There’s a big word that you can add to your vocabulary: Simulacrum. It is a hard word to wrap your head around, but one you are not too likely to forget. Indeed, you should not forget it!
Collins defines it as: “1) an image; likeness; 2) a vague representation; semblance; 3) a mere pretense; sham.”
Cambridge Dictionary says: “something that looks like or represents something else”.
Purdue University put it this way: “Something that replaces reality with its representation.”
Jean Baudrillard wrote about this in a 1981 paper called “The Precession of Simulacra”, where he digs deeper, making a distinction between a simulation and a simulacrum.
Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. Such would be the successive phases of the image:
it is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it has no relation to any reality whatsoever;
it is its own pure simulacrum.
So, the switch for reality is anti-reality: “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth – it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.”
This whole process does not happen in a vacuum because it involves human agency. Reality exists but human perception distorts it.
Just for review, reality slips into distortion, then into simulation, then finds its resting place in a state of simulacrum. Reality is subsumed by the simulacrum.
An example of simulacrum in the making
It is estimated that 90 percent of all online content will be generated by AI by 2025. This means news, social media posts, chats, pictures, videos, podcasts, websites, etc. A deluge of fake social media accounts will be run by AI. In short, everything.
“What generative AI can do, essentially, is create new things that would have thus far been seen as unique to human intelligence or creativity, Generative AI can create across all media, so text, video, audio, pictures – every digital medium can be powered by generative AI. So, I think these valuations that you’re seeing for OpenAI are actually going to go up and you’re going to start to see even more generative AI companies which have universal applications across many industries in 2023.”
People will remember back to 2023 images and think that nothing has changed in 2025.
Warning : The Total Collapse Of Reality Could Be At Hand
As described above, a simulacrum is anti-reality.
This is not a paradigm shift of reality. This is not a “new realty”. This is not reality, period. Unfortunately, billions of people risk being captured by it.
While everyone is looking at shiny new simulacra forming right before their eyes, reality is escaping out the back door.
The fears and possibilities of Artificial Intelligence have probably lurked in the human brain since human beings started telling stories. Pygmalion and his statue could be seen as members of the AI Universe. So, too, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But A.I. has moved out of science-fiction and into reality, impacting various workplaces in ways which would have seemed far-fetched just a couple of years ago. Franklin Ritch’s “The Artifice Girl” is a thought-provoking film that examines the ethics of A.I., moving into even the existential aspects of the concept of artificial intelligence. Any deep inquiry into A.I. is also an inquiry into what it means to be human. Ritch, who wrote, directed, and also appears in the film, keeps the story tightly controlled, so the sole focus is on the mental and emotional challenges facing us when we’re dealing with our preconceived notions of reality and authenticity.
This calls to mind “Blade Runner,” and its source material, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? If a memory is implanted into an android’s brain, a “personal” memory of a childhood that never happened, then isn’t that memory a real thing to the android? The android can’t tell the difference. It feels real. At a certain point, what is or is not “real” is irrelevant. This is when things get unsettling, and “The Artifice Girl” sits in that very unsettling place.
Broken up into three sections, each of which is about half an hour long, “The Artifice Girl” starts off in a very small, dark, windowless room, where a man named Gareth (Ritch) has been brought in for questioning. The two agents in charge (Sinda Nichols and David Girard) take a very rough approach, terrifying and intimidating Gareth (who is not as naive as he initially appears). The issue is an ongoing project designed to combat the spread of pedophiles and predators operating online, devising technological ways to lure these perverted creeps out into the open. Their newest tactic is Cherry (Tatum Matthews), a digitally created nine-year-old girl who hangs out in chat rooms, going on live chats, logging her persistent viewers, the ones who show up, who message her. She’s an effective decoy. She has also developed beyond her original programming, beyond the humans who designed her.
“The Artifice Girl” isn’t plot-heavy. Each scene occurs in a single location, making the film extremely claustrophobic. The characters sit or stand, or pace in windowless rooms, grappling with weighty subjects, throwing around references to the Turing Test, game theory, the uncanny valley, and NLP; all while trying to deal with the complications surrounding either the sentience of “Cherry“, or their own perception of her sentience. In one scene, Gareth and the two agents argue over whether or not Cherry, the digitized child, can consent to something. She looks so real. The thought of her in all those chat rooms is horrifying. It’s almost like the “adults” in charge of Cherry have to keep reminding themselves: “She’s not real, she’s not real, she’s not real.”
To speak more about how the story is structured would be to give too much away. Ritch’s script is thoughtful and intense, making “The Artifice Girl” a mentally engaging and challenging work. The small cast is excellent, particularly young Matthews, whose dialogue is dauntingly technical and delivered in a monotone. There’s a lot of dialogue, and yet “The Artifice Girl” doesn’t feel like it’s too “talky” (except for the third and final scene, where the long monologues drag). The issues at hand are intellectual and cerebral as much as emotional. There’s a great moment where Cherry, the A.I., is being questioned about what she feels about something. Cherry replies, in a flat voice, “Human nature is not something I aspire to.” Considering all she has “seen” online, one can’t blame her.
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”—Ray Bradbury
What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them. Seventy years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.
Welcome to the age of technocensorship.
On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.
In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.
By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.
This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.
Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.
The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.
Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.
This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Watch and learn.
We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.
Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.
Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.
The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.
Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.
It’s happening already.
With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”
Little by little, Americans are being conditioned to accept routine incursions on their freedoms.
This is how oppression becomes systemic, what is referred to as creeping normality, or a death by a thousand cuts.
It’s a concept invoked by Pulitzer Prize-winning scientist Jared Diamond to describe how major changes, if implemented slowly in small stages over time, can be accepted as normal without the shock and resistance that might greet a sudden upheaval.
