Is It Joe Biden’s New World Order?

Posted on April 11, 2022 by Reid Mukai

By Iain Davis

Speaking at a White House business convention on 21st March 2022 the US President, Joe Biden, said:

We are at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy [. . .] it occurs every three of four generations. [. . .] Now is a time when things are shifting, there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.

This caused a bit of a storm because Biden, once again, used the term “New World Order” (NWO). We are told that there is no identifiable globalist project called the NWO. Apparently, the only people who think such a project exists are “conspiracy theorists.” These people are all antesemites, can’t be trusted and absolutely must not be heard, or something like that.

In his 1992 article for the Wall Street Journal titled, How I Learned To Love The New World Order, Biden spoke about “America’s proper role in the new world order.” His latest statement indicates that his concern lingers, on this occasion with good reason. The US position as nominal leaders of the NWO is under threat from Russia and China.

Politicians, oligarchs and other alleged “leading voices” keep talking about the NWO. Every time they mention it the mainstream media (MSM) immediately spring into action, eager to “dispel the myths” or “set the record straight”, defining the term for us. Why do they feel the need to keep doing this? Why are the establishment and their media so sensitive about the term “new world order?”

The NWO Is Not an Antisemitic Trope

The “new world order” is a phrase that gets flung around by all sorts of people for a variety of reasons. It is occasionally expressed in distinctly antisemitic terms.

Some people believe that the NWO is a “Jewish plot to enslave humanity.” Very few people, who have researched and studied the NWO, share this view. It is not supported by the evidence.

Nonetheless, the false allegations of antisemitism applied to anyone who talks about the NWO provides a very useful canard which “debunkers” consistently deploy. As the historian Prof. Antony C. Sutton pointed out in his exploration of Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution:

The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes. [. . .] What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?

The mainstream media (MSM) role is to confuse and mislead the public. They do not want the people to know what the NWO really is. They hide its history and generally deny its existence, but if that fails they will exploit the Holocaust to bolster their disinformation.

Antisemitism means “hostility to or prejudice against Jewish people.” That hostility and prejudice led to the Holocaust. Falsely accusing people of antisemitism, simply to undermine their arguments, dilutes its true meaning. Doing so shows a lack of respect for the victims of the Holocaust and a casual disregard for Jewish people and their history.

The MSM insist that when US Presidents talk about the NWO they are simply referring to changes in the behavioural norms, regulations and laws that broadly shape international relations. This may be the case, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the NWO has a precise historical meaning.

Given that it is a heavily charged term, is it likely that senior politicians, foreign policy strategists and national leaders would routinely use it unwittingly, without understanding what it means? Perhaps so in some cases but not in all. It is clear than many presidents, prime ministers and geoplitical experts have referred to the NWO in its proper context.

The Term “New World Order” As Propaganda

In a typical example of MSM disinformation, the UK’s Independent newspaper attempted to cover up Biden’s slip by trotting-out the usual denials and obfuscations. They claimed that Biden was simply referring to the “shifting sands of geopolitical relations.”

The Independent did not divulge the reality of the NWO to their readers. Instead it relied upon the tired slurs and allegations traditionally used to discredit those who discuss the NWO. The Independent alleged:

[P]ost-war paranoia tapped into much more ancient social anxieties about the possibility of shadowy secret covens engaging in evil [. . .] The Illuminati, the model for all subsequent sinister behind-closed-doors cabals feared by conspiracy theorist [. . .] traces its origins to the German Enlightenment of the 18th century. Belief in such a group plotting insurrection to realise its “new world order” first gained real prominence in the US among anti-government extremists in the 1990s. [. . .] The movement brings together American right-wing militant instincts with Christian fundamentalist doom prophecies [. . .] and has exploded over the last three decades in tandem with the growth of the internet. [. . .] Conspiracy theories have now become a form of mass entertainment on social media. [. . .] [Z]ealots, bored in lockdown during the pandemic, blended ancient anti-Semitic smears with quest narrative mythologies and pop cultural borrowings to worrying ends.

The so-called “newspaper” followed all of the state approved propaganda to the letter. Mixing genuine history—yes, the Illuminati really did exist—with total gibberish—there is no “movement” of NWO-exposing “extremists”—the Independent managed to fuse “conspiracy theory” with “right-wing” extremism and antisemitism. This is the standard approach to NWO denialism.

By linking the whole hodgepodge together, in a word-salad of misdirection and innuendo, the Independent were able to deliver their essential message: people who talk about the NWO do not trust government and questioning government can only lead to “worrying ends.”

The Independent didn’t offer any evidence to substantiate its conclusion, but informing readers wasn’t the point of the article. Claiming that NWO investigators are all antisemites who believe in “lizard men” allows the reader to safely discount the historians and geopolitical analysts, who have published NWO research, as crazy people.

According to the Independent, no one would even bother talking about the NWO were it not for the Internet. By claiming that questioning government policy online is “extremism,” the Independent offered its support for the government’s proposed censorship of the Internet.

Ironically, the best NWO historians published their work long before the Internet was invented. As pointed out, in one of the many contradictions in the Independent’s article, the NWO was a hot topic of conversation decades before we took to our keyboards and devices.

Introducing The New World Order

Contrary to the opinions of propagandists and debunkers, the NWO is a defined globalist project. The objective is to establish global governance. It was inaugurated more than 100 years ago and it has undergone numerous changes over subsequent generations.

While it wields immense political influence it is not “all powerful.” The NWO is tyrannical and oppressive by nature, hence the need for subterfuge and concealment. Its architects cannot simply enforce their dictatorship and expect to get away with it. We would resist, and if we did so in sufficient numbers there’s not much the NWO could do about it.

Therefore we need to be controlled by other means. Education, society, culture, economics, party politics, finance, applied psychology, behaviour modification, censorship, propaganda, war and crisis management are all used to manoeuvre us into accepting the NWO’s policy agendas. We persistently fall into this trap because we imagine our “elected” leaders are making the ‘big’ decisions: they’re not.

