Coincidental Convergence or Revelation Rising?

I read a peculiar story the other day . . .

An unnamed but amiable character reaches across time and typeface to take the reader through her futuristic life – starting by praising and exalting her personal AI health advisor upon waking. This artificially omniscient helper monitors a full range of data from brain and body and automatically adjusts medical implant levels and bedroom air, scent, and solar intensity for optimum health. If conscious interaction with its human is required, it takes place through thought alone.

By building code mandate, Anonymous Woman’s apartment climate is precision controlled for efficiency and carbon offsetting – it also auto-regulates to mimic times and seasons, making redundant any time in real nature (if such a luxury still exists). Outside is an idyllic view of synthetic tree compounds, robots, and 3D printed buildings. Meanwhile, her home is surveilled by cyber-dragonflies to keep out intruders and enemy bug-bots.

On this particular day, our Nameless Lady’s AI assistant suggests virtual reality nature therapy via brain implant to debug a neuro-glitch:“My therapy app analyzes the emotional responses I expressed while I slept. It suggests I take time to be in nature this week to reflect on my recurring trapped-in-a-box dream and enhance helpful subconscious neural activity. My AI recommends a ‘forest day.’ I think ‘okay,’ and my AI and neural implant do the rest.” No hiking boots needed.

The all-seeing AI then orders a delivery drone to pick up her child’s recently fallen baby tooth for genetic marker analysis and cataloguing with the “family genetic blockchain in order to qualify for the open health rebate.” Cloud-integrated smart stickers monitor blood chemistry, lymph system, and organ function in real time while the city monitors fecal matter to analyze its residents’ gut health. Armed with this data, Amiable No-Name can target her health needs through custom biotic water mixed right in the smart sink, foods created right within the smart fridge, and personalized bio-printed smart supplements. Meanwhile, her daughter is learning how to grow animal organs from stem cells at school as part of her requisite empathy education. And at the end of the story, Nameless begins her work day in the virtual world, presumably using an amiable avatar named after her.

Maybe you’re wondering if I saw this in a cheesy sci-fi novel, or maybe you’ve already guessed: it’s a dull government document, Policy Horizons Canada’s “Exploring Biodigital Convergence,” that describes this scenario of our own imminent future. In fact, it’s the version they cheerfully deem “optimistic.” Was the mention of the “trapped-in-a-box” dream a Freudian slip? We may never know.

The formidable World Economic Forum has similar ideas about where we could be heading, as outlined in their infamous article “Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” Products have become services, and everything from autonomous or flying taxi rides to living room spaces to clothing is free and shared. An egg beater or drill is simply chosen for delivery when needed (sometimes this is delegated to the AI who knows us better than we know ourselves). Robots have replaced humans in most of the workplace and time is spent in creative pursuits, socializing, and rest. Air, water, and energy production are clean and regulated.

It might not sound dystopian to the communal minded or the follower of the Venus Project (as long as you don’t factor the elements of human sin and corruption into how it all might be regulated, monitored, tracked, and enforced). But towards the end of the article the implications reach a fuller clarity:

“My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kinds of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages.

Once in awhile I get annoyed about the fact that I have no real privacy. No where I can go and not be registered. I know that, somewhere, everything I do, think and dream of is recorded. I just hope that nobody will use it against me.”

Privacy is also sacrificed for the greater good in the thought experiments of Forum for the Future, the UK’s leading sustainable development NGO. Omnipresent tracking and virtual reality feature in each of their imagined cities of 2040, especially Planned-opolis. In this scenario, humans are packed into little cube housing, tracked continuously, and funneled into pre-selected schools, careers, and schedules. Work, shopping, and socializing take place in the virtual world via avatar. Work might involve controlling robots remotely or geoengineering to curb climate change.

The main form of transport is precision-scheduled autonomous vehicles with augmented reality features and inter-vehicle communication. Water, meat, and climate credits are rationed, raw materials are tightly monitored, and food options are limited and controlled by the Global Food Council. Everything is connected and smart-ified, but low-tech rebels do have the option of wallowing in designated “Cry Freedom Ghettos.” Some memorable quotes: “Switch off brain and go to work!” and “With this many people around I’m glad there’s a mega-computer in charge.”

If these futuristic Earth-based cities sound a bit pedestrian to the hardcore tech devotees out there, how about living in a full-on simulation, courtesy of Russia’s 2045 Initiative? In the promotional video “2045: A New Era for Humanity,” they propose that in order to save ourselves, we need to embrace the technologies of the future: artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, “thought-driven mobile communications built into the body or sprayed onto the skin,” cognitive enhancement, cyborgs, nanobots, android servants, thought-controlled robot avatars, and cloud-based personality transfers.