Diamond’s concerns related to Easter Island’s now-vanished civilization and the societal decline and environmental degradation that contributed to it, but it’s a powerful analogy for the steady erosion of our freedoms and decline of our country right under our noses.
As Diamond explains, “In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism… Why didn’t they look around, realize what they were doing, and stop before it was too late? What were they thinking when they cut down the last palm tree?”
Much like America’s own colonists, Easter Island’s early colonists discovered a new world—“a pristine paradise”—teeming with life. Yet almost 2000 years after its first settlers arrived, Easter Island was reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they failed to preserve paradise for future generations.
The same could be said of the America today: it, too, is being reduced to a barren graveyard by a populace so focused on their immediate needs that they are failing to preserve freedom for future generations.
The forest…vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation… The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect… Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.”
Sound painfully familiar yet?
We’ve already torn down the rich forest of liberties established by our founders. It has vanished slowly, over the decades. The erosion of our freedoms has happened so incrementally, no one seems to have noticed. Only the older generations, remembering what true freedom was like, recognize the difference. Gradually, the freedoms enjoyed by the citizenry have become fewer, smaller and less important. By the time the last freedom falls, no one will know the difference.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls: with a thousand cuts, each one justified or ignored or shrugged over as inconsequential enough by itself to bother, but they add up.
Each cut, each attempt to undermine our freedoms, each loss of some critical right—to think freely, to assemble, to speak without fear of being shamed or censored, to raise our children as we see fit, to worship or not worship as our conscience dictates, to eat what we want and love who we want, to live as we want—they add up to an immeasurable failure on the part of each and every one of us to stop the descent down that slippery slope.
The other day I joined the rush to explore ChatGPT, signing up at the OpenAI website. I gave it my full legal name and correct birth date, and asked it to pretend I had died and to write my obituary. The result was 300 words describing a somewhat boring paragon of a man.
Except maybe for the boring part, I am not that man, much less that paragon.
The obit wasn’t completely wrong, but it did nothing to undermine ChatGPT’s reputation for “uneven factual accuracy.” It said I was born in Ohio (true), but in Cleveland (false) in 1957 (false). It said I was a “committed environmentalist” (true; I worked for the late lamented Worldwatch Institute for the best part of my career), and that I was an active member of “several environmental organizations” (somewhat true, off and on). It described me as an “avid cyclist” (kind of true, but the last time I did a century ride was 1987).
So much for the hits. The misses include accounts of me as:
A “devoted husband” to my wife of 40 years, Mary (my marriage, to a fine woman not named Mary, lasted 26 years) and a “loving father” to two children (one, in fact)
A “brilliant engineer” with a degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University who worked for Boeing, General Electric, and SpaceX (wrong on all counts)
Someone who “was instrumental in the development of several renewable energy projects” (my wife and I put a few solar panels on our garage roof, but that’s it)
An “active member” of a church who spent “many hours volunteering at the food bank” (I am neither very religious nor, it shames me to admit, very generous with my personal time)
The obituary proclaimed that my “death” had “left a deep void in the lives of his family, friends, and colleagues” and that I would be “deeply missed by all who knew him.” Well, that would be gratifying—if there is a me to be gratified—but I’ll settle for a drunken wake where somebody plays “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
Maybe everyone should try this. You too might be amused and/or appalled by the plausible distortions and lies a quasi-intelligent computer program can gin up by accessing the petabytes of data (“data”?) on the Internet—accounts of people and events that are bogus but increasingly, and seamlessly, hard to tell from reality.
I am not a tech nerd and my grasp of what ChatGPT does is rudimentary. But I find it disturbing that this expression of artificial intelligence will instantly fabricate a profile and populate it with—not questions, or blanks to be filled in—but invented factoids tailored to fit a particular format. And this reservation isn’t just me being PO’d about my obit (I’m actually grateful my Internet footprint isn’t bigger); prominent tech geeks also have misgivings. Here’s Farhad Manjoo, for instance:
ChatGPT and other chatbots are known to make stuff up or otherwise spew out incorrect information. They’re also black boxes. Not even ChatGPT’s creators fully know why it suggests some ideas over others, or which way its biases run, or the myriad other ways it may screw up. …[T]hink of ChatGPT as a semi-reliable source.
Likewise Twitter and other social media, whose flaws and dangers are well known by now, and feared by some of the experts who know them best. The most recent book from revered tech guru and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier is called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Chapter titles include “Quitting Social Media Is the Most Finely Targeted Way to Resist the Insanity of Our Time,” “Social Media Is Making You into an Asshole,” “Social Media Is Undermining Truth,” and “Social Media Is Making Politics Impossible.”
About those politics: ChatGPT and its successors and rivals, whatever their virtues, are the latest agents in the corruption of the public sphere by digital technology, threatening to extend and deepen the misinformation, fabulism, and division stoked by Twitter and other digital media. Once again, a powerful new technology is out the door and running wild while society and regulators struggle to understand and tame it.
It’s hard to see how this can end well.
An earlier post in this series (DR5) looked at recent archaeological evidence suggesting that humans have explored lots of different means of governing ourselves over the last several thousand years. Eventually, for several reasons, we seem to have ended up with large, top-down, hierarchical organizations. These have lots of problems that won’t be reviewed here, but neuroscientist and philosopher Eric Hoel argues that at least they freed us from the “gossip trap.”
Hoel thinks the main reason small prehistoric human groups didn’t evolve hierarchical governing systems is because of “raw social power,” i.e., gossip:
[Y]ou don’t need a formal chief, nor an official council, nor laws or judges. You just need popular people and unpopular people.
After all, who sits with who is something that comes incredibly naturally to humans—it is our point of greatest anxiety and subject to our constant management. This is extremely similar to the grooming hierarchies of primates, and, presumably, our hominid ancestors.
“So,” Hoel says, “50,000 BC might be a little more like a high school than anything else.”
