Who would have thought that Jacques Audiard, the French director of slow-burn, humanistic character studies would one day take on one of the most characteristically American of genres, the Western, with his English-language debut? While worlds apart from his socially realist “Dheepan” and “Rust and Bone,” Audiard’s “The Sisters Brothers” sports a similarly closely watched, leaned in sensitivity with its brotherly story. Adapted from Patrick deWitt’s 2011 novel (by Audiard and Thomas Bidegain) and infused with sweetness, graphic body horror (that, at times, spins a childlike icky humor) and a high body count, this alcohol-soaked Frontier road trip constantly reinvents itself at every turn in fun, witty and ultimately touching ways. Call it a revisionist or an absurdist Western if you will, but Audiard’s film feels both refreshingly new (without ever going to the extreme lengths the Zellner Brothers did with “Damsel”) and nostalgically familiar.
The backdrop is the Gold Rush, which is said to have made a Sherriff’s job much easier: if there’s trouble, you follow the gold to get to the source of the unrest. But when we meet the central brothers Eli (John C. Reilly, goofy, soulful and great at physical comedy as ever) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix, quietly enigmatic) one random dark night at the start of the film, there doesn’t seem to be any wealth to be pursued. With the playful last name “Sisters,” the pair of cold-blooded hit-men, without much thought about the consequences of their actions, murder a household of people in a tightly orchestrated set piece of nocturnal shootouts. The reason remains unknown—with this job and everything else, the ruthless duo answers to a much feared, mostly unseen mysterious crime boss called ‘The Commodore’ and habitually assassinates their way through the 1850s Oregon. Along the way, they bond and trivially bicker about life as casually as they kill.
But just when the soft-edged Eli starts contemplating his future and ongoing profession despite the unaffected heavy drinker Charlie’s shrugs, The Commodore sets them up for a new task. They will tail and kill a criminal called Hermann Kemit Warm (Riz Ahmed, cheekily mysterious) for reasons we would slowly piece together later—for now, he is just a thieving enemy who once betrayed their boss. Enter Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal, reuniting with Ahmed after “Nightcrawler”), a British-accented bounty hunter for hire, tasked with delivering Warm to the brothers. But then the prospect of immediate wealth turns tables for everyone involved—the brainy chemist Warm’s creamy invention that makes gold glaringly appear in water, redefines priorities at once. The two pairs, traced on parallel storylines for a while (that admittedly slows down the film’s previously absorbing rhythm), find themselves entangled in a ploy against each other. Along the way, local madams, kindly prostitutes, further the accidentally amusing events and some dead horses unfortunately enter the story, sharpening the film’s tone as an original yet studied homage to its genre.
A delightful tale of familial ties balanced well with a slick cat-and-mouse yarn, “The Sisters Brothers” owes much of its breezy charm to John C. Reilly, whose comic timing does wonders for the meatiest and most multifaceted character of the ensemble. Phoenix feels right at home in Charlie’s quieter shoes, while Gyllenhaal’s familiarly on-edge persona and a mischievous turn from Ahmed impress. Reilly and Phoenix demonstrate tremendous chemistry throughout—we buy both their longtime amity and occasional callousness, especially when the script drip-feeds the brothers’ back-story into the narrative. In this bittersweet tale with a sentimental heart, and among a dangerous milieu of blood, greed and spiders (one in particular that causes the film’s biggest gross-out moment), Audiard’s characteristically sensitive touch gradually lifts familial emotions, letting them linger in the air long after the credits roll.
Philip K. Dick, whose novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? inspired the film Blade Runner, did not live to enjoy his Hollywood success. He died on March 2, 1982, three months before the film was released.
In the years since, the novelist once dismissed as a gutter pulp sci-fi weirdo has steadily climbed the ladder of posthumous literary reputation. The case for Dick’s genius has never rested on his dystopian vision of technology, which he shared in common with masters like HG Wells and Stanislaw Lem, and with hundreds of sci-fi writers since. Good science fiction — as opposed to fantasy novels set on other planets — is defined by a quasi-philosophical examination of interactions between men and machines and other products of modern science. It is part novel and part thought-experiment, centered on our idea of the human.
What made Dick a literary genius, then, was not any special talent for predicting hand-held personal devices or atom bombs the size of a shoe which might have led him to a job in Apple’s marketing department. His gift was for what might be called predictive psychology — how the altered worlds he imagined, whether futuristic or merely divergent from existing historical continuums, would feel to the people who inhabited them. Dick’s answer was, very often: “Not good.”
Dick’s dystopian-psychological approach marks him less as a conventional science fiction writer than as a member of the California anti-utopian school of the Sixties, whose best-known members include Robert Stone, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, Joan Didion and Hunter Thompson. Seen from this angle, Dick was perhaps the most powerfully and sweepingly paranoid of a group of writers whose stock-in-trade was conspiracy and paranoia, the hallmarks of a society marked — at that moment, and this one — by violent street crime, drug-induced psychosis, and visionary promises gone terribly wrong. Of his anti-utopian peers, Dick’s sci-fi genre background made him the only one who had any particular feel for the proposition that technology was inseparable from, and would therefore inevitably alter, our idea of the human.
Technology was and is perhaps the most Californian aspect of the American mythos. The idea that the universal constants of human nature were at war with the mutilating demands of technology-driven systems was a very Sixties Californian conceit, to which Dick’s fellow anti-utopians each adhered in their own way: In Kesey’s showdown between man and the castrating nanny-state; in Didion’s emphasis on the vanishing virtue of self-reliance; in Pynchon’s degenerate Ivy League Puritanism; in Thompson’s drug-addled primitivism; and in Stone’s Catholic idea of devotion to a God that might somehow salve the wounds of the survivors once the great American adventure goes bust.
What Dick saw, and what his fellow anti-utopians did not, was that human psychology and technology are not separate actors, and that whatever emerged from the other side of the future would be different to the human thing that entered it.
* * *
Seeing and describing how large numbers of people will perceive reality before anyone else does requires imagining states of consciousness that, in the moment, seem deeply strange. It is no accident that the greatest of works of speculative psychology were written by revolutionaries whose outlook was often bleak to the point of despair. The negative tone of these works often led future generations to describe their authors as conservatives, though artistically and psychologically speaking, they are radicals. Or rather, in their rejection of the dominant order, they are radicals and reactionaries at the same time.