The New World Order (NWO) is an idea that was first proposed by Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table Movement. It was envisaged as a secret system of global governance led by an anglo trans-Atlantic alliance. It didn’t stay “secret” for very long.

Not only have politicians and the leaders of industry, commerce and finance frequently spoken about it, it has also been thoroughly exposed by historians and researchers. Perhaps most notably by Professors Carroll Quigley and Antony C. Sutton.

Even in the early 20th Century, when it was first devised, the concept of the NWO wasn’t a particularly novel idea. It was simply an attempt, by a Western hegemonic power-bloc, to establish global dominion. It is an extension of the age-old game of empires.

Rhodes’ NWO project was itself built upon pre-existing global power structures. The Venetian bankers and the other private enterprises, such as the British East India Company, had already surpassed nation states in terms of their resources, wealth and global political control. Rhodes’ vision was to convert this private financial power, which he possessed in abundance, into one, cohesive system of global rule.

The NWO model, which emerged after Rhodes’ death in 1902, immediately came unstuck. Rhodes was a British imperialist who, alongside his fellow Brits, bemoaned the loss of “their” American colony. The NWO was supposed to re-assert British control in the US, with the city of London ruling Wall Street. This is not how the US contingent viewed the burgeoning trans-Atlantic alliance and it is they who would soon come to the fore. Internecine struggles have been a consistent feature of the NWO throughout its history.

The NWO that Rhodes and his subsequent movement proposed was a hierarchical, compartmentalised, authoritarian structure. It was designed as a system of rings-within-rings.

It was led from the centre by “the Society of the Elect” who would oversee, and be protected, by the first ring of power called “the Association of Helpers.” Consecutive rings were then established, affording NWO control of financial institutions, multinational corporations, governments, intelligence agencies and militaries, etc.

Only the members of the “Society” and the “Association” had a full grasp of the entire NWO project. Conceptualisation of the whole system, among the members of each subsequent ring, progressively diminished as their positions moved away from the centre of power. NWO controlled assets, placed in key administrative, academic, military, media or political roles, only knew enough to be able to perform their required tasks and report accurately back to their handlers.

There’s Nothing “New” about the NWO

Tyrants have always sought to impose their authority upon as many people as possible. Just like Sumerian kings or Roman emperors, the leaders of the NWO sought exactly the same despotism, though on a grander scale. As technology has advanced the goal of centralised authority over a global governance structure has become more attainable.

While the manipulation and control techniques have advanced, the goal hasn’t changed. This ambition is as old as civilisation itself. There have always been people who wish to rule and many more who are content to be ruled.

Our collective obedience to authority guarantees tyranny. The NWO is by no means the first kleptocracy to have cultivated and exploited our compliance.

Like all the empires that preceded it, from its inception the proposed NWO was designed to take the form of a public-private partnership between government and an immensely wealthy “Superclass.” Often these individuals and family dynasties came from the world of international finance or banking, but leading industrialists and media moguls were also prominent.

They formed the hand behind the throne. As Prof. Quigley noted in 1966:

There really is a “world system of financial control in private hands” that is “able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world.” [. . .] They now control every major international institution, every major multinational and transnational corporation both public and private, every major domestic and international banking institution, every central bank, every nation-state on earth, the natural resources on every continent and the people around the world through complicated inter-locking networks that resemble giant spider webs. [. . .] They were responsible for World War I, World War II, [. . .] They have created periods of inflation and deflation in order to confiscate and consolidate the wealth of the world. [. . .] This wealth is now being used to construct and maintain the World Empire that is in the last stages of development. [. . .] The chief architects of this new World Empire are planning another war—World War III—to eliminate any vestiges of political, economic or religious freedom from the face of the earth. They will then completely control the earth and its natural resources.

Elected politicians, and the governments they formed, were always the junior partners in this network. Many were hand picked for their malleability, predisposition to corruption or loyalty to the NWO project. With the intelligence and security agencies thoroughly co-opted, the deep state—the “state within the state” or “shadow state”—flourished.

The Party Political system was permitted because it ensured that electorates could never derail the NWO project. They could be placated with a misplaced sense of democratic oversight. Party politics also kept the masses occupied and distracted, leaving the NWO to get on with business unhindered .

Policy agendas were set and then political puppets were installed to sell the desired policies to the people, no matter who they voted for. Quigley explained the NWO’s approach to party based, representative democracy:

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is [. . .] a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.

The Leaders of the New World Order

The self-proclaimed leaders of the NWO are drawn from the so-called “Superclass.” Their only distinguishing attributes are immense private wealth, a ruthless willingness to act and an unshakeable belief in their divine right to rule.

The “old money” dynasties, sometimes referred to as the Black Nobility, have maintained their financial and monetary control for nearly a thousand years. They have been joined, in recent centuries, by banking families, industrialists and latterly the “new money” from the post WWII entrepreneurial, billionaire set.

The notion of a “Superclass” was proposed by Prof. David Rothkopf. As a member of the deep state think-tanks the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), among others, Rothkopf was well positioned to be personally acquainted with the robber barons he eulogised:

We’re not looking at just the wealthy; we’re looking at power. And so, the definition that we used was people who influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis. [. . .] It’s a tiny, tiny fraction of the people of the planet Earth. [. . .] [T]he really defining characteristics of this group is the nature of the networks, that networking is the force multiplier in any kind of power structure[.]

The “people who influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis” have gone by many names. “The Rhodes Crowd,” “All Souls Group,” “the Cliveden set,” “the Pilgrims” and many more. Today we often refer to them as oligarchs, thought leaders or stakeholders. No one elected Rothkopf’s “Superclass” to power.

Their wealth is often inherited from their forefathers’ war profits, often it’s the product of nepotism or profits accrued from more recent military interventions. Others have enriched themsleves from the exploitation of slave labour, rigged markets, resource theft, the drug trade, financial crime or usury, etc. The “parasite class” is a more accurate description.

The New World Order Today

It isn’t clear if the “Society of the Elect” or the “Association of Helpers” still remain. What can be said is that the current global management network is a compartmentalised, authoritarian structures. Everything first proposed by Rhodes’ pilgrims remains on track and appears to be nearing completion.