Hoel believes that raw social power was a major obstacle to cultural development for tens of thousands of years. When civilization did finally arise, it created “a superstructure that levels leveling mechanisms, freeing us from the gossip trap.”
But now, Hoel says, the explosion of digital media and their functions have resurrected it:
[I]f we lived in a gossip trap for the majority of our existence as humans, then what would it be, mentally, to atavistically return to that gossip trap?
Well, it sure would look a lot like Twitter.
I’m serious. It would look a lot like Twitter. For it’s on social media that gossip and social manipulation are unbounded, infinitely transmittable.
…Of course we gravitate to cancel culture—it’s our innate evolved form of government.
Allowing the gossip trap to resume its influence on human affairs—and turbocharging it the way digital media are doing—seems like a terrible way to run a PTA or a garden club, let alone a community or a nation.
The industrialization of made-to-order opinions, “facts,” and “data” via AI and social media, despite efforts to harness them for constructive ends, is plunging us into an epistemological crisis: “How do you know?” is becoming the most fraught question of our time. T.S. Eliot said that “humankind cannot bear very much reality,” but now we are well into an era when we can’t even tell what it is—or in which we simply make it up to please ourselves. The more convincing these applications become, the less anchored we are to the “fact-based” world.
We’ve struggled with this for centuries. Deception is built into nature as an evolutionary strategy, and humans are pretty good at it, both individually and at scale by means of propaganda, advertising, public relations, and spin. These all prey on human social and cognitive vulnerabilities (see DR4).
Humans can only perceive the world partially and indirectly. It starts with our senses, which ignore all but a tiny fraction of the vast amount of data that’s out there. (Sight, for instance, captures only a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum.) In addition, we’re social creatures and our perceptions of what’s real are powerfully shaped by other people. And now comes the digital mediation of inputs, in which information and data come from the ether via often faceless and anonymous sources and are cloaked or manipulated in ways we may never detect or suspect.
Digital media curate our information about reality, like all media do. But things have changed in the last few decades, and especially in the last few years. It’s been only a generation or so since the old days when Walter, or Chet and David, or any of hundreds of daily newspapers told us what was going on in the world. In those days the curation was handled by a relatively small number of individuals with high profiles. We knew, or could learn, something about who they were and where their biases lay. They were professionals, which also counted for something. There’s no perfect system and this one wasn’t either, but its chain of information custody was a far cry from the distant, anonymized, chat-botted, and algorithm-driven inputs flooding the public sphere now.
One liberal pundit recently noted that the increasing ideological specialization of media outlets “compels customers who care about getting a full and nuanced picture not to buy from just one merchant … .” That’s good advice. But you don’t have to force yourself, teeth clenched, to watch Fox News or MSNBC to get a different point of view; just sit down with your neighbors for a civil chat. In fact, getting away from our TVs and into a room with other people now and then would be good for all of us.
This being a blog about deliberative democracy, I default to deliberation in response to many of our political ills. Deliberation can’t fix everything, and no doubt we will get fooled again—but the tools of democratic deliberation can be used to mitigate the seemingly ubiquitous attempts at manipulation and deceit that surround us. Humans have struggled for a long time to build institutions to check our worst tendencies and have had some success. Digitally mediated information poses a fresh threat and we need institutions to meet these new circumstances.
Deliberative settings built for shaping community action should be among those new institutions. At the very least, they will outperform the social processes seen in high school cafeterias. The methods and structures of deliberative democracy can shorten the chain of information custody as well as restore and nurture the direct human presence of neighbors and fellow citizens: they’re sitting around the same table, and you will see them later at the local school or grocery store. Like them or not (or vice versa), they remain a potent element of our daily lives—a source of influence that can work for good or ill. Deliberation channels normal human interactions in ways that can benefit the community, help check the kinds of fantasist catastrophes so prevalent in digital media, and ground our perceptions of reality in the shared concerns of a community of people who may be less than friends but far more than strangers.
When is the last time you were outside in the morning to experience a glorious dawn? Or sat watching the sun set across the ocean horizon?
How do you feel when you touch the skin of someone you love? A grandparent, parent, lover or child?
Have you ever seen a spider’s web full of morning dew, or after the rain, when the sun is shining through the droplets in the web to reveal the flashing diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds hidden within?
Have you ever stood in a natural environment – a beach, desert, rainforest… – far from a city and noticed that strange and subtle feeling of freedom tremor through your body?
Have you ever marveled at the breath of wind that cools your face on a hot Summer’s day? Or been intoxicated by the smell of blossom in Spring?
Have you gaped in wonder at the birth of new life: a chick pecking out of its shell, a seed germinating or a baby being born?
Or paused to ponder the sheer magic of being alive yourself?
Or do you find life in the real physical world too constricting, painful, frightening and demanding: something from which you seek to escape, with some distraction or another (work, television, sport, a novel, a drug…), as often as you can?
Well, very soon now, we are promised, you will be able to escape reality far more effectively than those primitive means of distraction made possible previously. And far more effectively than even the outcomes promised in those dystopian novels.
So the fundamental questions we must ask ourselves are simple: Do you want real life, with all of the pains, sorrows, fear and fury that go along with beauty, freedom and love? Or do you believe what they tell us and want everything unpleasant to go away? Permanently. And to live in delusion thereafter, given synthetic versions of all of the pleasant feelings and experiences described above?
Remember the dialogue between the Savage and Mustapha Mond during the closing stages of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World?
‘But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.’
‘In fact,’ said Mustapha Mond, ‘you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘All right then,’ said the Savage defiantly, ‘I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.’
‘Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.’
There was a long silence.
‘I claim them all,’ said the Savage at last.
Well, after nearly one hundred years, the dystopian future described by Huxley is almost upon us and, if we are to defeat it, we need a lot more ‘savages’ willing to forego the promised ‘comforts’.