The anti-utopian tradition emerged in earnest in 19th-century Russia. The Russian pioneers of the genre were superior to their rivals in England and elsewhere because the latter’s visions were constrained by attachments to a settled society, which one can argue never really existed in Russia — and because the ideas of revolution and violent reaction have always been so closely allied in the Russian psyche. Fyodor’s Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground struck many of its initial readers as a kind of artless mental vomit, before revealing itself as a Rosetta Stone for the century of Adolf Hitler and Lee Harvey Oswald. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We is probably the greatest of at least a dozen weirdly prophetic novels written in the years immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. In We, Zamyatin predicted what a surveillance society run by engineers would feel like to its inhabitants with a nauseating accuracy that did not become fully apparent until the rise of the modern tech surveillance complex.
The Dick novel that directly predicted our information-addicted, socially-networked 21st-century society, A Scanner Darkly, was both a prophecy of future psychological states and a half-veiled memoir of Dick’s own experiences in the California drug culture. Published in 1977, the book was a detective noir set in a druggy future in which large portions of the population appear to spend their lives scheming and snitching on each other to feed their addictions to a drug called Substance D — the “D” standing for Death, of course.
A Scanner Darkly, a reference to the line in Corinthians in which men at first see God “as in a glass, darkly”, is Dick’s rawest book and the one that reads least like science fiction. The book’s protagonist is simultaneously a narcotics agent known to his peers as Fred and a Substance D addict named Bob Arctor. Fred/Arctor lives in a house — his former marital abode — with two fellow addicts, and is in love with another addict named Donna, who comes to visit him there. Donna helps Arctor obtain Substance D, which he consumes, while Fred uses Donna to attempt to climb higher on the drug distribution ladder. At the end of the novel, Donna turns out to be a drug agent, who is spying on Bob Arctor.
What’s so striking about the book is not Dick’s heartfelt, if futuristically bent, portrayal of the evils of Sixties drug culture. For that, read Stone, who was a master of connecting the physical, mental and moral corruption of drug dealing and dependency, and the fantasies those pursuits inevitably engender to the deeper corruption of man’s nature.
What Dick uniquely captured was something else: The degenerative effects of the split-screen existence of a human brain ceaselessly spying on and doubting and implicating itself while at the same time being spied on by others, all of whom are embedded within machine systems that record everything for reasons that humans cannot understand. Over the course of this machine-and-chemical fed process of human self-contradiction and self-destruction, of which Fred/Arctor is only intermittently aware, we see his thoughts and perceptions being short-circuited and reduced to gibberish.
Drug-induced paranoia aside, the psychology of Dick’s addicts and narcs is as good a description as exists of the spreading incoherence of today’s information ecosystem, which none of us are able to fully see or understand. As a thought experiment, it doesn’t matter that Dick chose a drug rather than the stories we tell about ourselves and our world. It’s not the technology; it’s the psychology. What Dick saw was that the process of splitting ourselves in two — into subject and narc — was a brutal assault on the idea of being human and would make thoughts and communication impossible.
“What does a scanner see?” Arctor wonders, after examining the surveillance apparatus that has been planted, with his knowledge, in his own home. “I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infra-red holographic scanner like they used to use, or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me – into us – clearly or darkly? I hope it does, see clearly,” Arctor continues, “because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better.” They don’t.
* * *
Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, which the English philosopher sketched out in a series of letters between 1786 and 1788 while visiting the Mogilev district of the Russian Empire, was an architectural system of control in which all inmates of an institution could be made visible to a single guard. Bentham’s utopian-utilitarian idea was widely applied in Victorian England to a range of public and private spaces including prisons, asylums, hospitals, factories and even schools. The unique horror of the Benthamite set-up was not the power imbalance inherent in places like prisons and factories, whose existence is obvious to guards and prisoners alike. It was the attempt to eliminate privacy, which is a necessary precondition for being human.
Over the last decade, Bentham’s architecture of unfreedom has been replaced by the architecture of machines. This has created a new social reality where everyone is at once inmate and guard; a panopticon where nothing is private and no one is free. The invisible operations of the machines and programmes we use every day to buy books or food or communicate, which are linked to each other and to the surveillance operations of large government agencies in a single net, induces in most sentient beings a kind of free-floating paranoia of the type that destroys the inhabitants of AScanner Darkly. On the one hand, everyone knows that everyone is being watched. On the other, it is necessary to deny that knowledge in order to appear to be functioning normally.
One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the weird split-screen mentality of our times is how people must routinely speak against themselves — deny what they see, hear, feel and believe — in order to maintain the appearance of sanity. It is now routine, for example, to hear Americans on the Left and the Right deride their political opponents for believing in far-reaching conspiracy theories — while in the next breath revealing their own.
No doubt both sides are at least half right. During lockdowns, it became normal for public officials in Western countries to issue draconian edicts in the name of “science” for the supposed good of large numbers of people, only to violate those edicts themselves. The meaning of “science”, it turned out, had nothing to do with the “common good”, or with demonstrating a theory through evidence; it was “one rule for me and another for thee”.
The flagrant doublespeak that is nurtured in the surveillance societies of the West, which have sprung up around us unnoticed, is characteristic of totalitarian societies and mental asylums. The difference is that both totalitarian societies and asylums allow for nonthreatening zones of privacy in order to make life easier for the guards. What we live in today is something else, a set of mirrors into which we are encouraged to look so that our reflections can be distorted and then returned to us. As Bob Arctor puts it, reflecting on the words of Corinthians: “it is not through glass but reflected back by a glass. And that reflection that returns to you: it is you, it is your face, but it isn’t.”
Powerful people in Western societies have lately become convinced of their ability to accomplish great feats of moral and social engineering by controlling these mirrors, altering our reflections and selling them back to us, while undermining our ability to think coherently. The mirrors are not meant to help anyone think; they are systems of control. They are mechanisms of profit, which foster dependence. They are used to mete out punishment, and spy on us.
What’s alarming is that the people who delight in their mastery of these devices seem not to have thought very hard about the damage they are doing to the people who shoot up, a category that includes those who shoot up schools and malls. None of them seem to calculate what creating a miasma of nonsensical conspiracy theories will do to the psyches of their own children, who will inherit “the murk”. They appear to believe that people with minds that have been permanently broken by their gibberish machines will make the perfect workers on their farm. Let’s see how that turns out for them.