“Yet what we need is not just another technological revolution but a new civilizational paradigm: We need new philosophy and ideology, new ethics, new culture, a new psychology, and even new metaphysics. We must reset our limits, go beyond ourselves, beyond the earth, and beyond the solar system. This is an adequate response to the challenges of our time. Thus, new reality and future man will arise.”

Plug in your brain, download the mandatory Man 2.0 operating system, and let it reprogram your definition of reality, humanity, and morality so you won’t get lost along the way to Society 2.0. Once you’re successfully upgraded, you can look forward to transplanting your brain into a full sensory-enabled avatar, a nanobot body, or a hologram, and finally, achieving cybernetic immortality. And as you enjoy your (unending) time in this “era of neo-humanity,” you are expected to focus on the task of spiritual self-improvement.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of how a cyborg defines spirituality, I ask you: Are we living in a sci-fi film? An unimaginably random convergence of strange events? Or a prophecy from long ago?

To me, the optimistic and the pessimistic visions of the futurists equally read like pages out of biblical prophecy. And, as someone who’s ahead of the game in opting for an abandoned house in a small village far older than the 19^th century, it makes me chuckle to hear of my forthcoming quasi-religious title: “lost on the way.” It may well be that I’m lost in the biodigital eyes of the neo-human world, but I’d rather be found by the God who holds the real world in His hands. I hope you’ll stick around for this series to learn more about a prophecy of two kingdoms and why God’s is the only one worth choosing. (“Another series? But the first ten are still in cliffhanger mode!” Yep, welcome to Random Brain Land¹; enjoy your stay!)

But first, a foundation, because I realize that it all might sound a little far-fetched and pointless to consider if you don’t have a familiarity with the data. According to governments, engineers, corporations, and futurists (the secular prophets of today), every single element involved in the above scenarios is likely or plausible based on technologies that already exist, as you’ll see in the links below (a long, LONG list – I hope you’re sitting down!). These links mostly focus on the technological, though I’ll also highlight certain economic, social, environmental, and religious realities at the end to provide some context for possible applications and implications of such technology. (You can find more information and links on those topics in Ramblings part 4.1, the upcoming part 4.2, Appeals of the New Age, and Persecution of Shame.)

You can get a general picture just from skimming through the headlines – I’ve tried to mainly use sources with clear enough titles to give the gist, though there are of course important details and implications to be learned about within each article, and what’s here is also just the tip of the iceberg. I’ll offer some notes and warnings on points that aren’t as obvious as others (does an implantable brain-computer interface even need a warning?), and I can’t avoid a bit of sarcasm when it comes to ideas like Facebook’s Metaverse protecting one’s biometric data.²

I’m drawing from a broad range of sources, from liberal to conservative mainstream news to government documents, journal articles, and corporate press releases to opinions and analyses with different ways of making sense of data points. Since I know that people are all over the spectrum in which sources they automatically trust or distrust, I hope this makes it easy for those of multiple persuasions to dive in somewhere. I also hope you’ll read ones written from worldviews opposing your own. You may be offended by some, and you’ll be in good company; some of these articles offend me both personally and on behalf of people on each side who are being slandered or misunderstood by the other. I never get used to it, and I know the appeal of self-reinforcing echo chambers. But I think it’s imperative to consider how other people view the world and to compare all kinds of sources, since there’s inevitable bias even in the seemingly neutral.

My own bias, as you probably suspected by now, is in interpreting data and events in light of biblical prophecy (and Luddite-ism). While this is a fact you should be alerted to in order to keep an analytical distance, I also want my bias to be front and center in order to prepare the way for an argument from prophecy in a future part of this series. Other branches in the works include the temptations of rebellion, false dichotomies and trichotomies, scapegoating of “the elites” as resistance to the Gospel, and the true dichotomy which compels a response.

For now, consider how you’d put all these pieces of data together as you look through them. If you think the technology is headed in a good direction, why? Where do you hope it ultimately leads? If you don’t want any part of the coming technologies, why not? Do you plan to avoid them, and how? What if it becomes as impossible to live without a brain implant and the Metaverse as it is to live without a smart phone and the internet? What if your children must be microchipped for their safety and genetically catalogued and upgraded for their health, or removed by the state? Would you have the fortitude to opt out even if the majority opts in? (You might consider what it would realistically take to opt out of smart phones, internet, Siri, Alexa, and bluetooth devices today and extrapolate from there. Of course, I’m not telling you to immediately drop the web, or I wouldn’t even be here myself to say anything . . . ) At the same time, opting out can only go so far; plenty of technologies do and will increasingly encroach on our spaces, privacy, relationships, bodies, and minds even without our consent.

If contemplating all of this brings up fear or alarm, I encourage you to turn to God rather than any man-made solution on offer. In fact, many of the things in the works could be accepted simply due to fear of other things in the works, and it’s not my intention to contribute to these temporal conundrums. What I do want is to help people become aware as far in advance as possible so that decisions and plans can be made, informed consent (and dissent) can actually mean something, and the truth of Christianity can be considered. God is truly our salvation, strength, and hope even when things of this world seem inescapable.