Because if those who see themselves as our global masters get their way, we are about to enter a virtual world that will become more complete by the day and from which there will be no escape.
The Metaverse
Based on many years of effort, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has recently launched its plan to create our new all-digital world, called the ‘metaverse’. See ‘Defining and Building the Metaverse’.
So if you find natural phenomena – ranging from rainforests, beaches and weather variations to ill-health, danger and unhappiness – annoying, you will soon be able to escape them, compliments of the metaverse. Or so we are promised. And you won’t be troubled by anything resembling what might be called ‘free will’ either. You will be content to do as you are told, even more than you are content to do already. See ‘Terrified of Freedom: Why Most Human Beings are Embracing the Global Elite’s Technotyranny’.
After all, your mind will no longer be your own. And while the usual descriptions, written by elite agents, fail to mention it, a quick flash of metaverse-induced fear will make sure that you comply, whatever you are required to do. The point is this: You won’t be escaping all of those unpleasant feelings after all. They can just be used to control you more directly, to fulfill an elite-determined purpose. But that is a fact they are not advertising.
In their iconic hit song ‘In the Year 2525’, written in 1964 by Rick Evans and later recorded by he and Denny Zager to become a No.1. hit around the world in 1969, Evans captured key elements of what is already upon us somewhat ahead of the schedule mapped out in the song.
[Chorus 2] In the year 3535 Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies Everything you think, do, and say Is in the pills you took today
[Chorus 3] In the year 4545 Ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes You won’t find a thing to chew Nobody’s gonna look at you
[Chorus 4] In the year 5555 Your arms are hanging limp at your sides Your legs got nothing to do Some machine’s doing that for you
[Chorus 5] In the year 6565 Ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife You’ll pick your sons, pick your daughters too From the bottom of a long glass tube Whoa-oh-oh
So what is the Metaverse?
According to the WEF: ‘The metaverse is a future persistent and interconnected virtual environment where social and economic elements mirror reality. Users can interact with it and each other simultaneously across devices and immersive technologies while engaging with digital assets and property.’ See ‘Defining and Building the Metaverse’.
Moreover, ‘if technologists are right that 2022 will separate thinkers from builders, then last years’ technical advances will produce this year’s first steps towards making the metaverse a reality….
‘But from the perspective of the human experience, one development stands out above all others: extended reality (XR) technologies. These include virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and brain-computer interfaces (BCI), which together position themselves as the next computing platforms in their own right.’
Having written that, here is one definition elaborated in the article above that reveals just how far some of those heavily involved in this work have become disconnected from any sense of themselves and, hence, reality: ‘Specifically, the metaverse is the moment at which our digital lives – our online identities, experiences, relationships, and assets – become more meaningful to us than our physical lives.’ The original quotation can be read here: ‘Spheres of Self: Performativity and Parasociality in the Metaverse’.
And, as Cathy Li describes it, the metaverse is ‘most useful as a lens through which to view ongoing digital transformation. The belief is that virtual worlds, incorporating connected devices, blockchain and other tech, will be so commonplace that the metaverse will become an extension of reality itself.’ See ‘Who will govern the metaverse?’
Let me reiterate two points from the paragraphs immediately above: ‘our digital lives… become more meaningful to us than our physical lives.’ And ‘the metaverse will become an extension of reality itself.’
Really?
While statements such as these reveal the breathtaking level of insanity that underpins this entire enterprise – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ – it does not mean that we are not under enormous threat. Just as vast arsenals of nuclear weapons, by some insane ‘logic’, are supposed to provide us with ‘security’ while actually threatening the existence of all life on Earth, the metaverse is part of a substantial package of measures that will reduce human life to one not worth living.
Why? Well, as noted by authors such as Tom Valovic: The metaverse is one element in the path to implementing technocratic governance over all of humanity.
‘As Planet Earth and our physical world continue to experience massive biospheric degradation and disruption, the elites that are now in many cases pulling the strings of governance at the country level are heading for the exit doors. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are exploring the realm of space and Musk has a Mars mission planned. Globally oriented elites… looked out for themselves which is what they do best….
‘Paralleling the notion of space flight as a form of existential escapism is the metaverse. So what if our cities are crumbling, infrastructures falling apart, and the biosphere is seriously degrading? So what if our wasteful consumer-driven lifestyle has created unprecedented levels of pollution so extensive that it’s now the number one cause of health problems globally? No problem… we’ll just kick back and don our Meta headsets (or worse get a brain implant) and escape into an artificially fabricated world that lets us turn our back on the massive ecological and environmental problems we now face.’ See ‘Why We Should Reject Mark Zuckerberg’s Dehumanizing Vision of a “Metaverse”’.
‘Education’ in the Metaverse
Of course, the metaverse is deeply interwoven with other components of their plan, such as those in relation to what they call ‘education’, which is more accurately described as the process by which young transhuman slaves are programmed to perform their function in the technocratic economy that is being imposed upon us. Of course, ‘education’ sounds better than ‘virtual programming of young transhuman slaves’ so, in the interests of not raising obvious concerns, the word ‘education’ has been used.
As noted by Dr. Michael Nevradakis, discussions on this subject at the recent gathering of the World Economic Forum emphasized the importance of virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with participants touting the purported educational and economic benefits that would derive from use of these technologies in the classroom by helping, according to Dr. Ali Saeed Bin Harmal Al Dhaheri & Dr. Mohamad Ali Hamade, to ‘increase accessibility, enhance quality and improve the affordability of education globally’. See ‘Experiential learning and VR will reshape the future of education’.
Of course, there is no need for concern about the ‘early-life experiences’ of those young transhumans who are being programmed for decades of servitude prior to being terminated when they are no longer functional.