The NWO has been through several iterations and has been re-marketed in different forms. The COVID-19 pseudopandemic has seen the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset come to public attention. This is simply a new brand for the NWO as the WEF makes its bid to be the central pillar of the Global Public-Private-Partnership (G3P). The G3P represents the current management structure of the NWO.

The proposed operating system for NWO global governance is Technocracy. There are a number of key elements which, once installed, will end the last vestiges of human freedom and place the world’s population under the totalitarian control of the technocrats. In turn, the technocrats will serve the interests of the parasite class, not humanity.

Democracy will continue in name only, reassuring the masses for a while, in the form of a communitarian “civil society.” Government, working in partnership with private corporations, will encourage civil society groups to “debate” policies. Every single one of those policies will be pre-selected by the technocratic state (Technate). The apparent political choice will remain an illusion.

The global economy is currently being transformed as new markets are created. As outlined in the 1992 UN Agenda 21 document (section 8.41), the “basis for action” has already been established. A global accountancy system for all business will use stakeholder capitalism metrics to rate assets, ensuring “the integration of sustainability into economic management.”

The rating mechanisms, such as environmental, social and governance ratings (ESG’s), will enable centralised global economic planning. It will determine which ventures receive or do not receive investment. Favoured corporate partners within the G3P will do very well, as long as they promote G3P goals. Those who don’t will go bankrupt without question.

The ratings system provides a “better measurement of the crucial role of the environment as a source of natural capital.” Natural Asset Companies will transform forests into ‘carbon sequestration services’ and natural water sources into ‘human settlement resource services,’ or some such thing.

By claiming that they own nature, the G3P will create new markets worth a projected $4 quadrillion. Thereby removing oil, as the base commodity of value, and replacing it with nature (natural assets). This transformation is called “sustainable development.” It has nothing to do with environmentalism or combatting “climate change.”

The notion of uniting all of humanity to work together to solve the “climate crisis” is a contrivance to facilitate global governance. It was fabricated in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s by the globalist think-tanks that set the world’s policy agendas.

The Club of Rome, the think-tank which greatly influenced the nascent WEF, took credit for imagining the perfect global crisis. In their 1991 publications The First Global Revolution, on page 75 under the heading “the common enemy of humanity is Man,” the Club of Rome wrote:

In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. [. . .] All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

This statement expresses two of the parasite class’ core beliefs. The assumed legitimacy of their claim to rule, which enables them to imagine they have the right to “designate” a global enemy, and their shared commitment to population control. They herd us like cattle, as they decide how to change our attitudes and behaviour to suit their objectives.

The International Monetary and Financial System (IMFS) has also undergone a transformation. With the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) it will be revolutionised. CBDC currency will be issued by central banks as their liability. They are solely responsible for that liability. CBDC will always be their money.

CBDC is electronic money, it is therefore programmable money. This means the central banks will have complete control over every unit of CBDC currency. Whether it is in your wallet or not, it is the central bank’s money and they will permit or deny every transaction you make with it.

For example, the decisions you currently make about where you travel have already been restricted by the global policy response to a fake pandemic. If CBDC is fully adopted, you will no longer have any choice at all.

CBDC will enable your central bank’s AI algorithm to decide where you can go and when. If CBDC becomes the only form of currency available to us, none of us, no matter how much money we think we have, will have any financial freedom.

In order for Technocracy to operate, every citizen must be continually surveilled and controlled by the state (Technate). The technology capable of doing this is already being distributed globally as part of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution (4ID).

The Internet of Things (IoT) will see every device that we use report that use back to the Technate’s data centres. The Internet of Bodies (IoB) will enhance the Technates ability to monitor us in real time. Combined with the Digital-ID, that every nation is rushing towards, the surveillance and control of every individual “global citizen” will be centrally managed at the global governance level.

The New World Order, under the current management structure of the Global Public-Private Partnership, is nearing completion. It is a truly global system of governance. There are no leading governments anywhere on Earth opposed to it. All are racing ahead to adopt it with equal enthusiasm.

The Way Forward For The NWO

With Russia’s recent military operation in Ukraine, it has been suggested by some that the Russian and Chinese governments are not prepared to accept the imposition of the NWO. We can only be guided by their major policy statements and their actions. If these are anything to go by, both governments are fully on-board with the NWO agenda.

Both Russia and China are absolutely committed to sustainable development, Digital ID, 4ID, COVID biosecurity and vaccine-passports. Russia is ahead of most Western nations with regards to CBDC and China has surpassed Russia, having already started to use CBDC on a significant scale.

On 4th February Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued a joint statement on the future relationship between Russia and China. It read, in part:

Today, the world is going through momentous changes, and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation. [. . .] of the global governance architecture and world order. [. . .] The ongoing pandemic of the new coronavirus infection poses a serious challenge to the fulfilment of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. [. . .] In order to accelerate the implementation of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the sides call on the international community to take practical steps in key areas of cooperation such as poverty reduction, food security, vaccines and epidemics control, financing for development, climate change, sustainable development, including green development, industrialization, digital economy, and infrastructure connectivity. [. . .] [We] will further increase cooperation in the development and manufacture of vaccines. [. . .] Russia and China intend to encourage interaction in the fields of public health, digital economy, science, innovation and technology, including artificial intelligence technologies [. . .] Particular emphasis will be placed on the fight against the novel coronavirus infection pandemic and economic recovery, digitalization of a wide range of different spheres of life.

There is no evidence to suggest that either Russia or China wish to derail the objectives of the WEF’s Great Reset. On the contrary, the evidence points towards Russia and China as perhaps the most enthusiastic and aggressive advocates for the NWO agenda. China is the world’s first Technate and Russia is a major WEF partner, most notably on cybersecurity.

Much has been made of the WEF’s decision to distance itself from Russia and sanctioned individuals. Notably this is a “temporary” freeze and smacks more of political expediency and PR, rather than any genuine severance.

