"Next surveillance phase? Invasion under the skin"

Animals that can be hacked

My friends, let me introduce you to Yuval Noah Harari, a man full of large ideas. He explained during the covid crisis: "Covid is crucial due to the fact that this is what convinces people to accept, legitimize full biometric surveillance. If we want to halt this epidemic, we request not only to monitor people, we request to monitor what is happening under their skin." In an interview for "60 Minutes"with Anderson Cooper, Harari repeated this idea: "What we have seen so far are corporations and governments collecting data about where we go, who we meet, what films we watch. The next phase is surveillance that goes under our skin." In a akin speech he said India Today, commenting on changes accepted by the population during covid:

We are now witnessing the creation of mass surveillance systems even in democratic countries that have rejected them before, and we are besides seeing a change in the nature of surveillance. Prior surveillance was mainly performed on the skin; Now we want him under the skin... Governments want to know not only where we go and who we meet. They want to know what happens under our skin: what is the temperature of our body; what is our blood pressure; What's our condition?

Harari is clearly a man who wants to... get under his skin. He can just succeed. In another fresh interview 1 catches a philosophical approach to the subject: "Now people make even greater powers than always before. In fact, we get divine powers of creation and destruction. We truly are improving people to the rank of gods. We gain, for example, the power to redesign human life." As Kierkegaard erstwhile said about Heglu erstwhile he talks about Absoluta erstwhile Harari talks about the future, it sounds like he's flying a balloon.

Forgive me, but prof. Harari's last fewer words will complete the image of his philosophy, his lofty hopes and dreams: "People are now animals that can be hacked. You know, the full thought that people have a soul or a spirit, and they have a free will, and nobody knows what's going on in me, so whatever I choose, whether it's in the election or in the supermarket, it's my free will – it's over. Harari explains that to hack people, it takes quite a few computing power and quite a few biometric data, which was not possible until late with the emergence of artificial intelligence. He claims that in a 100 years people will look back and identify the Covid crisis as a moment, "when he took over the fresh surveillance regime, especially surveillance under the skin – which in my opinion is the most crucial accomplishment of the 21st century, which is this ability to hack human beings."

People rightly worry that their iPhone or Alexa have become "eavesdropping devices" for surveillance and indeed, the microphone can be turned on even if the device is disabled. But imagine a wearing or implanting device that tracks your heart rate, blood force and skin conduction from minute to moment, sending this biometric information to the cloud. Anyone who has access to this data may know your exact emotional consequence to any message spoken during the presidential debate. They could measure your thoughts and feelings about each candidate, about all issue discussed, even if you never said a word.

I could quote prof. Harari for a long time about hacking the human body, but you know what I mean. At this point, 1 can be tempted to reject Harari as nothing but a overheated, obsessed discipline fiction of a agrarian atheist. After years of awe of discipline fiction novels, the balloon of his imagination is constantly floating somewhere above the ether. Why should we pay attention to the prophecies and prophecies of this man?

It turns out that Harari is simply a prof. of past at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His bestselling books have sold in over 20 million copies worldwide, which is rather a challenge. More importantly, he is 1 of the favorites of the planet economical Forum and a key architect of his program. In 2018, his lecture on the WEF "Will the future be human?" was squeezed between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron's speech. So he plays in a sandbox with large dogs.

In his lecture on the WEF Harari explained that in the coming generations "we will learn how to construct bodies, brains and minds" in specified a way that they will become "the main products of the 21st century economy: not textiles, vehicles and weapons, but bodies, brains and minds." fewer economical champions, as he explains, are people who own and control data: "Today data is the most crucial resource in the world", unlike ancient times, erstwhile the earth was the most crucial resource, or an industrial era, erstwhile machines were the most important. WeEF leader Klaus Schwab repeated Harari's ideas, explaining: "One feature of the 4th industrial revolution is that it does not change what we do; This changes us" by editing genes and another biotechnology tools that work under our skin.