Beyond claimed educational and economic benefits, however, some authors argue that digitalizing education can play a role in easing pressures on the environment and climate. How so? Nevradakis again: ‘Indeed, the WEF said the use of “textbooks, notebooks and pencils as critical learning tools” is on the way out, due to “environmental pressures and COP26 goals (from the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference),” which “will drive the digitalizing of education streams.”’ See ‘Future of Education? WEF’s Vision – Heavy on Virtual Reality and AI Technologies, Light on Privacy Concerns’
But it is clearly delusional to suggest that the use of textbooks, notebooks and pencils has greater adverse impact on the environment and climate than the environmental cost and climate impact of producing sophisticated technology for each student. And despite claims of ‘improved affordability’ it is equally delusional to ignore the economic and social cost, for example, to the child ‘laborers’ in the Congo working in appalling conditions to extract strategic minerals to produce this technology. See ‘Humanity’s “Dirty Little Secret”: Starving, Enslaving, Raping, Torturing and Killing our Children’.
Besides, as touched on below, education is already a monstrous experience, destroying the Selfhood of the child so that they become submissively obedient. Removing the bulk of education’s remaining social component by technologizing it can only make it even worse.
Babies in the Metaverse
Then again, maybe ‘children’ will no longer be put through school. It simply won’t be necessary because children, for transhuman slaves at least, will no longer exist.
By 2070, the metaverse will offer you virtual babies, ‘environmentally-friendly digital children’, according to UK artificial intelligence (AI) expert Catriona Campbell. ‘Parents will see and interact with their offspring through next-generation AR [augmented reality] glasses and haptic gloves.’ The latter devices enable users to experience ‘a realistic sense of touch when handling virtual or holographic objects’. As a bonus, these children take up no space, cost nothing to feed and remain healthy, if that is what you want, for as long as they are programmed to ‘live’. A subscription might cost as little as $25 each month.
And if this seems like a monumental leap out of reality to you, Campbell also believes that ‘within 50 years technology will have advanced to such an extent that babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world…. As the metaverse evolves, I can see virtual children becoming an accepted and fully embraced part of society in much of the developed world.’ See ‘“Virtual babies” who grow up in real time will be commonplace by 2070, expert predicts’.
That’s right, Campbell is claiming that ‘within 50 years… babies which exist in the metaverse are indistinct from those in the real world’! Pause a moment. How does that sound to you?
Beyond the criticisms already noted above, there are a great many other criticisms of the metaverse and the role it will play in the overall elite program being implemented under what the WEF calls its ‘Great Reset’. This comprehensive program will transform human society and human life for those people left alive after the eugenics component has been fully implemented. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.
If you like, you can read a little more about what the masters of this metaverse intend for us, as well as critiques of it, by authors such as these.
Derrick Broze: While some people ‘may not intend for The Metaverse to become an all encompassing reality that supersedes physical reality, for the Zuckerbergs, Microsofts, and WEFs of the world, that is exactly what they intend for The Metaverse…. For the billionaire class and their puppet organizations, such as the WEF and the United Nations, the Metaverse offers up the potential to commandeer all life into digital prisons where the people can be charged for services and products in the digital realm…. With the people of the world safely tucked into their digital beds, the Technocrats could complete their total takeover of natural resources, the economy, and humanity itself.’ See ‘The Great Narrative And The Metaverse, Part 2: Will The Metaverse End Human Freedom?’
Dr. Michael Nevradakis: ‘Who will govern the “metaverse”?… According to the WEF, “real-world governance models” represent one possible option for metaverse governance. However, far from referring to constitutionally defined institutions of governance, with checks and balances, the WEF cites Facebook’s “Oversight Board” as an example of such a “real-world governance model.”’ See ‘WEF Launches “Metaverse” Initiative, Predicts Digital Lives Will Become “More Meaningful to Us Than Our Physical Lives”’.
So if you believe that you and I are destined to have a say in the metaverse that is unfolding, you would be wise to keep investigating. Elite proposals are invariably very distant from the type of governance models usually considered by ‘ordinary’ people in a multiplicity of contexts, where the emphasis is on facilitating widespread grassroots participation, not rule by technocrats.
And here’s another simple issue to ponder. Remember how I mentioned above that a quick flash of metaverse-induced fear would ensure that you complied with an elite-determined directive, how does the idea of eating bugs, processed sewage and human flesh appeal? Well, given that your mind will no longer be your own, what appeals now, or doesn’t, will be irrelevant once the metaverse is determining how you perceive things. See ‘Canadian Company Pledges To Produce TWO BILLION BUGS Per Year For Human Consumption’ and ‘Will You Eat Cultured Meat Grown From Human Cells?’
You will eat ‘Soylent Green’ because that is what the program tells you.
So why are people embracing the Metaverse?
In a recent article in which he described taking his son to watch a film through 3D glasses, Charles Eisenstein noted ‘The on-screen reality was so vivid, stimulating and intense that it made the real world seem boring by comparison.’ See ‘Transhumanism and the Metaverse’.
Fundamentally, this terrorization works because it compels our children into suppressing awareness of how they feel. As a result, only the most intense experiences register emotionally: The capacity to experience a subtle feeling has been lost. And without this capacity, they cannot develop into the powerful, courageous Self-willed individuals that evolution intended. They are human relics. Ready and willing to be turned into a transhuman slave in the unconscious hope they will be finally able to experience, in the metaverse, what was taken from them in the real world as a child.
But they won’t get that experience, even in the metaverse. It is not what the elite has in mind for us.
Resisting the Metaverse
Of course, the metaverse is just one feature of the Global Elite agenda that is being imposed upon us. And it is not enough to resist individual features of the ‘Great Reset’ program. We must strategically resist its most fundamental elements so that the entire agenda is defeated.
If you are inclined to join those strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.
In addition and more simply, you can download a one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, now available in 17 languages (Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish & Slovak) with more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’.
If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).
And if you want a child who is powerfully able to perceive the dysfunctional lure of the metaverse, and is able to join you in resisting it, consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.