There is no aspect of the NWO, G3P managed agenda that either Russia or China stand against. Their joint statement read like a Great Reset checklist.

Perhaps this is all a cunning deception. Part of a “secret plot” by Russia and China to fight the NWO. However, it looks far more like a pact between two powers bidding for political leadership of the NWO.

There is no doubt that the NWO was conceived as a project of Western based oligarchs. In the post WWII era it has bared its teeth on the geopolitical stage as the “international rules-based order.” This unipolar order, centred around the G7 group of nations, with the US led NATO alliance providing the muscle, has been dominant within the Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P).

Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, and the G7/NATO alliance response to it, appears to be a watershed moment. Together, Russia and China are challenging the G7 clique with a BRICS based, G20 focused, multipolar model. It seems they are determined to seize primacy within the G3P management structure.

As a paid spokesperson for the G7 rules-based order, Joe Biden anxiously observed “there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.” The US-led alliance’s problem is that Russia and China, in league with their BRICS partners, are pursuing exactly the same objective.

The Metaverse Is Big Brother in Disguise: Freedom Meted Out by Technological Tyrants

Posted on November 23, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“The term metaverse, like the term meritocracy, was coined in a sci fi dystopia novel written as cautionary tale. Then techies took metaverse, and technocrats took meritocracy, and enthusiastically adopted what was meant to inspire horror.”—Antonio García Martínez

Welcome to the Matrix (i.e. the metaverse), where reality is virtual, freedom is only as free as one’s technological overlords allow, and artificial intelligence is slowly rendering humanity unnecessary, inferior and obsolete.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, sees this digital universe—the metaverse—as the next step in our evolutionary transformation from a human-driven society to a technological one.

Yet while Zuckerberg’s vision for this digital frontier has been met with a certain degree of skepticism, the truth—as journalist Antonio García Martínez concludes—is that we’re already living in the metaverse.

The metaverse is, in turn, a dystopian meritocracy, where freedom is a conditional construct based on one’s worthiness and compliance.

In a meritocracy, rights are privileges, afforded to those who have earned them. There can be no tolerance for independence or individuality in a meritocracy, where political correctness is formalized, legalized and institutionalized. Likewise, there can be no true freedom when the ability to express oneself, move about, engage in commerce and function in society is predicated on the extent to which you’re willing to “fit in.”

We are almost at that stage now.

Consider that in our present virtue-signaling world where fascism disguises itself as tolerance, the only way to enjoy even a semblance of freedom is by opting to voluntarily censor yourself, comply, conform and march in lockstep with whatever prevailing views dominate.

Fail to do so—by daring to espouse “dangerous” ideas or support unpopular political movements—and you will find yourself shut out of commerce, employment, and society: Facebook will ban you, Twitter will shut you down, Instagram will de-platform you, and your employer will issue ultimatums that force you to choose between your so-called freedoms and economic survival.

This is exactly how Corporate America plans to groom us for a world in which “we the people” are unthinking, unresistant, slavishly obedient automatons in bondage to a Deep State policed by computer algorithms.

Science fiction has become fact.

Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.

We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.

In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in an artificial dream world.

Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.

Most people opt for the blue pill.

In our case, the blue pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.

Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.

This is not freedom. This is not even progress.

This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.

So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.

Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.

If ever Americans find themselves in bondage to technological tyrants, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, we’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have—and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in—will be connected and talking to each other.”

By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”

As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)

These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.

Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

It is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.

Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:

1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.
2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone’s voice realistically enough to fool even family members.
3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.
4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.
5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.
6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.

This is the metaverse, wrapped up in the siren-song of convenience and sold to us as the secret to success, entertainment and happiness.

It’s a false promise, a wicked trap to snare us, with a single objective: total control.

George Orwell understood this.

Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

The Metaverse is just Big Brother in disguise.

Big Brother in Disguise: The Rise of a New, Technological World Order

Posted on December 29, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By John Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984

It had the potential for disaster.

Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube.

The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the heat to accessing work files, sending emails and making phone calls.

A year earlier, a Google outage resulted in Nest users being unable to access their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras. As Fast Company reports, “This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.”

Welcome to the Matrix.

Science fiction has become fact.

Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.

Most people opt for the blue pill.

Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.

This is not freedom.

This is not even progress.

Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”

It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.

This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones—poised to take to the skies en masse this year—will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

Indeed, it is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:

Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.

In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.

Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:

1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.

2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone’s voice realistically enough to fool even family members.

3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.

4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.

5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.

6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know?

Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

For example, asks Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha:

What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?

Let me put it another way.

If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

While President Trump signed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act into law on Dec. 4, 2020, in order to establish a baseline for security protection for the billions of IoT devices flooding homes and businesses, the law does little to protect the American people against corporate and governmental surveillance.

In fact, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.

After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?

Control is the key here.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

George Orwell understood this.

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things and its twin, the Internet of Senses, is just Big Brother in disguise.

P Is for Predator State: The Building Blocks of Tyranny from A to Z

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” — Professor Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Discourse in the Age of Show Business

While America continues to fixate on the drama-filled reality show scripted by the powers-that-be, directed from the nation’s capital, and played out in high definition across the country, the American Police State has moved steadily forward.

Nothing has changed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been a convenient, traumatic, devastating distraction.

The American people, the permanent underclass in America, have allowed themselves to be so distracted and divided that they have failed to notice the building blocks of tyranny being laid down right under their noses by the architects of the Deep State.

Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton: they have all been complicit in carrying out the Deep State’s agenda. Unless something changes to restore the balance of power, the next president—the new boss—will be the same as the old boss.

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter what you call the old/new boss—the Deep State, the Controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the corporate elite, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex—so long as you understand that no matter who occupies the White House, it is a profit-driven, an unelected bureaucracy that is actually calling the shots.

If our losses are mounting with every passing day—and they are—it is a calculated siege intended to ensure our defeat at the hands of a totalitarian regime.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, media, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more are casualties in the government’s war on the American people.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized federal police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms are being steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

None of these dangers have dissipated in any way.

They have merely disappeared from our televised news streams.

