomes? Why should we not look at this bit of history and then proceed with far more caution?
"Just a reminder for everyone reminiscing. The events of the past placed us in the situation that we are currently in."
The Amish offer an interesting example here. They rode the tech bandwagon to a point and then got off. We could certainly debate whether they got off too early or too late but they do maybe provide an example of a more "middle path."
I think a big part of what we'll need to do in the coming years is really attempt to bring nuance back to the public discussion. There's useful technological improvements but more importantly there's many more harms that can result. It's great that we can build a ditch without a day of backbreaking labor. But at what cost? Maybe the ditch digging improvement is an overall positive (despite the fact that a mass grave is also a kind of ditch that could be created more efficiently with fewer bodies) but not every problem is going to look like a ditch. It's like the old cliche "you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
Our obsession with technology & automation also seems to spring up from our (well really a narrow segment of us) neverending obsession with efficiency. But I like inefficiency. It adds difficulty. It encourages questioning whether something should be done at all. It slows things down to a more human speed. We just need to look at things like high-frequency trading algos to see what horrors some highly-efficient program can do. And perhaps most important: efficiency using technology results in the concentration of control.
"Whatever victories have apparently been achieved in the long struggle to achieve political representation, human rights, dignity, economic justice, cultural and gender identity, ecological sustainability and other causes dear to the hearts of those who have struggled, the elite (local, national or global) has always retained control and merely surrendered the minimum necessary to keep the bulk of the human population submissive.
Consequently...while elite control over human societies started to gather pace with the Neolithic revolution 12,000 years ago, it has simply been progressively consolidated since that time. Real power over anything that matters, including fundamental decision-making and the vast bulk of the world’s wealth, remains firmly in the hands of the elite.
More importantly, as one result of the elite’s long reign and the grotesquely distorted priorities it has advanced within the delusional versions of democracy we have experienced, human society is now characterized by staggering levels of psychological, social, economic, military and geopolitical dysfunctionality and Earth is on the brink of ecological collapse with Homo sapiens threatened by four distinct paths to extinction." [Source]
Consider for a moment the "humble" drone: The array of possible sensors and the area of coverage in both space & time of these drones is just mind-boggling. These drone-mounted sensors are the closest the elite have gotten yet to being able to provide the same kind of trails & tracking that is available to them in the digital realm.
Why do so many go along with these plans? Especially in media circles? I think when we search for dramatic reasons for things we may miss the more mundane. Bill Gates, via both his wealth & his foundations, gains status and reputation, including through using those resources to provide free information for easy consumption by media people who have been increasingly turned into cogs rewriting corporate press releases, which itself is caused by the neverending desire for more streamlining & efficiency...and well it just spirals like that all the way back to some monkey around a fire probably.
Is Bill Gates (and other powerful people who think like him) controlling the mainstream storylines for a variety of topics? Absolutely. But is it because of Pedo pics he's using as blackmail? I don't think so. I think here's where Chomsky's quote about media figures not being where they were if they didn't think the way they do comes in:
"Well, I know some of the best, and best-known, investigative reporters in the United States – I won’t mention names – whose attitude towards the media is much more cynical than mine. In fact, they regard the media as a sham. And they know, and they consciously talk about how they try to play it like a violin. If they see a little opening, they’ll try to squeeze something in that ordinarily wouldn’t make it through. And it’s perfectly true that the majority – I’m sure you’re speaking for the majority of journalists who are trained – have it driven into their heads, that this is a crusading profession, adversarial, we stand up against power. A very self-serving view. On the other hand, in my opinion, I hate to make a value judgement but, the better journalists and, in fact, the ones who are often regarded as the best journalists have quite a different picture. And I think a very realistic one.
I’m not saying your self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
--Noam Chomsky
With the professionalization of everything, including journalism, these people are being trained to think a very specific way from an increasingly early age. By the time they're spit out by the education system and deemed credentialed enough for their chosen pursuit there's really only one right way to view the world for so so many of them.
"When Schwab talks about how a grand ideal of a standard issue One World Government model, what he calls the Neoliberal Utopia simply will not work, I breathe a sigh of relief:
“Consider a global government [that] regulates multinational companies in global markets, and people gather in a global democracy and global unions. It is an unrealistic an undesirable goal, as it increases the distance between individuals and the immediate social ecosystems they are a part of. It also decreases their feeling of commitment to the people and the environment closest to them…Though the 20th century neoliberalists once may have seen such a global model as a Utopian ideal, it would inevitably end in the political disenfranchisement of local communities. When the center of power is too far removed from people’s everyday realities, neither political governance nor economic decision-making would have popular support.”
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But then, the more I read, the more I couldn’t shake the sense that when a guy like Schwab means by the word “commitment, what he really means is “obedience”. Schwab understands that people aren’t really going to accept decisions from on high, especially if on high is a centralized world government.