More than two years since Big Tech made the historic decision to limit access to the New York Post’s story about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, users are getting a glimpse into how Twitter came to that decision. However, delusional legacy and social media outlets are doing everything they can to misrepresent and bury the consequential details of the process.
An October 2020 New York Post story titled “Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad” offered sensationalistic photos and details of Hunter’s addiction issues coupled with damning emails indicating that Hunter utilized his connection with his father to curry favor and economic opportunity in foreign countries. At the time, intelligence officials told members of the press that the story was Russian propaganda aimed at influencing that year’s election. As a result, Big Tech platforms limited access to the story including in direct messages which is usually done only in extreme cases such as child pornography.
On Friday, December 2, 2022, Elon Musk promised to release files related to the matter. Soon afterward, journalist Matt Taibbi published a report based on thousands of internal Twitter documents. Taibbi demonstrated that Twitter’s decision to remove the Hunter Biden story was influenced in part by Biden’s campaign. Indeed, as Taibbi described, Twitter’s staff regularly fields phone calls from powerful people in government and acts upon their requests to moderate content. And it’s is not just Twitter. During a 2022 interview with Joe Rogan, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook) Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his company’s decision to moderate content – including the 2020 Hunter story – is sometimes based on recommendations from the intelligence community. Similarly, The Intercept reported in 2022 that the Department of Homeland Security regularly informs Big Tech’s content moderation practices.
In any other country, the revelation that government and Big Tech collude to shape public discourse and democratic participation would make Americans irate, but the story has received little coverage. The coverage received by legacy media has been dismissive. CNN reduced the files as simply showing “how employees debated how to handle 2020 New York Post Hunter Biden story.” Variety echoed the same sentiments. Meanwhile, giving readers less than 24-hours to process what Taibbi reported, WAPO declared that Musk’s Twitter Files “haven’t changed minds.”
The lack of substantive coverage of the Twitter Files is rooted in the legacy media’s fears over the broader implications of the story. Since 2015, legacy media have been fostering a moral panic over fake news and blamed their competition – digital media – for its spread. They have practically begged Big Tech overlords to fix the country and restore faith in journalism by censoringproblematiccontent, which they often refer to as misinformation or disinformation. Taibbi’s reporting demonstrates that the news media’s framing of Big Tech content moderation as a solution to anti-democratic practices, actually functioned as an anti-democratic position that enables the elite political class to shape public dialogue and manufacture consent of the electorate.
Adding to the news media’s inability to cover the story is their business model which depends on framing every story as an issue of left versus right, blue versus red, Democrat versus Republican. Indeed, whether it is cable news audiences or legacy newspaper subscribers, news outlets cater to audiences’ confirmation biases by villainizing a caricature of the “otherside.” This has reduced every story to a partisan issue, and fostered such high levels of hyper-partisanship vitriol that half of Americans cite “other Americans” as their number one fear, while 40% contend that a civil war will occur in their lifetime.
Although they still try, the legacy media has found it impossible to frame the Twitter Files as a hyper-partisan story because the political duopoly, not one party, utilizes Big Tech to manufacture the consent of the people. For example, Big Tech’s content moderation of was influenced by Biden’s Campaign in 2020 and leading Democrats after January 6th. Similarly, Donald Trump’s campaign spent $100 million to work with Facebook staff to amplify their campaign messages, and Trump met personally with Zuckerberg in secretmeetings throughout his presidency. Furthermore, legacy news media outlets cannot villainize the “other side” for censorship when loyalists for both parties are complicit. Indeed, the feckless liberals who begged Big Tech overlords to censor content about elections and Covid-19 are equally complicit as the neocons who championed censorship of the press and individuals, and organizations during the War on Terror and Trump supporters who lauded his attacks on the freepress and whistleblowers such as JulianAssange.
Anyone can, and will, argue that Hunter’s photos are not newsworthy, but that is for the citizens to decide when they encounter the story. That is how a free press in a democratic republic works. A democracy does not depend on Big Tech overlords acting at the behest of the political class to determine what content the public should see. The notion that censorship will erode hate, correct falsehoods, or solve national problems is a fallacy of utmost proportions. The contemporary censorious crowd seems to be in such a state of delusion that they have come to believe that World War II and the Holocaust could have been avoided if Twitter was around to censor Nazis. It is ludicrous and the establishment news media deserve part of the blame for perpetuating this lunacy.
A truly independent press would privilege narratives that expose Silicon Valley propaganda, which has led users of all political ideologies to a delusional state of Stockholm Syndrome, where Big Tech exploits their labor, erodes their privacy, and manufactures their consent for the duopoly, but users still laud and entrust the industry with their democracy. To be clear, Big Tech commercialized tools that were developed by the military industrial complex during the Cold War (which was not so cold in much of the world) to surveil and exploit users. They advertised their platforms as transformative tools that strengthen democracy and inclusion. As whistleblower after whistleblower remind us, this is all nonsense: Big Tech’s oligarchs are rapacious capitalists who time and time again put profits over people. No entity should be moderating information in a democracy, and as the Twitter Files reveal, the unaccountable profiteers in Big Tech are no exception.
Central bankers and international corporate financiers have long been pretending to hate the very concept of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Etherium while at the same time investing heavily in blockchain technologies and infrastructure. The purpose of the ruse is not clear, but more than likely it was an attempt at mass reverse psychology – “We don’t like crypto and digital currencies because we supposedly have no control over them; free market proponents should embrace them blindly because that is how you will beat us.”
In the meantime, while major banking firms are investing billions into various blockchain products, central banks and global institutions like the BIS and IMF have been developing their own systems. In fact, the BIS notes with enthusiasm that around 90% of central banks around the world are already in the process of adopting CBDCs.
But why would anyone want to use government and establishment bank controlled cryptocurrencies when they have access to Bitcoin and dozens of other coins that are supposedly independent? Why trade freedom for more centralization?
First, existing cryptocurrencies are not as free as many people believe, with ample government tracking of blockchain transactions in place for years, the notion of the completely anonymous crypto user is a bit of a fantasy, and the idea that a product such as Bitcoin is going to “bring down” the central banks is becoming less realistic by the year.