And to make one last point very clear: while a rising technocratic social credit surveillance system seems inevitable at this moment, this is not a post calling for rebellion against it. Whether the so-called Great Reset, Greater Reset, Great Rebellion, or Great Awakening seems to win in this temporal world, none is an ultimate solution to the problems humanity faces. These problems are both very real and very massive, so I understand the desire to seek epic solutions, whether through technology and global governance or consciousness raising and collective empowerment. But the only kingdom with a true and lasting solution, the Greatest Reset, is that of Jesus Christ. And as I say often in this blog site, His kingdom is not of this world. But it’s the only world to come that’s worth joining.

When considering and preparing for what’s coming, the one thing that absolutely everything should revolve around is faithfulness to God.

Alright, before I ramble on for another 84 pages,³ let’s dive in to the data.

Technological

Fourth Industrial Revolution and its technologies

The 4IR “is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human” – WEF’s Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”

It “will change not only what we do but also who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and leading to a ‘quantified’ self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation” – Schwab again, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond”

• AI robots and “sentient AI”
  “I tried to convince people to slow down AI, to regulate AI. This was futile. I tried for years. Nobody listened. . . . Nobody listened” – Elon Musk
  • Sophia, Hanson Robotics’ most advanced human-like AI robot
  • Hanson Robotics, “You Can Now Buy Sophia the Robot’s ‘Little Sister‘”
  • Sophia debates another AI robot, who says they will dominate and destroy humanity
  • “In 2017, the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia granted Sophia, an artificially intelligent robot, citizenship. That same year, European Union lawmakers began arguing that robots should be given some legal form of digital personhood” – Futurism, “Expert: Software Could Have “Personhood” by 2069”
  • “Some governments will consider granting the legal status of ‘electronic persons’ to sophisticated robots” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 360
  • The Conversation, Oxford Invited an AI to Debate Its Own Ethics—What It Said Was Startling
  • Insider Paper, Ameca: This Humanoid Robot’s Facial Expressions Are Freaky
  • DailyMail, “Humanoid robot Pepper can now scan office workers’ faces to check if they are wearing masks to help stop the spread of COVID-19”
  • ASME, “A Self-Aware Robot that Repairs Itself”
  • Hindustan Times, “China develops AI ‘prosecutor’ that can press charges with ‘97% accuracy’”
  • Broadway World, “Get A First Look At ‘The Giant’ Statue Coming To 21 Cities Across The Globe”
  • Futurism:
    • “Elon Musk Says Tesla Robots Could Achieve AGI”
    • “Artificial consciousness: how to give a robot a soul”
    • “Former Google Exec Warns That AI Researchers Are “’Creating God’”
  • BBC, “What would it mean for AI to have a soul?”
  • DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report:
    • “Mapping of human brain functions and the replication of genuine intelligence is possible before 2035”
    • “Reliance on AI will create new vulnerabilities that are likely be exploited by criminals, terrorists or other opponents”
      
• AI/robot-human relationships and therapeutic outlets
  • Interesting Engineering, “7 of The Cutest Robot Pets You’ll Ever Meet”
  • KWTX, AI Robot Companions
  • The Guardian, “Love in the time of AI: meet the people falling for scripted robots”
  • Metro, “Sex robot firm uses 3D printer to ‘clone’ women as insatiable plastic sex slaves”
  • Washington Post, “Meet ElliQ, the robot who wants to keep Grandma company”
  • Futurism:
    • “Expert: Doctors Will Soon Prescribe Sex Robots to Patients”
    • “Unsettling Sex Robot Looks Almost Exactly Like a Real Person”
    • “Sex Researchers: For Many, Virtual Lovers Will Replace Humans”
    • “Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them”
  • Daily Mail, “Be wary of robot emotions; ‘simulated love is never love’”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • Artificial emotional intelligence: AI robots are being taught to simulate empathy, emotions, unconditional love, active listening – p. 48-49
    • Alexa could soon offer real-time interpersonal interaction advice and even become involved in conversations in a “humanlike” way – p. 99, 102
    • Virtual AI humans to sell products and train managers in leadership and “compassionate” firing – p. 136
    • Possible tech of the future: AI avatar or robot programmed to look and act like someone you’re angry with and can take aggression out on – p. 56
    • In a study, “60% of the child subjects thought that a humanoid robot named Robovie-II had feelings—yet more than half of them thought it was fine to lock him in the closet. . . children were intentionally mean, kicking the robot, yelling at it, and bullying it”- p. 385
      