Even the dreamy Harari admits that there are any possible risks associated with these changes: "If besides much data is concentrated in besides fewer hands, humanity will divide not into classes, but into two different species". You might not think that would be good. But given everything, he is more than willing to take that hazard and decision forward with this programme. It is fair to admit that Harari does not advocate a future totalitarian state or governments of all-powerful corporations, but hopes that he will inform us of the coming threats.

In Harari's highly naive proposal, however, he believes that the apparent problems posed by the tyrannical biosecurity state can be solved through greater supervision, by prompting citizens to simply monitor the government: "Turn it around," he said in a speech at the Athens Democratic Forum, "More surveillance of governments. I mean, technology can always work both ways. If they can watch us, we can watch them." This proposal is – not to say besides mildly – incredibly stupid. As most of us learned in kindergarten, 2 evils do no good.

WeEF made a large deal of it a fewer years ago, publishing a slogan on its website: "You'll have nothing. And you'll be happy." Although this page was later removed, the inactive intact impression remained: it contained a clear and simple description of the future envisaged by the man of Davos. At the last phase of this development, we will be in an economy based only on rent/subscription, in which nothing truly belongs to us. Imagine the uberization of everything.

To realize this future, imagine the planet as an Amazon magazine of a large size: a mandarin of the caste of digital virtuosos will dictate the conditions from behind the screens, directing the masses below utilizing an increasingly sophisticated algorithmic specificity. The Prophet Aldous Huxley predicted this A fresh Wonderful World in his 1932 novel. These changes will not only challenge our political, economical and medical institutions and structures; They will challenge our ideas of what it means to be human. That's precisely what his supporters are celebrating, which we'll see in a minute.

Corporate public-private partnership agreements that combine state and corporate power are well suited to the essential convergence of existing and emerging areas. This biological-digit convergence envisaged by the WEF and its members will combine large data, artificial intelligence, device learning, genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. Schwab calls it the 4th industrial revolution to follow the first 3 revolutions – mechanical, electrical and digital. Transhumanists – whom we are about to meet – have dreamed of specified a combination of physical, digital and biological worlds for at least a fewer decades. But now their visions have a chance to become our reality.

Control mechanisms

Further steps in hacking people will include attempts to introduce – which we should vigorously argue – digital identifiers, linked to fingerprints and another biometric data specified as iris scans or facial identifiers, demographic information, medical documentation, education, travel data, financial transactions and bank accounts. They will be linked to the central bank's digital currencies, giving governments powers to supervise and control each of your financial transactions, with the anticipation to block you on the marketplace if you do not comply with the government directives.

The usage of biometrics in regular transactions routines these technologies. We teach children to accept biometric verification as an apparent thing. For example, facial IDs are presently utilized in many school districts to velocity up student movements through queues for school lunches. Until recently, biometric data specified as fingerprints have only been utilized for advanced safety purposes – for example erstwhile accusing individual of a crime or erstwhile notarially certifying a valid document. Currently, regular biometric verification of repeated activities, from mobile phones to queues to lunch, tends young people to think their bodies are tools utilized in transactions. We are instrumentalizing the body in an unconscious and subtle, yet powerful way.

Those who have an economical interest in creating markets for their products (whether it be vaccines, equipment and software for digital surveillance or collected data) will proceed to usage stick and carrot in the form of access to medical care and another services to strengthen the acceptance of digital identifiers in underdeveloped countries. In developed countries, they will initially apply the approach of "axmate gloves", selling digital identifiers as convenience and time-saving measures that will be hard for many to reject, specified as avoiding long queues for TSA safety checks at airports. Risks to privacy, including the anticipation of continuous surveillance and data collection, will vanish in the background erstwhile you are going to miss your flight if you can't jump to the start of the queue.

If we do not collectively refuse to participate in this fresh social experiment, digital identifiers – linked to private demographic, financial, locational, traffic and biometric data – will become mass data collection and population tracking mechanisms worldwide. We should argue this – including by giving up fresh scans of identity papers at the TSA checkpoints, which we can inactive do legally.