Second, the crypto market is highly unstable in part because it is still very limited. While crypto use in America is higher than most other countries with around 12% of people using it as an investment (not as a currency), the rest of the world is mostly uninterested with an estimated global footprint of around 4%. Of that 4% only a handful of people actually own the majority of the market; these people are known as “whales” and they have the ability to tip the market up or down with little effort.
This happens in many other trade commodities and paper currencies also. The point is, crypto is not immune to manipulation.
Third, crypto is enticing to people because of the quick profits that can be had, but massive losses are also a danger. The overall crypto market has plunged by $2 trillion in the past year alone – Over 60% of its value. The implosion of huge trading companies like FTX also undermines the stability of the market and usually it’s the average investor that ends up suffering the consequences.
All of these factors and more can be used by banking elites as a rationale for the implementation of CBDCs and global regulation of crypto trading. And, if the bloodbath in existing coins continues, people may even welcome CBDCs as a “safe” investment or currency system.
The investment losses in blockchain products along with the scandals in exchanges is a rather convenient opportunity for the banking establishment to promote their own currencies as a replacement. In the wake of the FTX event, multiple international banks including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have called for government regulation and a shift over to CBDCs.
The US House has scheduled hearings on FTX with an emphasis on regulation. In Europe, globalist Christine Lagarde and the ECB are calling for global cooperation on monitoring and controlling cryptocurrencies. Lagarde wants a “digital Euro” to take the place of existing coins and blames FTX and the larger market losses on lack of oversight.
Numerous crypto analysts are also demanding regulation, calling crypto “broken and useless” until governments step in to mediate (control) trade. This is the exact opposite of what crypto activists originally intended over a decade ago when Bitcoin was in its infancy, and digital trade back then was sold as some kind of revolution against the banking oligarchy. However, it’s easy to see where this is all going.
It means even more pervasive centralization. With paper currencies at least there is true anonymity, but with CBDCs the existence of the blockchain ledger precludes any and all privacy in trade. Not only that, but the institutional ability to cut off people from their wealth and economic access is going to be profound. If you think corporate and government led cancel culture is bad now, just wait until they can freeze your digital accounts at a moment’s notice because of something you said on social media. And, in a cashless society there are few alternatives beyond some kind of black market.
CBDCs mean the total death of any economic freedom the public has left, and central banks are exploiting disasters like FTX to make that death happen even faster.
The purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people.
Unfortunately, we have gone so far in the opposite direction from the ideals of a good government that it’s hard to see how this trainwreck can be redeemed.
According to the San Francisco Police Department’s draft policy, “Robots will only be used as a deadly force option when risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to SFPD.”
Yet as investigative journalist Sam Biddle points out, this is “what nearly every security agency says when it asks the public to trust it with an alarming new power: We’ll only use it in emergencies—but we get to decide what’s an emergency.”
A last-minute amendment to the SFPD policy limits the decision-making authority for deploying robots as a deadly force option to high-ranking officers, and only after using alternative force or de-escalation tactics, or concluding they would not be able to subdue the suspect through those alternative means.
In other words, police now have the power to kill with immunity using remote-controlled robots.
It’s only a matter of time before these killer robots intended for use as a last resort become as common as SWAT teams.
Frequently justified as vital tools necessary to combat terrorism and deal with rare but extremely dangerous criminal situations, such as those involving hostages, SWAT teams—which first appeared on the scene in California in the 1960s—have now become intrinsic parts of local law enforcement operations, thanks in large part to substantial federal assistance and the Pentagon’s military surplus recycling program, which allows the transfer of military equipment, weapons and training to local police for free or at sharp discounts.
Given the widespread use of these SWAT teams and the eagerness with which police agencies have embraced them, it’s likely those raids number upwards of 120,000 by now.
A California SWAT team drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard, surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house, then when Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held him at bay with rifles. Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped in the flame-filled house. Incredibly, the father of four had done nothing wrong. The SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved in a shooting.
These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg.
Nationwide, SWAT teams have been employed to address an astonishingly trivial array of nonviolent criminal activity or mere community nuisances: angry dogs, domestic disputes, improper paperwork filed by an orchid farmer, and misdemeanor marijuana possession, to give a brief sampling.
If these raids are becoming increasingly common and widespread, you can chalk it up to the “make-work” philosophy, by which police justify the acquisition of sophisticated military equipment and weapons and then rationalize their frequent use.
Mind you, SWAT teams originated as specialized units that were supposed to be dedicated to defusing extremely sensitive, dangerous situations (that language is almost identical to the language being used to rationalize adding armed robots to local police agencies). They were never meant to be used for routine police work such as serving a warrant.
As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded, however, to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional civilian officers.
How long before these armed, militarized robots, authorized to use lethal force against American citizens, become as commonplace as SWAT teams and just as deadly?
Likewise, how long before mistakes are made, technology gets hacked or goes haywire, robots are deployed based on false or erroneous information, and innocent individuals get killed in the line of fire?
And who will shoulder the blame and the liability for rogue killer robots? Given the government’s track record when it comes to sidestepping accountability for official misconduct through the use of qualified immunity, it’s completely feasible that they’d get a free pass here, too.
We’re gaining ground fast on the kind of autonomous, robotic assassins that Terminator envisioned would be deployed by 2029.
If these killer robots follow the same trajectory as militarized weapons, which, having been deployed to local police agencies as part of the Pentagon’s 1033 recycling program, are turning America into a battlefield, it’s just a matter of time before they become the first line of defense in interactions between police and members of the public.
As Sam Biddle writes for The Intercept, “As with any high-tech toy, the temptation to use advanced technology may surpass whatever institutional guardrails the police have in place.”
There are thousands of police robots across the country, and those numbers are growing exponentially. It won’t take much in the way of weaponry and programming to convert these robots to killer robots, and it’s coming.
The first time police used a robot as a lethal weapon was in 2016, when it was deployed with an explosive device to kill a sniper who had shot and killed five police officers.
This scenario has been repeatedly trotted out by police forces eager to add killer robots to their arsenal of deadly weapons. Yet as Paul Scharre, author of Army Of None: Autonomous Weapons And The Future Of War, recognizes, presenting a scenario in which the only two options are to use a robot for deadly force or put law enforcement officers at risk sets up a false choice that rules out any consideration of non-lethal options.