It’s time to get educated on what’s really going on. Thus, in the interest of liberty and truth, here’s an A-to-Z primer that spells out the grim realities of life in the American Police State that no one seems to be talking about anymore.

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the militarized police culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

C is for CIVIL ASSET FORFEITURE. This governmental scheme to deprive Americans of their liberties—namely, the right to property—is being carried out under the guise of civil asset forfeiture, a government practice wherein government agents (usually the police and now TSA agents) seize private property they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then, whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property and it’s virtually impossible to get it back.

D is for DRONES. It was estimated that at least 30,000 drones would be airborne in American airspace by 2020, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones will be used for benevolent purposes, many will also be equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for EMERGENCY STATE. From 9/11 to COVID-19, we have been the subjected to an “emergency state” that justifies all manner of government tyranny and power grabs in the so-called name of national security. The government’s ongoing attempts to declare so-called national emergencies in order to circumvent the Constitution’s system of checks and balances constitutes yet another expansion of presidential power that exposes the nation to further constitutional peril.

F is for FASCISM. A study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern University concluded that the U.S. government does not represent the majority of American citizens. Instead, the study found that the government is ruled by the rich and powerful, or the so-called “economic elite.” Moreover, the researchers concluded that policies enacted by this governmental elite nearly always favor special interests and lobbying groups. In other words, we are being ruled by an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, and arguably on our way towards fascism—a form of government where private corporate interests rule, money calls the shots, and the people are seen as mere economic units or databits.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for petty crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they may have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between the citizenry and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

L is for LICENSE PLATE READERS, which enable law enforcement and private agencies to track the whereabouts of vehicles, and their occupants, all across the country. This data collected on tens of thousands of innocent people is also being shared between police agencies, as well as with government fusion centers and private companies. This puts Big Brother in the driver’s seat.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION and OVERREGULATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police and other government agents, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY. Qualified immunity allows police officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a cop should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal and vaginal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of the electronic concentration camp in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button

U is for UNARMED CITIZENS SHOT BY POLICE. No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later, often attributed to a fear for their safety. Yet the fatality rate of on-duty patrol officers is reportedly far lower than many other professions, including construction, logging, fishing, truck driving, and even trash collection.

V is for VIRUSES AND FORCED VACCINATIONS. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) has become yet another means by which world governments (including the U.S.) can expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. With millions of dollars in stimulus funds being directed towards policing agencies across the country, the federal government plans to fight this COVID-19 virus with riot gear, gas masks, ballistic helmets, drones, and hi-tech surveillance technology. The road we are traveling is paved with lockdowns, SWAT team raids, mass surveillance and forced vaccinations. Now there’s talk of mobilizing the military to deliver forced vaccinations, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dare to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

X is for X-KEYSCORE, one of the many spying programs carried out by the National Security Agency that targets every person in the United States who uses a computer or phone. This top-secret program “allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.”

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you are now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior or for saying the “wrong” word. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the reality we must come to terms with is that in the post-9/11 America we live in today, the government does whatever it wants, freedom be damned.

We have moved beyond the era of representative government and entered a new age.

You can call it the age of authoritarianism. Or fascism. Or oligarchy. Or the American police state.

Whatever label you want to put on it, the end result is the same: tyranny.

Me, Me, Me – The Neurotic Satisfactions of the Selfie Generation

Posted on September 1, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By Julian Rose

Source: Waking Times

We humans are rather curious creatures, I’ll admit. So many sides to our nature, so many colours to our emotions, so many journeys of our imaginations. But the question must arise, do we learn any more about these traits by making ourselves the perpetual object of our own fascination?

One would certainly assume so based upon the cult of the ‘selfie’ which rages around the world at this particular juncture of human evolution. I am tempted to say ‘devolution’, but going backwards would at least stand the chance of putting us in touch with something tangible, earthy even – whereas to live life as a virtual reality experience with one’s own photographic image as the central point of attraction – fails to provoke my sense of admiration for the human race.

The cult of the selfie has gone so far that reports are now emerging that addicts often put themselves in positions of real danger in order to get the perfect shot. A number have already died as a result of the dare-devil approach to getting the perfect selfie.

If I was to take a relaxed and laid-back view of all this, I might say, “OK, sure, we all need to get our kicks in some form or other, just let it be – let people have fun with their cameras on poles; apart from the excesses we hear about it’s pretty harmless fun isn’t it?”

It would be simple enough to go along with such a prognosis were it not for the fact that the whole thing is surely telling us something more than just what the crazy craze of the moment is. It is telling us something quite profound about an advanced preoccupation with superficiality per se. A kind of ego flattering sport whose popularity has presently reached the point of pandemic.

Is this just a kick-back against a sense of loneliness and sense of insignificance in a world that appears indifferent to the fate of the individual? Is it a wish to be noticed in an age of hyper inflated promotion of the engineered stars of stage, screen, video, social media et al? A range of elevated self-importance that runs from TV chef to porn star to political poser?

Whatever the cause, its ubiquitous nature is undeniable and has added yet more techno baggage to the 21st century tourist’s arsenal of seemingly indispensable smart gizmos. If one isn’t squinting into the illuminated screen of a smart phone while walking through a beautiful landscape, one is posing against the same background smiling cheesily for a selfie. While a discourse with nature herself, the source of all our deepest and most practical needs, is shunned. Left out of the picture, except to the extent that she forms the backdrop to the vanity inflated self.

Here lies a clue to this infliction. Modern day living has contrived to be a virtual reality form of existence, one which has alienated human beings from their roots. The ability to find a deep appreciation for beauty, quiet and the actual power of landscape has been smothered by an electro-smog of self satisfying surface pursuits; the sum total of which have formed a veritable barrier against true instincts, perceptions and genuinely life satisfying experiences.

This is a dangerous state of affairs, because we need these qualities to be at the forefront of our daily lives in order to gain/regain a true sense of equilibrium and balance. To find in ourselves that which gives us the courage and vision we need to negotiate and ultimately to vanquish the miasma of deceptions, twisted truths and outright lies legion at this time.