CONCLUSION
So, for just a little longer, the choice is yours.
You can live your life with all its challenges and problems, joys and achievements. Or you can live the virtual life that someone else programmed for you, including whatever comes with it that they didn’t tell you about.
In short, like Neo in the film ‘The Matrix’, you have a choice. You can choose the Blue Pill and proceed to live in a synthesized, fictional, computer-generated world. Or you take the Red Pill and, in this case, join the fight with those of us determined to defend the real world and avert descent into the metaverse.
But you must make that choice while you still have free will.
So you must make that choice soon.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
If Covid-19 has been a boon for anyone, that would be Big Business and Big Tech – overblowing fears, widening the wealth gap and facilitating global control through all-powerful technology the world now depends on.
What happens when systems cross the threshold of peak complexity and can no longer be improved in their current forms?
Decision-makers can commission competing models in order to pick a winner. This however calls for patience, prudence and sound oversight. Alternately, they can pounce on a fantastical blueprint that will supposedly gel via Artificial Intelligence and get to play monopoly at the same time. An all-in-one solution!
Such thinking was precisely what beleaguered the F-35 combat aircraft program with its estimated $1.7 trillion in lifetime costs. After 20 years of troubled development, the stealth fighter’s problems have become so insurmountable that there is talk in the US Air Force of considering a clean slate fighter jet program to replace its ageing F-16s.
The F-35 illustrates the other barely-analysed pandemic infecting our world – that of ‘technological voodooism’ (coined by the author for want of a better term).
Returns on investments these days are no longer measured by healthy profits generated by proven products. The devotees of techno-voodooism are essentially totalitarians who believe that not just markets, but the world itself, must be reorganized and monopolized by an enlightened few in a smart era called the Great Reset. The prime agency promoting this technopia is the World Economic Forum (WEF) which has promised a wonderful world where we will “own nothing” and yet “be happy.”
The outcome thus far has been societal meltdowns, malfunctioning jets in the skies and iRobot Roomba vacuums that meander aimlessly on the floor. The modern adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ may have been lost on iRobot’s C-Suite executives. Roomba machines use “artificial intelligence to scan room size, identify obstacles and remember the most efficient routes for cleaning.” But the quest for greater efficiency and profits at lesser costs – a process which Buckminster Fuller called ‘ephemeralization’ more than 80 years ago – has resulted in smart updates and berserk gadgets. Even after the vacuum is reset, IoT connectivity ensures that the robot is updated back to its state of regression.
Now, imagine the consequences of similar systems breakdowns worldwide? For starters, consider the point of singularity when robot chefs are updated with a new definition of what constitutes meat? A berserk Roomba machine can at least be switched off and plopped down as a paperweight. That is not an option for Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes which reportedly used artificial intelligence to bend aerodynamic laws on the cheap.
The string of Boeing disasters – as well as other failures mentioned thus far – has not deterred the merchants of techno-voodooism. Instead, every new crisis is seen as an opportunity for AI-mediated quick fixes and big profits. Remember Big Tech’s apocalyptic Covid-19 projections of the previous year?
Pseudosciences, based on the chimera of smart systems have been allowed to run amok, emboldening the WEF to claim that Covid-19 “lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.” Tell that to the tens of millions of small businesses who have lost their livelihoods to multinational corporations. Just how did cities improve with the archipelago of trash that piled up during lockdowns? What about the environmental impacts which happen to be a pet peeve of the WEF?
It is not just cities that have supposedly “improved” with Covid-19. Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the United States – coincidentally at a time when lockdowns have worsened food security and incomes among the poor. Logically, this great humanitarian could have matched his suite of predictive analytics software with owned farmland capacity to alleviate lockdown-induced hunger, but Gates is reportedly too busy promoting synthetic beef and vaccines.
The global ‘coronapsychosis’ has in fact accelerated wealth fractionation at the expense of the mid-to-low income classes. Just 655 people now own $4 trillion in wealth, while 200 million can’t cover a $1,000 expense in the United States alone. Imagine the sheer numbers of the impoverished worldwide, especially in nations bonded to the Anglo-American compact?
As for Covid-19 itself, inconvenient facts are routinely censored or shadow-banned by AI-powered social media platforms and search engines. Annual flu deaths in the US – which the British Medical Journal once questioned whether it was more PR than science – have surprisingly disappeared from official health statistics due to the pandemic.
Big Tech will not allow us to question the efficacy of vaccines developed in the West. After all, Artificial Intelligence has seemingly accelerated the development of vaccines that would have otherwise taken years or decades to research, test and deploy.
We should not ask why dozens of people (as of early February) had contracted a rare blood disorder after taking vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Or why there is an alarming number of deaths from Norway to Spain to the Netherlands post-vaccination? Or even how thousands of Israelis could test positive for Covid-19 despite receiving Pfizer/BioNTech jabs?
The Covid-19 vaccination figures in Israel are so alarming that two researchers have even called the fiasco “a new Holocaust.” Yet, the Israeli government wants local authorities to maintain a database of its vaccine refuseniks. (The Nazis, too, once maintained a meticulous database of “undesirables” in localities they were about to occupy, but that historical parallel is lost on today’s lamestream media).
Supine Governments
Techno-voodooism did not emerge in a vacuum. It thrived in tandem with ‘inclusivity’ and ‘sustainability’ programs which, in turn, handed the reins of power, scholarship and opinion-making to a horde of half-wits worldwide. This is one reason why governments, backed by spineless bureaucrats and academics, are increasingly surrendering national sovereignties to Big Tech.
One can imagine the quid pro quo: A post-retirement sinecure; jobs for children and relatives; and coding opportunities for trolls who push the Big Tech agenda. No wonder planes are falling from the skies and a raft of disasters await humanity throughout this decade.