“Once a technology is feasible and permitted, it tends to linger. Just as drones, mine-proof trucks, and Stingray devices drifted from Middle Eastern battlefields to American towns, critics of … police’s claims that lethal robots would only be used in one-in-a-million public emergencies isn’t borne out by history. The recent past is littered with instances of technologies originally intended for warfare mustered instead against, say, constitutionally protected speech, as happened frequently during the George Floyd protests.”
This gradual dismantling of cultural, legal and political resistance to what was once considered unthinkable is what Liz O’Sullivan, a member of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, refers to as “a well-executed playbook to normalize militarization.”
It’s the boiling frog analogy all over again, and yet there’s more at play than just militarization or suppressing dissent.
There’s a philosophical underpinning to this debate over killer robots that we can’t afford to overlook, and that is the government’s expansion of its power to kill the citizenry.
Although the government was established to protect the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the American people, the Deep State has been working hard to strip us of any claims to life and liberty, while trying to persuade us that happiness can be found in vapid pursuits, entertainment spectacles and political circuses.
Having claimed the power to kill through the use of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later, SWAT team raids, no-knock raids, capital punishment, targeted drone attacks, grisly secret experiments on prisoners and unsuspecting communities, weapons of mass destruction, endless wars, etc., the government has come to view “we the people” as collateral damage in its pursuit of absolute power.
Greed is a powerful motivation to be an ardent believer in the central banking cult.
The ideal cult convinces its followers that it isn’t a cult, it’s simply the natural order of things. In current terms, this normalizes insane behaviors and beliefs. Sacrificing youth to appease the gods isn’t a cult; it’s simply the natural order of things. If we don’t sacrifice youth, bad things will happen, so we have to follow the natural order of things.
Despite the lofty claims made by our rational mind, we want to hear and obey the voices of the gods. This non-rational desire is the root of cults and episodes of mass hysteria, i.e. the madness of crowds.
Humanity is in the grip of the secular cult of central banking. The cult’s seers and prophets periodically emerge with arcane signs and readings, offering divinations to guide the followers.
The motivation to believe the cult is the natural order of things is powerful: greed. Those who heed the oracles of the cult enrich themselves, unbelievers impoverish themselves.
Rationalists outside the cult discern the structure of the cult and its core beliefs. The cult creates credit and “money” out of thin air and distributes it to the few extremely wealthy to further expand their wealth. These few do not improve productivity or the well-being of the many; they use the cult’s gifts to exploit the cult’s rigged casino of speculation to maximize their private gains.
In other words, the cult benefits the few at the expense of the many while proclaiming it benefits everyone. This is of course insane. The cult’s core beliefs are: 1) enriching the already-rich magically trickles down benefits to the masses, and 2) this vast enrichment of the already-wealthy is cost-free. The economy prospers with no downside or consequences other than the glorious expansion of wealth at the top and the trickle-down of sweet goodness to the masses.
This is of course insane. The costs are borne by the masses and by the socio-economic system, which is now in thrall to a cult that has made the economy dependent on an ever-expanding credit bubble which feeds an ever-expanding asset bubble, which then enables a further expansion of credit which then fuels ever-higher assets prices.
And so on, forever, because the cult and its ever-expanding bubble are the natural order of things. If we don’t sacrifice the many to benefit the few, the sun will stop rising and the Earth will be cast into endless shadow.
This is of course insane, but greed is a powerful motivation to be an ardent believer in the central banking cult. Expanding credit based on the expanding collateral of asset bubbles, each feeding the other, is held up not as insane but as a financial perpetual-motion machine, overseen and managed by the seers and prophets of the central bank cult. Followers heeding the cult’s oracles become rich, non-believers and skeptics become impoverished.
Alas, cults and bubbles both come to an inglorious end. What seemed self-evidently true for the ages is revealed as a brief moment of self-serving delusion, supported by the immense powers of greed and the madness of crowds.
Do you hear the voices of the gods? Yes, yes, oh yes.
In Brave New World, author Aldous Huxley wrote that the slaves of the future are happy. Drugged and genetically modified, their personalities are blunted and their bodies and minds configured by a technocracy whose scientists design humans to maximise their outputs for the benefit of the ruling classes.
Outside the world of fiction, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is an umbrella of multibillion-dollar, mostly US-based corporations and billionaires; a think tank in which the rulers of the world meet to discuss and try to shape the general direction of the global order. With permanent strikers in the US, for instance, refusing to work in what the late anthropologist David Graeber eloquently called “bullshit jobs,” the WEF’s academics and researchers understand that they could lose their grip on power. Global financial inequalities are widening as anti-democratic sentiments grow within “democratic” societies, whose populations realise that they have no control over their lives.
Rather than risk revolutions in numerous countries from strikers – now called The Great Resignation – the WEF seeks to ideologically capture potential revolutionary leaders and re-programme them to favour the WEF system (e.g., Greta Thunberg’s platform at the annual conference). The businesses that fund and join WEF’s Davos meetings recognise that real estate remains the physical basis on which profitable assets are constructed. Under slogans like the Great Reset, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Build Back Better, WEF elites want to cement their new world order.
But what will that new order look like for non-elites? Unlike the present global malaise, the “new normal” – or “next normal” as WEF elites are calling it – aims to use hi-technology and data collection to tailor environments to the needs and wishes of the public who will be expected to participate in “sustainable” infrastructure and be data points for constant public health monitoring.
Like the hapless victims of Huxley’s dystopia, tomorrow’s society will be happily enslaved, at least in the minds of WEF planners. Workspaces will blur the lines between personalisation and professionalism, feelings of being cheated by the system will be reconceived as consuming less to help the environment, and the pains of reality will be soothed with immersion into joyous, incessant virtual reality like Facebook’s new Meta concepts.
Build Back Better
Mega-wealth in the global economy is a house of cards: it consists of digits on bank account computer screens that increase when the rich buy and sell repackaged debts to each other. When the gravy train derails every decade or so, the public bails out the perpetrators. Yet, the three main bases on which the intangible economy is constructed are tangible: precious metals, hydrocarbons, and real estate.