Those who feel the necessity to surround themselves with stimulants for the nourishment of their superficial selves cannot resist slavery to the controlling powers that be. Cannot resist becoming pawns to the carefully planned sales promotions that make such people feel they ‘must have’ the latest, most advance, most essential addition to the range. It is an addiction which includes uncritical acceptance of the disinformation that forms the great majority of what appears on mainstream television, newspapers, glossy journals and all channels of communication that maintain a wall of conscious-blocking visual and printed fake news and views 24/7.

It’s only a small step from here to open armed acceptance of life in a ‘Smart City’. A life where electromagnetic microwaves come with the very air you breathe. No choice. A place where ‘being monitored’ and ‘monitoring’ form a framework around the chief activities of the day – and no doubt night. A place designed and built for technology addicts, one might surmise. But actually a sinister prison camp for the imposition of a cyborgian programme of control.

It’s a place where no trees will be present because they interrupt the 5G signals which are the controlling motor of everything that happens in this arid world of concrete, glass and microwave radiation. Woe betide you if you should lose your personal chip which gives access to everything you need including your own self autonomous self driving car and the ability to unlock the front door of your home. In a smart city, should you lose or destroy your chip, permission will have to be sought from Big Brother to get back into your house, turn on the lights and open the refrigerator.

The ‘internet of everything’ which is to be the techno-hub of the 5G Smart City, ensures citizens cannot act outside the authority of the centralised computer master control.

Orwellian fantasy? No, already existing reality in its first stages.

But all this will, I presume be a source of frisson to those who willingly accept a fate controlled by anyone other than themselves. Who find such a techno-psychotic existence a direct extension of their fascination with all that comes under the word ‘superficial’. And that brings us full circle back to the exponents of narcissistic selfies, who roam the world camera triggered extension pods so as to photograph themselves against exotic backgrounds and famous works of architecture as though they were just empty cut-outs for a theatre set. After all, for selfie exponents, the only thing of real importance is themselves.

It is a remarkable seductive trait that leads to the entrapment of the spirit and soul of man. The master stroke in all this is that it all appears to be oh so normal – and those who do not conform are regarded with incredulity and relegated to the old pastures rare breeds museum for special research into their strange individualistic traits.

The rare breeds, however, turn out to have strong genes and resistant immune systems. They never abandoned nature in favour of the arid virtual 5G powered smartscape. Instead they organised resistance and were supported by energies that were not recognised or understood by adherents of the smartscape.

They kept alive the torch of justice and truth and they grew in number in spite of the dystopian landscape around them. They retained the collective name ‘humanity’ and the warm feelings that underpin that name – the state we call ‘human’. And in the course of time, they came to nurture back to health the planet that nourished them and to rescue those drowning in the narcissistic electro- magnetic soup of their naive choosing. They heeded the cries of desperation of these prisoners – to find a way back out of their oh so ordinary self-imposed toxic prison. It was only the irredeemable selfie who never made it back to real life. The rest experienced the flowering of a self they never knew existed. An unselfish self.

How successfully this unselfish self had been kept at bay by the distractions and fakery of the now defunct soulless smartscapes of yesteryear. As has been noted many times over the millennia, the only real learning is learning by experience.

Technotyranny: The Iron-Fisted Authoritarianism of the Surveillance State

Posted on June 13, 2019 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: Activist Post

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick

Red pill or blue pill? You decide.

Twenty years after the Wachowskis’ iconic 1999 film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a red pill or a blue pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.

We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing us and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.

Science fiction has become fact.

Neo is given a choice: to wake up and join the resistance, or remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be. “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” Morpheus says to Neo in The Matrix. “You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

Most people opt for the red pill.

In our case, the red pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.

This is not freedom.

This is not even progress.

We are living in a virtual world carefully crafted to resemble a representative government, while in reality we are little more than slaves in thrall to an authoritarian regime, with its constant surveillance, manufactured media spectacles, secret courts, inverted justice, and violent repression of dissent.

It’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.

Indeed, while most people are busily taking selfies, Google has been busily partnering with the NSA, the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies to develop a new “human” species.

Essentially, Google—a neural network that approximates a global brain—is fusing with the human mind in a phenomenon that is called “singularity.” Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, said transhumanist scientist Ray Kurzweil. “It will have read every email you will ever have written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.”

But here’s the catch: the NSA and all other government agencies will also know you better than yourself. As William Binney, one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA said, “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”

Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.

The key word here is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”

By 2020, there will be 152 million cars connected to the Internet and 100 million Internet-connected bulbs and lamps. By 2021, it is estimated there will be 240 million wearable devices such as smartwatches, keeping users connected it real time to their phones, emails, text messages and the Internet. By 2022, there will be 1.1 billion smart meters installed in homes, reporting real-time usage to utility companies and other interested parties.

This “connected” industry—estimated to add more than $14 trillion to the economy by 2020—is about to be the next big thing in terms of societal transformations, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)

Internet-connected techno gadgets as smart light bulbs can discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats will regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells will let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Nest, Google’s $3 billion acquisition, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.

It’s not just our homes that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government and our very bodies that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.

As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know? Have we done our due diligence in dealing with the ramifications of giving the government and its cronies access to such intrusive programs? For example, asks reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha, “How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?”

Let me put it another way.

All of those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have (Forbes refers to them as “(data) pipelines to our intimate bodily processes”)—the smart watches that can monitor our blood pressure and the smart phones that let us pay for purchases with our fingerprints and iris scans—are setting us up for a brave new world where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home: locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.

It’s hard to truly appreciate the intangible menace of technology-enabled government surveillance in the face of the all-too-tangible menace of police shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, and government violence and corruption.

However, both dangers are just as lethal to our freedoms if left unchecked.

Consider that on any given day, the average American going about his daily business is monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in virtually every way by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, will be listening in and tracking your behavior.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

In other words, there is no form of digital communication that the government cannot and does not monitor: phone calls, emails, text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, internet video chats, etc., are all accessible, trackable and downloadable by federal agents.