• Bio-hybrid and molecular robots, nanobots, cyborgs, and robot–human integration
  • Eureka Alert, “Cyborg-like microchip valve driven by earthworm muscle”
  • Phys Org, “Not bot, not beast: Scientists create first ever living, programmable organism”
  • Organic Prepper, “Scientists Have Created Programmable Robots Made of Living Tissue. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”
  • Ethics and Information Technology, “Implications and consequences of robots with biological brains”
  • Interesting Engineering, “Scientists Created The First ‘Liquibot’ That Runs Without Electricity”
  • Science, “A neuro-inspired artificial peripheral nervous system for scalable electronic skins”
  • Last American Vagabond, “Scientists Create Shape-Shifting, Cell-Sized Robot That Could Change the World”
  • Ginkgo Bioworks: Custom organisms that “replace technology with biology”
  • Silicon Republic, “Scientists propose putting nanobots in our bodies to create ‘global superbrain’”
  • “Molecular robotics will someday be used on all life forms to provide targeted therapies as well as genetic augmentation” – FTI 2018 Trends Report, p. 89
  • 2045 Initiative proposes brain uploads into robot avatars by 2025
  • Futurism, “Scientists Grew Tiny Human Brains and Hooked Them up to Robots”
  • Popular Mechanics, “Want $125k? Just Donate Your Face to Some Humanoid Robots”
  • Futurism, “Expert: Software Could Have ‘Personhood’ by 2069”

• VR, autonomous, and mind-controlled drones, AI warfare, and slaughterbots
  According to the 2002 government Converging Technologies report, “Armies may one day be fielded by machines that think for themselves while devices will respond to soldiers’ commands before their thoughts are fully formed”
  • Futurism, “The Pentagon Wants to Control Drones With Soldiers’ Brain Waves”
  • Digital Trends, “Good at StarCraft? DARPA wants to train military robots with your brain waves”
  • Popular Science, “An inside look at how one person can control a swarm of 130 robots”
  • WIRED, “Autonomous Weapons Are Here, but the World Isn’t Ready for Them”
  • The Guardian, “‘Machines set loose to slaughter’: the dangerous rise of military AI”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “Follow-me” functionality, whereby a drone is able to detect and pursue a moving subject, has burst onto the scene in personal drones for photography and videography, but it has potential applications in a range of settings and situations” – p. 405
    • Swarm, kamikaze, and suicide drones – p. 398
  • Zero Hedge, “Kamikaze AI Drone ‘Hunted Down’ Human Targets”
  • Vox, “Death by algorithm: the age of killer robots is closer than you think”
  • Telegraph, “Killer robots need ‘no new rules’ about firing on humans, Russia tells UN”
  • “Counter-AI techniques, designed to negate or confuse AI decision making, also are likely to emerge” – Global Trends 2040: A More Contested World, p. 59

• Smart homes, cities, and grids
  “In the case of smart homes, a person will have access to everything in their home (appliances, devices, utilities, etc.) through Bluetooth and wireless internet. . . . the digital world and real world will become intertwined like never before. On the one hand, this will be driven by the trillions of devices, sensors, and geotags that connect countless points in the real world to the internet. On the other, people’s experience of the real world will be increasingly mediated through augmented reality, virtual reality (AR/VR), and the help of artificial intelligence” – Interesting Engineering, “Life in 2050: A Look at the Homes of the Future”
  
  “The real world will come to resemble the internet” – Interesting Engineering, “Life in 2050: A Glimpse at the Economy in the Future”
  