The new rulers of the world are the asset managers who hold the stocks, shares, bonds, and portfolios of the banks, hedge funds, insurers, pension companies, and real estate holdings. They include BlackRock, State Street, UBS, and Vanguard. Their fake wealth would not exist without the physical ownership of land. Real estate is the skin of the balloon in which they blow the hot air of money markets.
The WEF corporations understand the importance of real estate in relation to wealth inequality and uber-profits. They also understand that the younger generations are getting more and more desperate. In terms of size, housing quality is leading to mental health issues as younger people live and work in increasingly crowded and expensive cities. Not only is property ownership a dream for the majority of young westerners, renting is becoming harder as owners are reluctant to let their property to people in the insecure work of the expanding gig economy.
WEF corporations fear a brain and labour drain from cities as work-from-home youngsters flee to the countryside where dwellings are bigger and cheaper. The WEF notes that cities generate 80 per cent of global GDP, yet their revenues (e.g., from local taxes and property sales) are expected to fall as fewer people use public transport and reduced council budgets lead to disinvestment from public services. Asset companies want to keep workers locked into cities and are looking to redesign urban hellholes to make them more appealing: eco-friendly, health conscious, and tailored to the psychology of the individual.1
WEF authors say that the new agenda will take place via “an increase in public-private cooperation,” meaning the taxpayer foots the bill, as usual. New urban slums will be greenwashed and prettied via the harnessing of personalised big tech data collection for “customisation.” While the rich continue to plunder, the working classes will have to get used to “adaptive reuse”; an eco-friendly normalisation of second-hand products; or “pre-loved” as they now call them. The WEF says that, “The private sector can also play an instrumental role in helping the public sector craft legislation that is viable for business.” What could possibly go wrong?
WEF emphasises that a whole tenth of global GDP is concentrated in a single sector: real estate. Commenting on the above, Christian Ulbrich, Global Chief Executive Officer and President of the real estate services company JLL, confirms: “The world will look different in the coming years; our cities and urban centres especially so.”2
On greenwashing in response to public pressure, Ahmed Galal Ismail, Chief Executive Officer of the holding company Majid Al Futtaim Properties, says “global investors, pension funds and financial institutions are demanding that their investee companies incorporate, track and report ESG [environmental, social and governance] performance into the risk-adjusted returns that they deliver.”3
As we shall examine in more detail, artificial intelligence and the instantaneous advertising and automated services markets are exploding. In so-called smart homes, the wishes and intentions of the occupant will be sales opportunities for programmed machines, from fridges to heating systems, as the very biology of the tenant is tracked and analysed under the PR-friendly cover of public health monitoring.
Under counter-Covid biosurveillance, prospective AI in smart homes might also be tailored to provide commercial services. AI could, for instance, offer to adjust the solar-controlled room temperature if in-home cameras sense that the occupant might be too hot or cold. “Autonomous buildings autotune, adapting to dynamic indoor and outdoor conditions, create optimal working conditions.” Through bastardised communitarianism designed by WEF to prevent the poor from ever attaining wealth under the slogan of “equity,” the buildings will be designed with “cost-sharing mechanisms.”
Existing examples, not yet fully authoritarian like the above, include the hub at Causeway, Boston, Massachusetts: a mixed-use revitalisation project that includes heat-regulating glass, airflow-supported balconies, and local food production. Another is Hong Kong’s Taikoo Place: an interconnected business hub. Citing patents per head of population, the WEF notes that increased population density – i.e., big cities – is linked to increased creativity and productivity. But the people who do the hard work don’t share in the patent wealth. Taxpayers, for instance, funded the vaccines that low-paid nurses administer, yet big pharma reaps the rewards.
In other words, they want people crammed into cities to boost innovation, but they also want to polish the turd of urbanisation by making dystopian dives look like efficient, modern pockets of eco-friendly mingling.
For instance, knowing that most people prefer the more relaxed atmosphere of villages to crowded and impersonal cities, the government of Victoria, Australia supports the 20 Minute City concept in which the village – grocer, butcher, baker, pharmacy, health clinic, bus stop – is integrated into the city.4
“Sustainable McDonald’s” is an oxymoron, yet Australia once again serves as a testbed for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) with “sustainable” fast-food outlets that allegedly cut CO2 emissions by a third. The solar-powered “smartly” ventilated takeaway/restaurant in Melton South is a prototype for other sites. Through Podium, Australia is also pioneering the end-to-end digitisation of real estate: from design, purchase, lease, and construction, to repurchase, letting, contract, and the new age of tailored living. This will create a new blockchain for real estate markets.
In this part of the new world order, constant labour is normalised. “From focus zones to work cafes, the space integrates ‘external’ elements such as coworking and the home office.” Happy slaves must also be healthy slaves. Design concepts include an “ergonomically supportive home office with limited distractions.” There will be a “blend of social spaces with productivity enablers,” such as colleagues who give unconscious prompts to others to work harder. This will be achieved through the design of the building itself. For instance, computers on which people work might be strategically placed near the coffee machine so that the idler sees their colleagues labouring and is prompted to return to work. Exercise machines might be placed near the snack bar so that workers tempted by candy are also guilted into doing a few minutes’ exercise before returning to their toil.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Covid has given WEF corporations the chance to integrate public health concepts via constant social biosurveillance in their existing 4IR agenda. Over the last few decades, the phrase “new normal” became normal as politicians, intellectuals, and the media sought to brainwash us into believing that terrorism would make total surveillance and travel restrictions a new normal, as would limitations on freedom and growth caused by anthropogenic climate change.
Since Covid, the WEF asks: “What will the ‘next normal’ look like?” (Emphasis added). WEF’s message is confused. On the one hand, its authors lessen mental health concerns by promoting community, but on the other, they note that the structure of the socioeconomic order will increase isolation. Facebook is notorious for keeping people isolated in echo chambers, but the new Meta rebranding, as we shall see, will blend isolation and community in augmented, virtual reality (VR) settings. The happy slave will be alone in their tiny, greenwashed hovel but feel emotionally connected with friends in a VR universe.