When this surveillance strategy is full implemented, it will offer unprecedented control mechanisms, allowing the government to be maintained against all forms of resistance. This technocratic dream would strengthen the most implacable authoritarian strategy the planet has always known – in the sense that it could persist against all forms of opposition through monopolistic technological and economical power. The suppression of opposition will be mostly through financial control of the system, especially if we adopt the digital currencies of the central bank. effort to defy or go beyond the limitations of the system, and the doors to the markets will just shut. This means that erstwhile this strategy is introduced, it may be almost impossible to overthrow.

Eugenics in the microwave

Harari – whom I quoted extensively at the beginning of this lecture – is 1 of the more prominent members of the fresh species of scientists, activists and "visionaries" who call themselves transhumanists. These people are striving to usage technology not to change the environment of life, but to fundamentally change the human nature itself. The goal is to "improve" or "improve" human beings. This is both possible and desirable, as Harari explains, due to the fact that all organisms – whether human or amoeba, or bananas or viruses – are actually only "biological algorithms". It is an old materialistic, social Darwinist ideology with turbocharge and enhanced technology utilizing gene editing tools, nanotechnology, robotics and advanced pharmaceuticals. Transhumanism is simply a microwave eugenics. There's nothing fresh under the sun.

The 20th century eugenics called people with disabilities "useless eaters". Repeating this rhetoric on many occasions, Harari wondered what to do with people in the future who would refuse improvements through artificial intelligence – people he calls "useless people". "Perhaps the biggest question in economics and politics in the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people?" He further explains, "The problem is more boredom, what to do with them and how they will find meaning in life, since they are fundamentally meaningless, worthless."

Harari suggests 1 possible solution to the problem, what to do with useless people: "My best guess right now is to combine drugs and computer games". Well, at least we have an advantage in this respect, which is not missed by Harari's remark: "We see that more and more people spend more and more time or solve problems related to drugs and computer games, both legal and illegal drugs," he explains. Harari predicts that in this place there will be those who do not want to be hacked to improve artificial intelligence.

Meeting Harari's head wasn't my first contact with the transhumanist movement. A fewer years ago, I spoke on a panel at Stanford University, sponsored by the Zephyr Institute, on transhumanism. I criticized the thought of "improvement of man", the usage of biomedical technology not to treat sick people, but to make healthy "better than healthy", i.e. larger, faster, stronger, smarter, etc. respective students from the Transhumanist Club at Stanford University attended the event.

We had a heartwarming discussion and I enjoyed talking to these students after it ended. I learned that the symbol of their student group is H+ ("humanity plus"). They were highly smart, ambitious and serious young men and women – Stanford's typical students. any of them read more than "Scientific American" Plato. They sincerely wanted to make the planet a better place. There may have been 1 or 2 authoritarians in the closet, but I was under the impression that they were not curious in facilitating dominance over the planet of the oligarchical corporate regimes authorized to hack human beings.

Nevertheless, I had the impression that they did not realize the implications of the axioms they had received. We can choose our first principles, our fundamental reasons, but then we gotta follow them to their logical conclusions; Otherwise, we deceive ourselves. These Stanford students were not isolated, but represented a local culture: transhumanism is highly influential in Silicon Valley and shapes the imagination of many of the most influential technological elites. Supporters include Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom, Harvard geneticist George Church, dead physicist Stephen Hawking, Google engineer Ray Kurzweil, and another prominent personalities.

Transhumanist Dream

Returning to Harari's speech at the WeEF in 2018, he admits that data control can not only enable human elites to build digital dictatorships, but besides believes that hacking people can make something even more extremist easier: "Elity can gain power to redesign the future of life itself". After warming the audience in Davos goes to crescendo: "It will not only be the largest revolution in human history, but besides the largest revolution in biology since the beginning of life 4 billion years ago".

Which, of course, is rather a large deal. due to the fact that for billions of years nothing fundamental has changed in the basic principles of the game in life, as he explains: "All life for 4 billion years – dinosaurs, amoebas, tomatoes, people – all life was subject to the laws of natural selection and the laws of organic biochemistry." But that's not: all of this will shortly change, as he explains:

Science replaces evolution by choosing natural evolution by intelligent plan – not the intelligent plan of any god above the cloud, but our intelligent plan and plan of our clouds: IBM clouds, Microsoft clouds – these are the fresh driving forces of evolution. At the same time, discipline can let life – after 4 billion years of confinement in a limited kingdom of organic compounds – discipline can let life to enter an inorganic sphere.