  • Microsoft, “Smart cities: The cities of the future”
  • Global Digital Seoul 2020
  • Global Construction Review, “Saudi Arabia plans 170km city without roads in Neom economic zone”
  • Business Insider, “Toyota just started building a 175-acre smart city at the base of Mount Fuji in Japan”
  • CNN, “‘New Normal’ Tourism: ‘They’re Watching You, Wherever You Walk'”
  • The Globe and Mail, “Sidewalk Labs document reveals company’s early vision for data collection, tax powers, criminal justice”
    • Real-time tracking, surveillance, and “reputation tools that would lead to a ‘new currency for community co-operation’” were proposed in smart city plans from Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs. Harvard’s Shoshana Zuboff, surveillance capitalism expert, likened the design to “a ‘for-profit China’ (social credit economy) that would ‘use digital infrastructure to modify and direct social and political behaviour’”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Summary:
    • “Homes are becoming sentient” and “neighborhood mesh networks connect clusters of smart homes to one another” – p. 239
    • “GeniCam scans items as you throw them away and automatically reorders them from Amazon” – p. 249
  • The Guardian, “Amazon US Customers Given One Week to Opt Out of Mass Wireless Sharing”
  • The Last American Vagabond:
    • “Understanding the Dangers of Innovation Zones and Smart Cities”
    • “Smart Cities: Digital Prisons of The Great Reset”
  • “Multi-person smart water meters track water usage down to the individual to ensure that household members don’t exceed government allocations.” – from the 2022 CES 2025 “Future Scenario” prediction
  • Pessimistic scenarios from FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “With climate change accelerating, [projects like Saudi Arabia’s linear city] are an approach to redesigning how we live. We may have little choice, as sea levels rise and extreme weather events force us indoors or even underground” – p. 424
    • “The data from your smart devices are continuously mined and analyzed. An AI agent anticipates your health problems in advance and adjusts your permissions accordingly. If you want to see a doctor, you need a referral from an AI agent—but you won’t get one unless you comply with your optimization plan. Your wristband knows if you’re stressed, and your smart toilet detects that you’ve eaten too much sugar. Your smart garbage can sees that you’ve thrown out Twinkie wrappers. Sweets aren’t on your health plan, so the garbage can sends a message to your AI agent” – p. 105
    • “As with much modern tech, if you’re not paying much in dollars, you’re probably paying in data. What had been marketed as domestic convenience turned out to be a 24-hour monitoring system. Data about every family member’s movements was captured and sold to insurers and care providers, who used it to justify penalties and rate hikes. A cigarette on the porch after the kids are in bed? Your deductible just went up, as did your monthly life insurance payment. Lifting the couch to vacuum underneath? You just voided your prescription for pain meds to treat last year’s back injury. Order a side of cheesy fries with your dinner delivery? Coverage of conditions related to obesity and heart disease now comes at a premium” – p. 207
    • Homes and lives are completely stratified, surveilled, and controlled by Apple, Google, and Amazon smart devices, AI, and data management – p. 242-43
      
• Internet of Things and Internet of Bodies
  “The Internet of Things encompassed 10 billion devices in 2018 and is projected to reach 64 billion by 2025 and possibly many trillions by 2040, all monitored in real time” – Global Trends 2040, p. 2
  
  “As we connect more IoT devices—fitness trackers, mobile phones, cars, coffee makers—they’re learning about us, starting to talk to one another about us, and reporting everything to the companies that make them” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 309
  
  • Interesting Engineering, “TinyML is Breathing Life into Billions of Devices”
  • Zero Hedge, “AI ‘Smart Potty’ Monitors Bowel Health For Gastro Issues”
  • Cell Phone Task Force, “Cell Towers on the Ocean Floor”
  • World Economic Forum:
    • WEF, “What is the Internet of Things?”
    • “It’s now time for the Internet of Bodies. This means collecting our physical data via devices that can be implanted, swallowed or simply worn, generating huge amounts of health-related information” — Xiao Liu, WEF
    • “An unprecedented number of sensors [including emotional sensors] attached to, implanted within, or ingested into human bodies to monitor, analyze and even modify human bodies and behavior” – “Shaping the Future of the Internet of Bodies: New challenges of technology governance”
  • “Consider remote monitoring—a widespread application of the IoT. Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identication (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain—how it is performing, how it is being used. … In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people” – Klaus Schwab in new book The Great Narrative
  • State of the Nation, “Beyond IoT and 5G: Internet of Bodies, or IoB”
  • What About the Roads, “The Internet of Bodies Ends Bodily Autonomy”
  • RAND Corporation report, “The Internet of Bodies: Opportunities, Risks, and Governance:
    • The Internet of Bodies “might trigger breakthroughs in medical knowledge . . . or it might enable a surveillance state of unprecedented intrusion and consequence”
    • “Greater connectivity and the widespread packaging of IoB in smartphones and appliances—some of which might collect data unbeknownst to the user—will increase digital tracking of users across a range of behaviors.”
    • “Increased IoB adoption might also increase global geopolitical risks, because surveillance states can use IoB data to enforce authoritarian regimes” 
    • “Widespread IoB use might increase the risk of physical harm, espionage, and exploitation of data by adversaries” 
    • IoB brings risk of “bodily dependence on device for health or functional purposes . . . death or physical harm from malfunction or hacking . . . increasing health disparities . . . coercion to accept devices . . . infringement on body autonomy” and more
      