When it comes to online shopping, there will be less “face-to-face interaction.” The last-minute deliveries spurred by Covid “will persist beyond the pandemic”5 and be delivered by the kinds of people whom the WEF envisages occupying the above properties. Jab mandates for working people are part of the “next normal,” and patents on the vaccines are of primary interest to the mega-rich. But the WEF is less interested in ensuring the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines and more concerned with bolstering “vaccine confidence.” Even though the jab appears to be effective only in reducing hospitalisations, the WEF was quick to ask how its thought leaders could work to promote “trust” in big pharma’s rushed products.6
It is important to distinguish between words and actions. Sometimes, WEF founder and chairman Klaus Schwab speaks truth and horrifies those familiar with his words. Examples include references to microchipping the population and replacing humans with robots.7 At other times, Schwab seems to say the opposite, acknowledging that what is erroneously called “capitalism” – which actually means state-backed monopoly corporatism – has damaged the younger generations, stagnated the middle classes, and fuelled the climate crisis. In order to look good and paint the global elite’s WEF as some kind of progressive or “woke” (as the right-wing say) face of “capitalism,” Schwab points out that which is wrong with the “capitalist” order.
The reality is that pretty words and agreement with those injured by profit-driven corporatism is a cover. It is as if an abuser consoles their victim while continuing to abuse them. In his introduction to the WEF’s report on youth, Schwab plays this game, writing things many of us would agree with: that long-term planning is better than short-term profit and that intergenerational parity is better than growing inequality.8
As part of its pyramid structure, the WEF claims that its global reach on this issue was over two million people, the vast majority of whom were journalists, intellectuals, businesspeople, and community leaders; in other words, rungs on the ladder of hierarchy, not ordinary people. These so-called cultural leaders will shape the doctrines for those below them through entertainment, education, media, and the workplace.
The report pays lip service to getting corporations to disinvest from fossil fuels and working with Generation Z’s thought leaders to create a new agenda for sustainability. In reality, it is the same old monopoly corporatism in which ordinary people are the flotsam and jetsam in the plans of those higher than them in the social order. For example, one Lab held in Luxembourg concluded that the WEF should decide what is or is not ethical consumption: “It would be unfair and naïve to put all the burden on consumers having to educate themselves in order to avoid greenwashing.”9
If, for instance, someone decides not to buy the latest Apple gadget because ‘child mining’ in Congo extracted the device’s coltan, ‘forced labour’ in China created the product, ‘air miles’ brought the item to the West, and ‘tax avoidance’ enables the company to be a monopoly, a WEF messaging campaign might greenwash and claim that the gadget’s production was ethical and its carbon footprint neutral.
Another event in Australia concluded that the WEF should harness the wisdom of indigenous people when promoting the new agenda so that people resonate with ancient ways of living whilst continuing to work for corporate overlords.
This is a form of mind control in which the labouring masses have internal freedom and believe they participate in a spiritual society, when in fact the limits of their reality are set by superiors who pretend to consult with and gain the approval of those they are controlling. The Davos Lab’s Millennium Manifesto is jam-packed with empty verbiage such as, “We will ask big questions to advance bold solutions.”10
The Great Reset
Another aspect of the WEF agenda is what Schwab calls the Great Reset: a professed plan to promote economic and social equity while cementing the structures that guarantee worsening inequality. In addition to trapping working people in properties designed to enhance their productivity and monetise their idiosyncrasies (like the AI temperature control example above), the revolutionary potential of the exploited classes as well as their dissatisfaction will, if the WEF planners get their way, be quelled by the promotion of transhumanism and virtual reality, in which humanity is “reset” to begin anew with biological and digital enhancements.
One of the methods of control is trapping people in social media bubbles. After US President Donald Trump came to power (2017–21) and threatened the neoliberal agenda, ideological managers such as mainstream media, think tanks, and political unions, took action against what they call “fake news.” Fact-check organisations have morphed into the guardians of neoliberal elites. Often “populists” like Trump and his supporters lie, misreport, and publish fake news. Fact-checkers expose those lies, but they have a deeper agenda.
In most cases, so-called fact-checkers simply argue over interpretations of truth, which the fact-checkers then use to delegitimise real populism. The ideological basis from which they operate promotes the agenda of the World Economic Forum and others. But who fact checks the fact-checkers? Researchers have uncovered their connections to the political, corporate, and media establishment. In this revolving door system, former mainstream corporate media editors and journalists take up new roles as self-professed fact-checkers whose targets are those opposed to the neoliberal order.
In addition, social media have, for years, been on a deplatforming crusade as part of “woke washing” (while keeping oppressive and prejudicial structures in place) and under the influence of the intelligence services. In their evidence to US Congress after the 6 January Capitol insurrection, both Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey confirmed that because of “security” concerns, domestic US intelligence agencies advised (i.e., leaned on) them to deplatform accounts, including the President’s.
All of the above serves to blandify social media content and constrain users to the boundaries of what is acceptable within neoliberal culture. Anything too progressive (e.g., the World Socialist Web Site) or regressive (e.g., Breitbart News) is censored, pushing the entire user base of hundreds of millions of people into a giant corporate-approved echo chamber (e.g., CNN, New York Times).
This process is called “digital literacy” by the WEF and others. Without “digital literacy,” people might fall for dangerous “fake news” (i.e., news not approved by WEF corporations). But people might also create and share real news and real information that does not fall within the bounds of accepted neoliberal ideology, such as questioning the efficacy of big pharma-produced vaccines or pointing out the serious problems with the corporate-political elite. In making the world “digitally literate,” the WEF employs doublethink: “Steps must be taken to prevent abuse and harm while maintaining the freedom to openly exchange ideas.”11
Slaving for the ultra-rich in personally-tailored smart cities, the younger generations censored into the neoliberal sheep pen by social media will, according to the WEF model, augment their capacities with technology. The transhumanist agenda is specifically harnessed for the older, infirm generations who have gone from being useless eaters – from the WEF perspective – to potential data points for augmentative technologies. As part of the WEF propaganda campaign, the organisation is preparing to “Articulate the potential benefits of artificial intelligence,” particularly for the older generations.12
For “older” people, which we assume means the over-60s, WEF suggests placing representatives in the design process, the reasoning being that over-60s tend to have different aesthetic tastes, practical preferences, and physical and cognitive requirements to young people. The young are born into the new technological changes, and those changes become part of their environment. In contrast, the over-60s must adapt. Pursuing profit, companies are using the WEF as a vehicle to help turn the over-60s into transhumanist augmentation technology consumers: home-help robots, implants for better eyesight, time-released painkillers, etc. The WEF does not seek solutions for ending the collection and selling of personal data but rather for more transparency. This way companies can cheat consumers whilst being honest that they are cheating them. The aim is to make consumers feel less angry because they appreciate the honesty.