The first conviction perfectly reflects the first definition of eugenics proposed by the man who coined this word in the late 19th century, Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin: "What nature does blindly, slow and absolutely [evolution by natural selection], man can do providence, rapidly and kindly [evolution according to our own—or through—smart cloud design]". But what does Harari say in this last conviction – about life entering an inorganic sphere?

Since the dawn of modern computing, it has been a dream of transhumanists that 1 day we will be able to send information content to our brains or our minds (if you believe in the minds) to any immense computing system, digital cloud or another technological repository capable of storing immense amounts of data. According to this materialistic view of man, we will no longer request our human body, which yet always fails us. By dropping this deadly shell—this organic dust that always turns to dust—we will find technological means to... well, Live forever. Eternal life in the digital cloud or in the sky's mainframe is the eschatology of transhumanists: the salvation by digital technology.

This task is of course physically (and metaphysically) impossible, due to the fact that man is an inseparable unity of body and soul, not any spirit in a machine, not just a part of software that can be transferred to another equipment. But for now, put it aside; Let us look at what this eschatological dream tells us about the transhumanist movement. Of course, these fanciful flights of imagination have gone far beyond the realm of science. Transhumanism is of course religion – indeed, a peculiar kind of neo-gnostic religion. present it attracts supporters – including educated, rich, influential and culturally influential believers – due to the fact that it refers to unfulfilled, profoundly spiritual aspirations and longing. This is simply a substitute religion for the secular era.

That hideous force

I cannot emphasize adequate the meaning of C.S. Lewis' book for our time "The Abolition of Man". Lewis erstwhile noticed that his dystopian fresh "This hideous force"the 3rd part of his "space trilogy," "The abolition of man"in a fictional form. Those who learned from Huxley's "New Wonderful World" and "A 1000 9 100 eighty-fourth"Orwell, they should besides read "Detestable strength", an underrated position in the dystopian fiction genre. In 1945 Lewis predicted Yuval Harari and his akin transhumanists on the horizon. Brilliantly satirized their ideology in the fresh hero Filostrat, a serious but profoundly lost Italian scientist.

In this story, a fewer technocrats take over the idyllic university town in England – think of Oxford or Cambridge – and immediately take to work, transforming things according to their imagination of the future. The main character of the novel, Mark Studdock, is recruited distant from the university to a fresh technocrat institute. Mark primarily wants to be part of the progressive set, the "internal ring", which directs the next large thing. He spends his first days at the N.I.C.E (National Institute for Coordinated Experiments), in vain trying to find precisely what his fresh responsibilities mean.

Finally, he learns that he has been employed mainly to compose propaganda explaining to the public the activities of the Institute. A bit depressed – in the end he is simply a investigator of social sciences alternatively than a writer – 1 day he sits down to lunch with Filostrato, a associate of the interior ellipse of N.I.C.E., and learns a small about the planet view of this scientist.

As a substance of fact, Filostrato just issued an order to cut down respective beech trees at the Institute and replace them with aluminium trees. individual at the table naturally why, noting that he alternatively liked the beech. "Yes, yes," says Filostrato. "Beautiful trees, garden trees. But not wild. I put a rose in my garden, but not my brother. The forest tree is weed." Filostrato explains that he erstwhile saw a metallic tree in Persia, "so natural that it was misleading", which he thought could be perfected. His interlocutor opposes that a tree made of metallic is not the same as a real tree. But the scientist is invulnerable and explains why the artificial tree is better:

"But think of the advantages! You're tired of him in 1 place: 2 workers carry him elsewhere: wherever you want. He never dies. There were no leaves that would fall, no twigs, no nest-building birds, no mud and no mess."

— I say 1 or two, as curious facts, can be rather entertaining.