The government and its corporate partners-in-crime have been bypassing the Fourth Amendment’s prohibitions for so long that this constitutional bulwark against warrantless searches and seizures has largely been rendered antiquated and irrelevant.

We are now in the final stage of the transition from a police state to a surveillance state.

Having already transformed local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are in the process of turning the nation’s police officers into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more.

Add in the fusion centers and real-time crime centers, city-wide surveillance networks, data clouds conveniently hosted overseas by Amazon and Microsoft, drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras, and biometric databases, and you’ve got the makings of a world in which “privacy” is reserved exclusively for government agencies.

In other words, the surveillance state that came into being with the 9/11 attacks is alive and well and kicking privacy to shreds in America. Having been persuaded to trade freedom for a phantom promise of security, Americans now find themselves imprisoned in a virtual cage of cameras, wiretaps, sensors and watchful government eyes.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people.

And of course that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. Indeed, Facebook, Amazon and Google are among the government’s closest competitors when it comes to carrying out surveillance on Americans, monitoring the content of your emails, tracking your purchases and exploiting your social media posts.

“Few consumers understand what data are being shared, with whom, or how the information is being used,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “Most Americans emit a stream of personal digital exhaust — what they search for, what they buy, who they communicate with, where they are — that is captured and exploited in a largely unregulated fashion.”

It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs them through computer programs that can break the data down into unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and its corporate allies for their respective uses.

For instance, imagine what the NSA could do (and is likely already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of individuals. There is already discussion about placing voice sensors in public spaces, and … multiple sensors could be triangulated to identify individuals and specify their location within very small areas.”

The NSA is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under surveillance and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government.

In other words, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its domestic surveillance efforts.

Control is the key here.

Total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

George Orwell understood this. His masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise.

Now there are still those who insist that they have nothing to hide from the surveillance state and nothing to fear from the police state because they have done nothing wrong. To those sanctimonious few, secure in their delusions, let this be a warning: the danger posed by the American police state applies equally to all of us, lawbreaker and law-abider alike.

In an age of too many laws, too many prisons, too many government spies, and too many corporations eager to make a fast buck at the expense of the American taxpayer, there is no safe place and no watertight alibi.

We are all guilty of some transgression or other.

Eventually, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we will all be made to suffer the same consequences in the electronic concentration camp that surrounds us.

Welcome to the Matrix: Enslaved by Technology and the Internet of Things

Posted on February 26, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By John W. Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“There will come a time when it isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” ― Philip K. Dick

If ever Americans sell their birthright, it will be for the promise of expediency and comfort delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.

Likewise, if ever we find ourselves in bondage, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.

Indeed, while most of us are consumed with our selfies and trying to keep up with what our so-called friends are posting on Facebook, the megacorporation Google has been busily partnering with the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, and other governmental agencies to develop a new “human” species, so to speak.

In other words, Google—a neural network that approximates a global brain—is fusing with the human mind in a phenomenon that is called “singularity,” and they’ve hired transhumanist scientist Ray Kurzweil to do just that. Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, Kurzweil said. “It will have read every email you will ever have written, every document, every idle thought you’ve ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself.”

Science fiction, thus, has become fact.

We’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

The key word here, however, is control.

In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”

By 2018, it is estimated there will be 112 million wearable devices such as smartwatches, keeping users connected it real time to their phones, emails, text messages and the Internet. By 2020, there will be 152 million cars connected to the Internet and 100 million Internet-connected bulbs and lamps. By 2022, there will be 1.1 billion smart meters installed in homes, reporting real-time usage to utility companies and other interested parties.

Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.

The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is a glittering showcase for such Internet-connected techno gadgets as smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.

Moreover, given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”

Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.

Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know? Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?

For example, asks Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha:

What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?

Let me put it another way. If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.

Thus far, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug. After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?

As for those still reeling from a year of police shootings of unarmed citizens, SWAT team raids, and community uprisings, the menace of government surveillance can’t begin to compare to bullet-riddled bodies, devastated survivors and traumatized children. However, both approaches are just as lethal to our freedoms if left unchecked.

Control is the key here. As I make clear in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.

Make no mistake: the Internet of Things is just Big Brother in a more appealing disguise.

Even so, I’m not suggesting we all become Luddites. However, we need to be aware of how quickly a helpful device that makes our lives easier can become a harmful weapon that enslaves us.

This was the underlying lesson of The Matrix, the Wachowski brothers’ futuristic thriller about human beings enslaved by autonomous technological beings that call the shots. As Morpheus, one of the characters in The Matrix, explains:

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

“What truth?” asks Neo.

Morpheus leans in closer to Neo: “That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind.”

The Birth of the Time-Motion Human

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Reid Mukai

By Dale Lately

Source: The Baffler

In a darkened room, a woman lies watched by an infra-red camera as she sleeps. It monitors her breathing, her movements, the flicker of her eyelids. Some hours later it stings her with a painful electric shock. She wakes, tumbles out of bed and into the restroom, whereupon a chip installed in her toothbrush tracks her arm movements. She’s photographed, silently, every thirty seconds. As she sets off in the morning her location is logged and data is streamed on the steps she takes. Her pulse and calorie count are recorded and sent to unseen observers. She has a dog at her side. The dog’s data is logged as well.

Such a tableau would be the envy of any futuristic dictatorship. In fact, the devices outlined above are all available on the consumer market now, for voluntary use. The impetus towards tracking our lives with smartphones, apps and stats represents a massive growth area into which companies like Jawbone, MyFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Runtastic, MapMyRun, Foodzy, GymPact, and Fitocracy are flooding. Alongside the Nike+ Fuelband, there’s the popular Fitbit Flex, a wristband that counts the steps you take by day and the number of times you stir in your sleep. There are smart cups to track what you drink and wristbands programmed to give you electric shocks for not achieving your goals. There’s even a “Fitbit for your vagina” in the form of the KGoal Smart Kegel Trainer—a Kickstarter project designed to track kegels, exercises for women’s pelvic floor muscles to improve childbirth and continence, and for helping them to achieve a better “clench strength” via Bluetooth.