Europe is an exemplar in this regard. Its leaders are now worried that Apple and Google may end up issuing Covid-19 health certificates before the union can reach a consensus. Isn’t that the job of sovereign governments with taxpayer-funded healthcare systems? But this trend is getting more sordid by the day.
Bureaucrats are falling over each other to gift vaccine roadmaps and distributions systems to Big Tech because their AI-driven systems can supposedly deliver optimal outcomes. They should just pick Bill Gates’ concept of using mosquitoes as airborne syringes. Call it a bang for the bite!
These shameless capitulations are not limited to the healthcare sector alone. Entire government machineries are gradually hived off to Big Tech. The trailblazing US state of Nevada may even allow tech giants to set up their own governments. These entities can impose taxes, form school districts and even run the judicial system. The first such ‘smart city’ may break ground as early as 2022. What could possibly go wrong?
In the final analysis, while the author argues that Artificial Intelligence and smart systems have real, sectoral potentials, these have been hijacked by the techno-voodooism of Big Tech. We should therefore brace ourselves for a very turbulent decade!
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”― George Orwell
This is the slippery slope that leads to the end of free speech as we once knew it.
In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.
Martin Niemöller’s warning about the widening net that ensnares us all still applies.
“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
In our case, however, it started with the censors who went after extremists spouting so-called “hate speech,” and few spoke out—because they were not extremists and didn’t want to be shamed for being perceived as politically incorrect.
Eventually, “we the people” will be the ones in the crosshairs.
At some point or another, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.
When that time comes, there may be no one left to speak out or speak up in our defense.
Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.
Watch and learn.
We should all be alarmed when prominent social media voices such as Donald Trump, Alex Jones, David Icke and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. are censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.
The question is not whether the content of their speech was legitimate.
The concern is what happens after such prominent targets are muzzled. What happens once the corporate techno-censors turn their sights on the rest of us?
It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth. Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
Knowing what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.
Here’s the point: you don’t have to like Trump or any of the others who are being muzzled, nor do you have to agree or even sympathize with their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship would be dangerously naïve.
In other words, whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now, for the sake of the greater good or because you like or trust those in charge, will eventually be abused and used against you by tyrants of your own making.
The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.
Welcome to the age of technofascism.
Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.
Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best. Certainly, Facebook and Twitter have become the modern-day equivalents of public squares, traditional free speech forums, with the internet itself serving as a public utility.
When given a choice, the government always goes for the option that expands its powers at the expense of the citizenry’s. Moreover, when it comes to free speech activities, regulation is just another word for censorship.
Right now, it’s trendy and politically expedient to denounce, silence, shout down and shame anyone whose views challenge the prevailing norms, so the tech giants are lining up to appease their shareholders.
This is the tyranny of the majority against the minority—exactly the menace to free speech that James Madison sought to prevent when he drafted the First Amendment to the Constitution—marching in lockstep with technofascism.
With intolerance as the new scarlet letter of our day, we now find ourselves ruled by the mob.
Those who dare to voice an opinion or use a taboo word or image that runs counter to the accepted norms are first in line to be shamed, shouted down, silenced, censored, fired, cast out and generally relegated to the dust heap of ignorant, mean-spirited bullies who are guilty of various “word crimes” and banished from society.
For example, a professor at Duquesne University was fired for using the N-word in an academic context. To get his job back, Gary Shank will have to go through diversity training and restructure his lesson plans.
This is what passes for academic freedom in America today.
If Americans don’t vociferously defend the right of a minority of one to subscribe to, let alone voice, ideas and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different, then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).
No matter what our numbers might be, no matter what our views might be, no matter what party we might belong to, it will not be long before “we the people” constitute a powerless minority in the eyes of a power-fueled fascist state driven to maintain its power at all costs.
We are almost at that point now.
The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.
Censorship power, like the tech giants who now wield it, is an instrument of status quo preservation. The promise of the internet from the start was that it would be a tool of liberation, of egalitarianism, by permitting those without money and power to compete on fair terms in the information war with the most powerful governments and corporations. But just as is true of allowing the internet to be converted into a tool of coercion and mass surveillance, nothing guts that promise, that potential, like empowering corporate overlords and unaccountable monopolists to regulate and suppress what can be heard.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, these internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns. They’re laying the groundwork to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Therefore, it is important to recognize the thought prison that is being built around us for what it is: a prison with only one route of escape—free thinking and free speaking in the face of tyranny.
I don’t know if you have been paying attention or not, but a lot of police organizations across the U.S. have been using what are known as “heat lists” or pre-crime databases for years. What is a “heat list,” you may ask?
Well, “heat lists” are basically databases compiled by algorithms of people that police suspect may commit a crime. Yes, you read that right a person who “may” commit a crime. How these lists are generated and what factors determine an individual “may commit a crime” is unknown. A recent article by Tampa Bay Times highlights how this program in Florida terrorized and monitored residents of Pasco County and how the Pasco County Sheriff Department’s program operates.
According to the Times, the Sheriff’s office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence, and arbitrary decisions by police analysts. Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant, or evidence of a specific crime.
This program according to the Times has been operating since at least 2011. The program introduces a social credit system. It gives people scores based on their criminal records. People get points each time they’re arrested, even when the charges are dropped, and they even get points for just being a suspect of a crime.
The deputies then make frequent – potentially even daily – visits to those with higher scores in the heavily flawed pre-criminal system.
Activists and journalists sued the Chicago Police Department in 2017 for failing to disclose how these programs operate, as Activist Postreported.
Chicago wasn’t the only major police department exposed using predictive crime algorithms. The Los Angeles Police Department was also caught one year later in 2018 by activists from the Stop LA Spying Coalition, as Activist Postreported.
This heat list idea in local law enforcement actually originated in Miami then was rolled out in Chicago. However, Activist Post may have missed other cities that gained less media attention; and as this writer will discuss shortly, the idea comes from a federal database.