WEF suggests that companies “Disclose the data being collected.” They hope that older people will thus be more willing to have their information sold. The WEF also wants to “Obtain meaningful consent.” The clue is in the word “meaningful,” suggesting that up until now, consent has not been meaningful. One of the more insidious agendas is to “Design for appropriate trust.” Just as they seek to make the younger generations “digitally literate,” i.e., keep them in a mental prison, WEF corporations aim to protect the elderly from “deception,”13 but not the deceptions on which their system is built.
The WEF is aware that the general public might, if left on their own, form groups, communities, parties, and movements that spread an anti-“capitalist” message and develop new social models. If such a long-term grassroots revolution succeeded, it would not only hurt the profits of the owner-classes but threaten the system they spent so long developing. Repackaging profit-driven agendas as some form of third position between capitalism and socialism is achieved, in part, by rhetorically emphasising “corporate responsibility.”14
The WEF also seeks to capture potential revolutionaries by appealing to “social justice.” The WEF intellectuals are aware that young people tend to be driven more than old people by outrage. The right-wing dismisses these young, conscious activists as “social justice warriors.” Instead of encouraging people to change the system in their own image, WEF intellectuals want to make people feel like they have – without actually having – input into their conditions. “[R]ecognising, co-designing, partnering and learning with impacted stakeholders… must be at the centre of any corporate action on equity and social justice in our unequal world.”15
Another factor profitable to the corporate class is social impact bonds. Historically, the underclasses – those below the working classes – were a financial negative. They claimed benefits, needed free healthcare, public housing, etc. The working classes laboured, the middle classes paid the most relative taxes, and the rich lived off the labour of the poor, profits generated by the consuming middle classes, and hording through tax avoidance.
But over the last decades, banks figured out ways of profiting from the underclasses: social impact bonds. Under such systems, government cuts back on social welfare and relies instead on charities to keep offenders out of prison and reach homelessness reduction targets, etc. The banks that fund the charities are then reimbursed by government, and the loans of the banks are serviced by taxpayers. This social impact bond system creates an incentive to have a permanent underclass and champion the alleged virtues of “charity” instead of systemic change that brings genuine inclusivity and democratic empowerment.16 Gerbrand Haverkamp, Executive Director of the World Benchmarking Alliance, is quoted as saying: “[W]e need businesses that can profitably solve societal problems, without profiting from societal harms.”17 This model incentivises the creation of a permanent underclass.
Engineered ‘Life’ In Fake Worlds
There is a sinister, occultic element to the WEF’s agenda. Certain members who currently practice what they believe to be online “meme magic(k)” are also involved in the development of Facebook’s VR world: the Metaverse.
A near-billionaire developer and Trump supporter, Palmer Luckey, used social media to boost Trump’s profile and deflate his rival Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. Luckey made his fortune selling the Oculus VR headset to Zuckerberg. Luckey’s benefactor, a lobby called Nimble America, believed that “meme magic is real.” The Millennial generation started to use images with text circulated online to boost their agendas and attack their enemies (memes). One famous meme was Pepe the Frog, an innocent cartoon hijacked by racists and right-wingers (usually both) to signal their political allegiances. The cultists behind the spread of such memes believed that they could invoke spiritual power (“meme magic(k)” to vanquish enemies. Pepe, to give one of many examples, is drawn with light reflecting in both eyes in the shape of a Freemasonic dot-triangle.
Regardless of his involvement or lack of involvement in such practices, the executive director of Oculus, Jason Rubin, sent his 50-page report on the Metaverse to Zuckerberg. Just as US military planners devised a “shock and awe” terror campaign to inflict on the Iraqi people in 2003, Rubin said that “shock and awe” tactics would condition the user to accept their new digital life in the Metaverse. CNBC has seen leaked policy documents: “It imagined users floating through a digital universe of virtual ads, filled with virtual goods that people buy.”18
Chillingly (no pun intended), FB Oculus’s Michael Abrash says: “It all started with Snow Crash,” the futuristic ‘90s novel written by Neal Stephenson. The Guardian, which picked up the Abrash quote, conveniently omits a crucial detail about the novel: that the fictional online world on which the new scheme is based contains a mind virus that can infect users as they merely look at the screen. Likening it to Snow Crash, though providing no evidence, certain individuals claim that the Pepe meme that evolved into something else has, for many years, contained a hidden mind virus.
Whether the mind virus is real or not is beside the point. Certain online occultists, including Luckey, are using the fear of mind control, coupled with what Rubin calls “shock and awe,” to get users to submit to the dialectic: a “progressive” Zuckerberg world order of Joe “Build Back Better” Biden in a virtual reality, or a more overtly fascistic world order of “meme magic(k)” and mind warfare using Trump as a frontman.
Part of the Trump meme war and the fake news hysteria surrounding the President had the effect of making ‘truth’ a vague and flexible concept. As the concept of truth becomes fuzzy, that which is real is set to become fuzzier. WEF says of Meta: “This could manifest itself in several ways, but many experts believe that ‘extended reality’ (XR) – the combination of augmented, virtual and mixed reality – will play an important role.”19 The WEF hopes that once we have been bombarded into the new system, we will all be Huxleyan happy slaves in their Brave New World, playing with intangible VR toys and mingling with avatars of our loved ones.
About the Author
Dr T.J. Coles is an associate researcher at the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, a columnist with Axis of Logic, a contributor to numerous publications (including CounterPunch and Truthout) and the author of several books including Manufacturing Terrorism (Clairview Books), Human Wrongs (iff Books) and Privatized Planet (New Internationalist).
12. WEF,” Insight Report, August 2021, www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_ Designing_Artificial_Intelligence_Technologies_for_Older_Adults_2021.pdf
13. Ibid.
14. WEF, Business for Social Responsibility and Laudes Foundation, Insight Report, September 2021, www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Lighthouse_ Action_Social_Justice_Stakeholder_Inclusion_2021.pdf
After the Crash 