With all this biofeedback now available on our phones, the act of walking, living and breathing can—at least to the “datasexuals” who embrace it—be an ongoing project with limitless potential for improvement. But might such potential also lead to a kind of “Taylorism within”? Applying scientific management to twentieth century business created a workforce optimized for maximum efficiency. Likewise, life-tracking is encouraging us to internalize this dream by optimizing ourselves. Rather than a tool for liberation, we’re using the tech, in other words, to tune our lives for maximum “productivity.”

Perhaps none of this should seem surprising for a consumer society that drives on anxiety. If bad breath had to be invented as a disease mouthwash would help to cure a century ago, now the Quantified Self movement suggests we must live in permanent beta, to aim not just at maintaining ourselves but to become “better than well.” And so, Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done and websites like Lifehacker help to turn our lives into a series of sanctioned tasks and goals, where one must carry a “Surprise Journal” to find areas for self-improvement in one’s life, and sleep comes in the form of “power” naps. There’s the Lumo Back, a gizmo that monitors the tricky process of sitting in a chair, while the Narrative wearable camera snaps your life twice a minute. Time management lessons are now available for kids, while the iPotty seems to give toddlers the message that they shouldn’t take their eyes off a screen even when satisfying the most basic of human needs.

Silicon Valley, naturally, is more than happy to export the mantra of ongoing product optimization to our bodies: life-hacking fanatics talk of “upgrades” and “body hacks,” with often obsessive results. In a Financial Times article that marked a mainstream recognition of the movement, Tim Ferriss–author of The 4-Hour Body–claimed that he could teach people how to lose weight without exercising, work on two hours’ sleep, and have a fifteen-minute orgasm, while bio-hacker Dave Asprey was adamant that he’s made himself twenty years younger and forty IQ points smarter through life-tracking and smart pills (“I’ve rewired my brain,” he said). All of this task management can become a considerable task in itself, leading to the piling up of Catch 22 ironies—like the fact that developers are now working on smartphone apps to solve the problem of people spending too much time on their smartphones.

Luckily, some are questioning the use of intimate monitoring devices in our lives. The information asymmetry provided by the emergent “Internet of Things” may create a class of uninsurable people, while ”digital Taylorism”—the tracking and tagging of workers like cattle—has been roundly criticized as it has begun to emerge at companies like Amazon. What’s disquieting about the popularization of life-tracking is the voluntary desire to become “time-motion humans,” to subject ourselves to a self-imposed surveillance state. “Track everything. Track your entire day—wherever you go,” says the website for the LumoBack. “VESSYL AUTOMATICALLY KNOWS AND TRACKS EVERYTHING YOU DRINK,” the Vessyl “smart mug” warns us in stark capitals. And once we’ve volunteered for this intimate biological scrutiny, we’re keen to publicize the results—using tools like the Withings scale, which threatens to broadcast our weight gains to our Twitter followers as “encouragement.” Self-Improvement Macht Frei.

Since the invention of the forceps we’ve been introducing machinery into our bodies to improve our lives (the aforementioned KGoal is actually based on a biofeedback device from the 1940s by Dr. Arnold Kegel), and undoubtedly many of these trackers are helping to make people healthier. But life tracking also comes from a certain ideological background, one that denigrates macro-interventions in our lives (nationalized health care) in favor of individual micro-solutionism (becoming our own gym instructors and fitness trainers).

We’re living in an entrepreneurial model of humanity, a vision of human beings as start-ups, where unfitness or obesity are viewed as “bugs” to be fixed rather than as products of an economy based on long hours and precarious work. Daily exercise has always been an individual responsibility, but sharing our biofeedback via social media encourages people to compete like businesses, vying for better health scores with the personal data that makes us special. (Flex boasts that it reflects “your stats, not any average Joe’s.”) Here we can all be Superman—“Join over 141,000 other people who want to discover their inner superhero,” urges website Superheroyou—while, back in the complex, unquantifiable real world, we often struggle to maintain control over the most basic facts of our finances and job prospects.

The Quantified Self literature is full of such fantasizing. It all treats the body as a fun challenge, a puzzle to be solved. We see this in the current trend towards adding game-like features to the process of life tracking, which leads to some quite startlingly intimate results (“Spreadsheets,” an app that promises to gamify your sex life, has the user get on the bed and talk dirty to a computer). Even antenatal workouts aren’t immune: the KGoal promises gamification in forthcoming product updates for those who fancy comparing their pelvic thrust scores to those of their peers.

The friendly rivalry that has always been a part of amateur fitness starts to look less inspiring, and more controlling, when it’s built into the architecture of smartphones and social media. It’s more like a crowd-sourced version of what philosopher Michel Foucault termed “Biopower,” the control over our bodies wielded by states and their institutions. But in this version, it’s not the institutions; we control ourselves, and each other.

As more and more aspects of our lives are seen as legitimate targets for intrusion by technology, the gaze inevitably falls on the newly born. Start-ups like Sproutling, Owlet, and Mimo are springing up to replace old-fashioned baby monitors with comprehensive, round-the-clock surveillance (temperature, pulse, breathing, position, room ambience) as well as all the attendant data crunching. These infants may be the first humans to grow up entirely in the lens of machines, with the process of rearing having been refashioned as a high-tech, high-maintenance project, requiring endless inputs from both parent and child alike. They will be the first “time-motion babies”: faster, happier, more productive, in the words of Radiohead’s Ok Computer.

Will they really be happier, versed as they will be, since birth, in the techniques of maximizing their sleep, optimizing their nutrients, and tracking the number of steps they walk? It seems doubtful, but then, it’s impossible to really tell when we talk about happiness—even Silicon Valley hasn’t worked out how to put a number on that.

Dale Lately writes about culture and communications and has contributed to the Guardian, 3:AM Magazine, OpenDemocracy, Litro and Pop Matters. His regular musings can be found at @dalelately and www.dalelately.blogspot.com.

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