Fortunately for us, as Nicholas West noted, the pushback has already started in several cities, and a few police departments have dropped their programs after becoming aware of the inaccuracies. In 2018, for example, New Orleans suspended its 6-year running pre-crime program after its secret predictive policing software was exposed.
The scariest part of all this is that the New Orleans and LA police departments were actually both linked to Palantir Technologies, which directly works with the CIA and is suspected of being the current fork of PROMIS Main Core software. PROMIS pre-dates all of these local police heat lists, with algorithms that put suspected “domestic terrorists” into their own round-up lists, created at first by Oliver North for President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush under FEMA’s Readiness Exercise — 1984 (REX-1984.)
The use of Palantir’s pre-crime algorithm software posits that other police departments may be utilizing the same software for their own pre-crime programs. Palantir is also the same company working with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on its own lists to catch illegal immigrants, as Activist Post and investigative journalist Barrett Brown originally reported.
You may remember Palantir from journalist Barrett Brown, Anonymous’ hack of HBGary, or accusations that the company provided the technology that enables NSA’s mass surveillance PRISM which is the successor to PROMIS. Palantir’s software in many ways is similar to the Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) stolen software Main Core and may be the next evolution in that code, which allegedly predated PRISM. In 2008, Salon.com published details about a top-secret government database that might have been at the heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The database known as “Main Core” reportedly collected and stored vast amounts of personal and financial data about millions of Americans in the event of an emergency like Martial Law.
PROMIS was forked into many reported use-cases for the U.S. government, including an intelligence application on board nuclear submarines of the United States and Great Britain, and the use by both the U.S. government and certain allied governments for inventory tracking of nuclear materials and long-range ballistic missiles. But the most bizarre and frightening use was to keep track of dissident Americans under Main Core.
Trump’s administration has now expanded that effort for local police and federal officials with a national security watchlist that includes Americans who have no connection to terrorism. The new TOC (Transnational Organized Crime) watchlist, was authorized through a classified Attorney General order and launched in 2017, as Activist Post reported.
The TOC database allows the government to track and monitor Americans without a warrant, even when there is no evidence they’re breaking the law. Also, anyone who is considered to be an “authority” – be it police to state and federal agencies, and even some allied foreign governments – can nominate any single person to the list.
The Main Core database isn’t just a rumor or conspiracy theory; PROMIS software was used by Iran-Contra fall guy then-National Security Council, Lt. Col. Oliver North to create the dissidents list for Rex-84 that would later evolve to Main Core. North used PROMIS software in 1982 in the Department of Justice, and at the White House, to compile a list of American dissidents to invoke if the government ever needed to do so under Ronald Reagan’s Continuity of Government (COG) program as a liaison to FEMA.
In 1993, Wired described North’s use of PROMIS in compiling the Main Core database:
Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon’s enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy’s blacklist look downright crude.
This Main Core database of individuals was given to a handful of individuals, meaning most government officials had no knowledge of the program ever existing. The database was passed off from administration to administration through National Security channels, according to sources.
The TOC list includes — “Insider threats,” which is relevant to leakers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, and journalists leaking these secrets like Julian Assange. In fact, last February, FBI Director Wray told the House Judiciary Committee that the Bureau had expanded initiatives “to focus on insider threats partnering with TCO [transnational criminal organization] actors.” This is a statement that is being re-echoed from 2017, when Wray stated a similar comment mentioning TCOs during a House meeting.
While presidents change, the leadership under them inside agencies only sees a shift by the replacing of the heads of the agencies. However, policies and stigmas inside stick with those in the intelligence community. In fact, Trump’s government, U.S. National Counterintelligence, and Security Center (NCSC) stressed in its latest report that hacktivists “Anonymous” and “public disclosure organizations” like WikiLeaks pose a “significant threat” similar to that of the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda terrorists, as well as Russia, Iran, and China.
Obama’s DHS didn’t hesitate to call those who believe in conspiracy theories potential right-wing terrorists, stating that the following points might make someone a terrorist in a study by the University of Maryland, which was funded in part by the Department of Homeland Security.
Americans who “are fiercely nationalistic, as opposed to universal and international in orientation”
Americans considering themselves “anti-global”
Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority”
Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty (especially their right to own guns and be free of taxes)”
Americans exhibiting a belief in “conspiracy theories that involve grave threat to national sovereignty and/or personal liberty and a belief that one’s personal and/or national way of life is under attack”
Palantir was founded with early investment from the CIA and heavily used by the military, and Palantir is a subcontracting company in its own right. The company has even been featured in the Senate’s grilling of Facebook, when Washington State Senator Maria Cantwell asked CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “Do you know who Palantir is?” due to Peter Thiel sitting on Facebook’s board.
Palantir’s Gotham software allows Fusion Center police to track citizens beyond social media and online web accounts with people record searches, vehicle record searches, a Histogram tool, a Map tool, and an Object Explorer tool.
According to DHS, “Fusion centers operate as state and major urban area focal points for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between federal; state, local, tribal, territorial (SLTT); and private sector partners” like Palantir. Further, Fusion Centers are locally owned and operated, arms of the “intelligence community,” i.e. the 17 intelligence agencies coordinated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). However, sometimes the buildings are staffed by trained NSA personnel like what happened in Mexico City, according to a 2010 Defense Department (DOD) memorandum.
This is only the beginning of the fight, and it’s going to be a long battle drawn out to prevent the use of this technology, not just here in the U.S. but worldwide as well. There’s no telling how long these projects have been active, and trusting police to honestly tell us is like trusting the wolf guarding the henhouse. For more articles on artificial intelligence predicting criminals, see Uri Gal’s hilarious and honestly titled article: “Predictive Algorithms Are No Better At Telling The Future Than A Crystal Ball.”
After the Crash 