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We get some insight by looking at the list of “Deep Shifts” Schwab predicts in his earlier book: The Fourth Industrial Revolution, where he posits what the big changes are that are coming at us in terms of tipping points, positive outcomes, negative outcomes and “unknown / cuts both ways”.
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Together, they coalesce to usher in an impetus toward Transhumanism ordered by Big Data and AI that will probably, in lieu of any honest debate or public consultation around these shifts, result in a type of social credit system.
And that’s what is missing from Schwab’s books. There is nothing in the framework where local communities can identify and define what they see as problems for themselves and work toward solving them. There is no mechanism for asserting their own priorities of types of things the communities themselves may value above the WEF’s “Deep Shifts”, such as full or meaningful employment, privacy, or self-sovereign health care." [Source]
So really we're playing a game of Chicken. The elite are racing to get us into the Final Cage and we free-thinkers are racing to awake enough and develop actual workable solutions before that cage door slams shut. But taking out any particular elite themselves will not necessarily stop the march to the cage, though it may slow it (but it could also accelerate it).
I've been playing recently with an argument that Transhumanists are attempting to insidiously undermine human rights via widespread acceptance of transgenderism. By so radically altering the nature of being human in that way, it makes it much much easier to get people to embrace their ultimate redefinitions. If we're ever going to encounter a Pandora's Box in our modern times I believe this ideology will be what opens it. Some argue we've already opened it but I think we've just unwrapped the plastic film on the box, an important milestone but not one we can't come back from.
While there are bits and pieces scattered, they have not yet perfected any single one nor integrated them all together. CRISPR is still inaccurate, many of these inventions are still niche, there's still a very negative reaction by many to even simple things like RFID chip injections. I just don't see widespread usage as being an inevitability. We can still strangle this baby in its crib.
And given the way we treat those we consider less than ourselves...well until that changes it's an Us or Them fight to the death from my perspective. Thankfully we find ourselves in the Cold War information stage though the Transhumanists are engaging in ever more aggressive actions.
If I may attempt a different analogy than Pandora: We've got a bunch of monkeys that found a fully fueled & armed tank. So far they've really just played with the gun on top. But it can be loud and seemingly erratic so they've so far been cautious. But a few monkeys have been engaging in focused practice and are becoming confident they can use it properly. Meanwhile others have been tinkering about inside experimenting with other controls as well as the main gun. If they figure out how to start the thing and begin moving it around, the destruction to our world will resemble the after effects of that fellow who armored a bulldozer and went for a ride around a formerly quiet Colorado town.
"...Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and its associated philanthropic organizations, the UN’s SDG program stands out as one of the cornerstones of the Great Reset, which now features Covid-19 as the fulcrum of that project and underlies what pioneering independent researcher Alison McDowell, interviewed by MintPress for this article, calls “theological technofascism.”
Christened as the fourth sector, this merger of “the corporate state […] with nonprofits and religion,” as McDowell puts it, operates through so-called “benefit corporations,” a novel incorporation structure the rules of which were developed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s B Lab. Based on the “environmental social governance” or ESG framework, Certified B Corporations allow company executives to be shielded to a considerable extent from their shareholders and, therefore, provided with an unprecedented measure of freedom as a result of the ostensibly socially and environmentally beneficial entity.
This new face of capitalism intends to function under the aegis of what is referred to as the “Impact Economy” — an idea that arose out of the ashes of the controlled demolition of the global financial system in 2008, which paved the way for hedge funds to replace banks as the dominant force in the world of global capital. That world is currently ruled by The Blackstone Group Inc., which controls a mind-boggling half trillion dollars under asset management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world’s biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA database on the planet.
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Blackstone’s ability to monetize our DNA is not limited by existing markets, however. Its significant stake in healthcare, insurance and retail companies gives the private equity firm the capacity to mix-and-match the collective data sets they own to spin off new segments, along the lines of Ancestry.com’s Spotify partnership to design “DNA-designed music playlists” and other less benign behavioral and genetic dataset combinations...." [Source]
It seems to me that these endeavors are the culmination of an ideology which has swept the world leaving destruction in its wake. And this isn't some anti-white/anti-European rant of course, these folks have come in all colors. It's a further wedge between humans and the aspects of the world not created by human hands.
"[Dr. Bradley A.] Perkins highlights the critically important shift from “volume-based health care to value-based health care.” Perkins is referring here to cold, hard cash as the rest of his seminar makes clear, given how genomics “will drive tremendous progress in life and health insurance [as well as] tremendous progress in healthcare delivery by powering a next generation of healthcare and healthcare models.”
“What we are about to embark on,” Perkins boldly predicts, is nothing less than “hacking the software of life,” and “for the first time, trying to understand all the instructions that build, operate and reproduce us as humans.” He illustrates his point with a disturbing anecdote about how genomic pioneer Venter “sat down at a computer with the notion that he could actually design a genome, a sequence of DNA letters; produce that genome artificially; insert it into a membrane and boot up life from scratch.”