- Why 1 or two? I admit we request forests for the atmosphere right now. We now find a chemical substitute. And then, why the natural trees? I don't foretell anything but a tree of art all over the earth. In fact, we're clearing the planet."

When asked if he meant that there would be no vegetation at all, Filostrato replies, "That's right. You shave your face, and even, at the English prayer, you shave it all day. 1 day we'll shave the planet." individual wonders what the birds will do about it, but Filostrato besides has a plan for them: "I wouldn't have any birds either. I'd have all the birds singing erstwhile you hit the control at home. erstwhile you're tired of singing, you turn it off. Let us consider the improvement again. No fallen feathers, no nests, no eggs, no land."

Mark replies that this sounds like the abolition of almost all organic life. Why not? Filostrato counters. "It's simple hygiene." And then, repeating Yuval Harari's rhetoric, we hear the ascending perorat Filostrato, which would be most appropriate at the yearly gathering of the planet economical Forum in Davos:

— Listen, friends. If you take a rotten thing into your hand and you see that it's an organic life, won't you say, "Oh, that awful thing. He's alive," and then drop him?... And you, especially the English, are not hostile to any organic life but your own life on your own body? alternatively of letting that happen, you invented a regular bath... What do you call dirty dirt? Isn't that what's organic? Minerals are pure dirt. But the real dirt is what comes from organisms – sweat, sputum, secretions. Isn't your full thought of chastity an example? What is unclean, and what is organic, are interchangeable concepts. After all, we are the organisms ourselves.

I admit... Organic life has created our mind. She did her job. Then we don't want it anymore. We do not want the planet to be covered with organic life, specified as what you call blue mold – everything germinates, doughnuts, reproduces and decomposes. We gotta get free of him. A small slow, of course. We're slow learning how to do it. Learn to make our brains live with less and less bodies: learn to build our bodies straight with chemicals, you no longer gotta stuff them with dead animals and weeds. Learn how to multiply without copulation".

Someone inserts that the second part does not sound besides fun, but Filostrato replies, "My friend, you've already separated the fun, as you call it, from fertility. The fun itself is beginning to fade... Nature itself begins to reject anachronism. erstwhile he throws him out, then real civilization becomes possible." It should be remembered that this was written decades before the invention of in vitro fertilization and another assisted reproductive technologies, as well as a sexual revolution that brought widespread acceptance of the oral contraceptive pill. However, as Lewis reveals at the end of the novel, the N.I.C.E. is not controlled by superb scientists, but is yet influenced by demonic forces.

Both in the actual character of Harari and in the fictional form of Filostrat, we find people who accept and even celebrate the thought that human beings can abandon the mess of organic life and someway transfer our bodily existence into sterile inorganic matter. In both forms, we meet with the kind of man who wants to bleach the full earth with hand disinfection liquid. Were we not pushed, possibly a small besides far, towards Filostrato's dream during covid, erstwhile we tried to full disinfect and disinfect our environment of life and decision all our communication to the digital sphere? Did we not besides decision in this direction, spending more hours glued to the screens in the virtual planet than interacting with people in the real world, while from all pressing and clicking from each click are extracted the rice of behavioral data for predictive analysis by artificial intelligence?

Organic substance is alive, while inorganic substance is dead. All I can say is that the dream of transhumanists is, ultimately, the doctrine of death. However, it must be admitted that it has become an influential doctrine among many elites today. 1 way or another, we were all seduced by the misconception that thanks to the mass-coordinated vigilance and application of technology, we can free ourselves of pathogens from our environment in which we live, and completely cleanse our planet – possibly even thwarting death.

As the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce pointed out, philosophers that come out of the incorrect premise, not only neglect to scope their goal, but inevitably end up leading to something precisely other of the stated goals. Transhumanism pursues superior intelligence, superhuman strength and endless life.

But since it is rooted in a completely false concept of what it means to be human, If we recklessly accept a transhumanist dream, alternatively we will find ourselves in a nightmare dystopia of stupidity, weakness and death.

Translated by Google Translator

source:https://www.zerohedge.com/