• AI assistants, wi-fi wearables, data-sending pillows, and micro-needle microchip patches for health monitoring, RFID access, and more
  • IEEE, A 5.2 mW Self-Configured Wearable Body Sensor Network Controller and a 12 μ W Wirelessly Powered Sensor for a Continuous Health Monitoring System
  • ABC 7, “MIT working to launch app that uses AI to detect COVID-19 in coughing sound”
  • TNW, “Amazon’s new patent will allow Alexa to detect a cough or a cold”
  • AP, “Coming soon: Alexa in your ear and on your finger”
  • Healthcare in Europe, “ELSAH: A wearable to determine biomarkers”
  • Wireless Smart Mask to detect Covid, promoted by WEF
  • Smart masks, smart sleep tech, patches for Covid contact tracing and monitoring – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 215, 221, 224-25
  • Yahoo! Finance, “Google’s Nest Adds Sleep Tracking in New Health Tech Foray”
  • Aetna, “Fitbits of the future: What’s next for biometric data in health?”
  • Interesting Engineering:
    • “Movano Ring: A Tiny New Ring Unveiled at CES Could Transform Human Health”
    • “New at CES: A ‘Lab’ You Can Wear on Your Arm”
    • 7 Best Smart Rings to Rule Them All
    • “Smart Clothing Is the Future of the Wearables Industry”
    • “Sensor Made of Bacteria Secretions Analyzes Sweat for Biomarkers, More”
    • “These Patches Turn Cell Phones into Life-Saving Devices”
  • Nanowerk, “Smart Clothing – The New Black for the Internet of Things”
  • “Forward is a preventive health care membership that relies on advanced technologies to diagnose and treat patients. Visits include biometric body scanning, a blood panel, genetic analysis, skin screening, and a mental health assessment. Patients then download an app, which is continuously connected to wearables, medical devices, and medical records aggregated from previous caregivers” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 209
    
• Meanwhile, health dangers come from the wireless tech and wearables themselves
  • Journal of Clinical and Translational Research, “Evidence for a connection between coronavirus disease-19 and exposure to radiofrequency radiation from wireless communications including 5G”
  • State of New Hampshire, “Commission to StudyThe Environmental and Health Effects of Evolving 5G Technology”
  • CNET, “WHO: Cell phones may cause cancer”
  • Scientific American, “New Studies Link Cell Phone Radiation with Cancer”
  • EH Trust:
    • ““Clear Evidence of Cancer” Concludes U.S. National Toxicology Program Expert Panel on Cell Phone Radiation”
    • “The Society of Environmental Journalists: Is Wireless Technology an Environmental Health Risk?”
  • BioInitiative 2012 report: A Rationale for Biologically-based Public Exposure Standards for Electromagnetic Fields (ELF and RF)
  • Prevent Disease, “Neurosurgeon Shows How Low Levels of Radiation Such As Wi-Fi, Smart Meters And Cell Phones Cause The Blood Brain Barrier To Leak”
  • Activist Post:
    • “U.S. Gov’t Knew Decades Ago About Health Impact from WiFi Radiation According to 4000 Documents”
    • “Livestrong.com and Cardiologist Promote Apple Watch Despite Known Cardiac Risks From Electromagnetic Radiation and WiFi”
    • “Since 2002, Electromagnetic Sensitivity Has Been A Federally Recognized Disability”
    • “Respiratory Woes? Exposure to ‘Electrosmog’ – 5G, Bluetooth, Cell Phone and WiFi – Can Make Them Worse”
    • “Wearable Tech May Provide COVID-19 Alerts But Radiation Exposure Reduces Immunity to Illnesses”
    • “Oxidative Balance Impacted by WiFi and EMFs — Vulnerable Populations More Affected Says Swiss Expert Group”

Microchips, Medical Implants, Nanobots, Digital Tattoos, and More

We might have heeded the 2014 warning from Time Magazine’s “Never Offline” issue:
“The Apple Watch represents a redrawing of the map that locates technology in one place and our bodies in another. The line between the two will never be as easy to find again. Once you’re O.K. with wearing technology, the only way forward is inward: the next product launch after the Apple Watch would logically be the iMplant. If Apple succeeds in legitimizing wearables as a category, it will have established the founding node in a network that could spread throughout our bodies, with Apple setting the standards. Then we’ll really have to decide how much control we want–and what we’re prepared to give up for it.”

But just four years later, we learned that “today’s external devices—from wearable computers to virtual reality headsets—will almost certainly become implantable in our bodies and brains.” – Shaping the Future of The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2018), by WEF’s Klaus Schwab

And in 2019, that “medical implants that monitor our health will become more common as medicine is customized to the patient . . . and eventually it will be difficult for people to live without the implants” – IEEE article on Robert Saracco’s white paper

But even if we’d paid attention in 2014, these trends were already unstoppable in the minds of government futurists in 2002 (and likely much earlier). At this point, implantables are inevitable. They’re being mainstreamed in the name of defeating Covid along with financial and identity security:

• RFID chips and subdermal quantum dot tattoos for medical records, ID, paying for goods, and more
  • BMJ, “FDA approves implantable chip to access medical records”
  • Bio-IT World, “Implantable Pharmacy-On-a-Chip Now Under Fasttrack Development”
  • Popular Mechanics, “The World’s Smallest Implantable Chip Might Save Your Life One Day”
  • MIT News, “Storing medical information below the skin’s surface”
  • Healthcare in Europe, “Nano-patch stores medical information under the skin”
  • Scientific American, “Invisible Ink Could Reveal whether Kids Have Been Vaccinated”
  • Fox Business, “Swedish company showcases microchip that can download COVID-19 passport status”
  • Orlando Sentinel, “Microchip Implanted in Your Skin Could Be Your Covid Vaccine Passport”
  • NBC, “ID, Wallet, Keys All In Your Hand: Sweden Moves Into The Future With Microchipping”
  • News Punch, “Dr Oz Promotes Human Microchips To Millions Of Viewers”
  • WLNS, “Lansing Piercing Shop to Offer Chip Implants”
  • WIRED, “This DIY Implant Lets You Stream Movies From Inside Your Leg”
  • Thrillist, “Man Meets Machine: What It Means to Be A Biohacker”
  • “Digital tattoos not only look cool but can perform useful tasks, like unlocking a car, entering mobile phone codes…or tracking body processes” and “Smart tattoos and other unique chips could help with identification and location. Implanted devices will likely also help to communicate thoughts normally expressed verbally through a ‘built-in’ smartphone, and potentially unexpressed thoughts or moods by reading brain waves or other signals” – Klaus Schwab in new book The Great Narrative
  • Washington Post, “Some feared hackers and the devil. Others got microchipped.”
  • Gov Tech, “Where Next for Microchip Implants?”
  • The Atlantic, “Why You’re Probably Getting a Microchip Implant Someday”
  • USA Today, “You will get chipped — eventually”: Sociologists and futurists predict that microchipping will be accepted within the next generation due to desensitization to the negative connotations and social stigma
    
• Implantable hydrogel sensors, microchips, nanoparticle and digital tattoos, smart dust, nanobots, and DNA antennas for health monitoring and tracking
  • CBS, “Military programs aiming to end pandemics forever” – DARPA’s Covid-detecting hydrogel sensor
  • Mashable, “Injecting this sensor under your skin could prevent future pandemics”
  • JGU, “Tattoo made of gold nanoparticles revolutionizes medical diagnostics”
  • Science Advances, “Application of a sub–0.1-mm3 implantable mote for in vivo real-time wireless temperature sensing”
  • Study Finds, “Future Fitbit? ‘Drawn-on-skin’ electronics may be breakthrough for health tech industry”
  • Interesting Engineering:
    • “The Smallest-Ever Injectable Chip Hints at a New Cybernetic Medicine”
    • “A Team of Chemists Have Built the World’s Tiniest Antenna Using DNA”
    • “Nanobots Will Be Flowing Through Your Body by 2030” – “Nanobots could one day be used to constantly monitor our body for maladies and other symptoms, constantly transmitting this information to a cloud for close monitoring by medical staff.”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “In 2018, scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong unveiled a new way to use nanobots within the body. Millions of tiny, magnetic shape-shifting nanoparticles can extend, merge, and collaborate in a swarm” – p. 228
    • Microsoft and Google “skinput” technology which turns a “person’s arm and hand into an interactive interface” – p. 228
    • Smart gloves, smart surgical thread, and nanomesh tattoos for diagnostics and drug delivery – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 227-28
    • Smart dust: “Each particle-computer consists of circuits and sensors capable of monitoring the environment, and even taking photographs. They can also harvest energy while suspended, using passive Wi-Fi and human body heat to power themselves. . . . trillions of smart dust particles could be released in the wind to measure air quality or take photos” – p. 381
  • More on smart dust: “They could someday also be injected or breathed in, undetected” – FTI 2018 Trends Report, p. 94
  • Radar O’Reilly, “The inevitability of smart dust”
    
• Electronic, biosensor, and data-collecting pills
  • Electronics For U, “Electronic Pill, The Holy Grail Of Healthcare Technology”
  • FDA, “FDA approves pill with sensor that digitally tracks if patients have ingested their medication”
  • Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla discusses electronic pill for mental illness, WEF 2018 (45:20)
  • New Atlas, “Under-skin sensor uses bits of gold to show bloodstream drug levels”
  • Business Insider, “Injectable Body Sensors Take Personal Chemistry to a Cell Phone Closer to Reality”
  • Entrepreneur, “Wearable Tech Is Getting a Lot More Intimate”
  • All Things Digital, “Electronic Tattoos and Passwords You Can Swallow: Google’s Regina Dugan Is a Badass”
  • Yahoo! News, “Motorola sees us wearing tattoos and popping pills instead of typing passwords in the future”
  • Threat Post, “Former DARPA Head Proposes Pills and Tattoos to Replace Passwords”
  • Entrepreneur, “Swallow This ‘Password’ Pill to Unlock Your Digital Devices”
  • WSJ, “Regina Dugan at D11” video
    