Perkins considers that Venter’s 2010 brainstorm might have been even “more important” than the sequencing of the human genome, itself. The eureka moment when a Western scientist developed a God-complex is what will change “medicine from a clinical science supported by data to a data science supported by clinicians,” according to Perkins, who goes on to warn of the “profound disruption in our current format for the practice of medicine,” that he confidently states will no longer “be possible in the place that we’re going very shortly.”" [Source]
Now some might argue that we should not deny anyone the right to try these things. Especially those effected by tragedy & disability. But even then I can't help but see echoes of a band of natives standing on a beach looking out at a large ship.
Disability & tragedy have always been trojan horses, I think. A big part of the problem is we lack the cultural structures & belief systems which allow us to engage with those all-too-human things (so we have Ray & company wanting to defeat death). In a sense it's a bit like the concept that even if we could torture one person (Le Guin writes about something similar in her tale about Omelas) to make the world great we shouldn't do it because of all the after-effects taking such a stance would have.
We may one day be able to have both the technology to make paralyzed individuals walk again AND the spiritual advancements necessary to use such technology "safely" and "wisely." But we certainly do not possess those spiritual qualities currently.
"In Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World,” people aren’t born from a mother’s womb. Instead, embryos are grown in artificial wombs until they are brought into the world, a process called ectogenesis. In the novel, technicians in charge of the hatcheries manipulate the nutrients they give the fetuses to make the newborns fit the desires of society. Two recent scientific developments suggest that Huxley’s imagined world of functionally manufactured people is no longer far-fetched.
On March 17, 2021, an Israeli team announced that it had grown mouse embryos for 11 days – about half of the gestation period – in artificial wombs that were essentially bottles. Until this experiment, no one had grown a mammal embryo outside a womb this far into pregnancy. Then, on April 15, 2021, a U.S. and Chinese team announced that it had successfully grown, for the first time, embryos that included both human and monkey cells in plates to a stage where organs began to form." [Source]
There are already tinkerers going beyond fixing disability & preventing tragedy. This Transhumanist problem, like so many of our problems, is unlikely to be solved well using violence (though that doesn't mean some won't try). We need to do the more difficult work of changing minds. Thankfully there's much overlap, I think, between the support of Transhumanism and support for other problems we face. Undermining one helps undermine them all. And maybe, just maybe, this path is the one that leads us to those necessary spiritual advancements.
Currently, any attempts to ban it (if you could even gain the power to make a meaningful attempt) would likely result in something like what we've seen with Prohibition & the War on Drugs. But at some point a line will get crossed (where the line is will depend on the person though) where those downsides may have to be risked.
"The missionaries of “free-market economics” are pulling out all the stops to convince us that they really do have the people’s best interest at heart this time, after centuries of ceaseless war, ruthless corruption and environmental devastation. Suddenly, a public health emergency has managed to peer into their soulless chasm and not only sparked a long-dead sense of compassion, but coincidentally provided them with all the solutions. The only catch is that we have to give up our humanity and live behind screens and speak to each other via encrypted messaging apps only.
Other than that, they assure us, everything is as it always should have been. They’ve seen the error of their ways and are ready to usher in a more humane, a more “sustainable” economic paradigm, in which the wealthy finally invest in the poor, the sick and the homeless as part of a new “moral” economy. But, the obvious question is, if misery becomes profitable, what incentive is there for its eradication?" [Source]
Some people argue "we" (in this case: The US) have to research genetic modification, advanced weaponry, interplanetary human travel, etc because the Chinese and the Russians will & are. But these endeavors are just as useless and just as potentially harmful to the average people of China & Russia as they are to average Americans. The leaders of these countries are engaged in these things because they are just as deluded as our own leaders. Average people everywhere need to unite and topple these narrow minded & truly unimaginative fools. If the Chinese people and the Indian people and all the peoples of Africa are brought to heel by the elites there will be no hope for the rest of the world's peoples.
The idea that we might have reached a point where we've actually done enough technological development and should wind down the R&D efforts would strike many as insane. Maybe so. But could it also be plausible that we are so willing to believe it is insane simply because we have so heavily focused on technological progress at the expense of spiritual development?
"One thing is for sure...things are fast converging into a shitstorm of the likes the world has never seen."
The comparison to appeasing Hitler gets thrown around a lot but I can't think of a more perfect fit than our technocratic Transhumanist elites. Humans have waged bloody wars over far more minor differences in belief systems. Transhumanism's boosters seem to be pushing for the ultimate civil war. Considering how mediocre our elite propagandists are in general and how intelligent the average person is in ways not measured by credentials I still have hope for achieving the "W". But, if we remain separate they win by running out the clock on humanity...literally.