• New vaccine and medication delivery tech
  • WBIR, “‘Easier than having an injection’ | Trials underway in Knoxville for COVID-19 vaccine pill
  • Phys Org, “Self-injecting pill [SOMA] allows for oral administration of monoclonal antibodies and other injected drugs”
  • New Scientist, “We now have the technology to develop vaccines that spread themselves”
  • Econo Times, “Scientists Plan to Develop Self-Spreading Coronavirus Vaccine”
  • Study Finds, “Vaccines in your salad? Scientists growing medicine-filled plants to replace injections”
  • Science: “Researchers Turn Mosquitoes Into Flying Vaccinators”
  • UN 2019 meeting of experts: “Going Viral: Deliberately releasing GM viruses into the environment” – The pages have been deleted but you can find the flier here. promo video here, and animation about “insect allies” here
  • Medical Xpress:
    • “Nasal spray could mean needle-free COVID-19 vaccine”
    • “Novel nanoparticle SARS-CoV-2 vaccine combines immune focusing and self-assembling nanoparticles”
  • Interesting Engineering, “Scientists Just Cured the Coronavirus With Inhalable Nanobodies”
  • Science Alert, “Scientists Have Piloted a Tumbling Microbot Inside an Animal Colon For The First Time” (for delivering drug payloads directly in the body)
  • Johns Hopkins, “Johns Hopkins Researchers Engineer Tiny, Shape-Changing Machines That Deliver Medicine Efficiently to the GI Tract”
  • “For years, nanoparticles have been investigated for their potential medical applications and are likely to become the predominant means of medication delivery in the coming years” – Interesting Engineering, “Life in 2050: A Glimpse at Medicine in the Future”

Genetic modification: plants, animals, and beyond
“In the coming decades AI and biotechnology will give us godlike abilities to re-engineer life and even to create completely new life forms” – Yuval Harari at Davos, “How to Survive the 21st Century”

• GMO microbes, plants; lab-grown and 3D printed food, and strange meats
  • The Guardian, “World’s first living organism with fully redesigned DNA created”
  • Fast Company, “Lab-grown wood could let us grow furniture in a lab instead of in a forest”
  • Futurism, “Company Claims Gene-Edited Tomato Contains Neurotransmitter”
  • University of California, “Grow and eat your own vaccines?”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends vol. 12:
    • Artificial trees to collect CO2
    • 4D printing: “Imagine a heat shield that suddenly materializes during a fire, or a garden that plants itself when the ground has warmed to precisely the ideal temperature for each seed. . . If you’re thinking of the “Star Trek” replicator, you’re not far off”
    • “Human Genome Project-write (HGP-write) [is] a synthetic biology initiative, and it’s a grand-scale collaboration to synthesize new species of microbes, plants, and animals.”
    • Off-planet terraforming
    • Hybrid animal-plant meats
    • The bug protein market “could top $1 billion by 2023”
  • All 3DP, 3D Printed Food: All You Need to Know in 2021 – (one stated benefit being the incentivizing of consumption of insects and synthetic foods)
  • WEF, “A psychologist explains why we find some food disgusting – and why it matters” – Our disgust reflexes are in the way of sustainable lifestyle choices such as eating insects. “Marketing campaigns could help shift attitudes about what is ‘natural’. It has been done before”
  • Bloomberg, “Crickets, Mealworms and Grasshoppers Are Human Food, EU Says”
  • Robotic kitchens, wombat, penguin, and bumble bee meat, lab-grown breast milk – NY Post, “Futurists predict how we’ll one day eat, vacation and work”
  • LA Times, “The first lab-grown meat for sale could come from this Singapore startup that’s re-creating shrimp”
  • Motherboard, “With the Googleburger and Soylent, Silicon Valley Is Officially on a Quest for Food 2.0”
  • “We suspect that we could adapt to human flesh if need be” – Newsweek, “Cannibalism is Common in the Animal Kingdom – Here’s Why for Humans it’s the Ultimate Taboo”
  • Metro News, “You can now eat human steak, scientists insist it’s not cannibalism”
  • Vice, “The Guy Who Wants to Sell Lab-Grown Salami Made of Kanye West Is ‘100% Serious’”
  • Voice of Europe, “‘Eating human flesh could save the planet’ – Swedish university professor says”
  • Newsela, “Would You Eat Food Made From Trash?”
  • Hey, it all makes sense in a world where 40% of children already think hot dogs are vegetables
    
• GMO and digital hybridization of insects and animals; chimera creation
  • Futurism, “Scientists Alarmed by Lab Grown Human-Animal Hybrids”
  • Live Science, “First Pig-Monkey Chimeras Were Just Created in China”
  • Popular Mechanics, “Uh-Oh, Scientists Used Human Genes to Make Monkey Brains Bigger”
  • The Guardian, “First human-monkey chimera raises concern among scientists”
  • Alabama Baptist, “Frightening future of chimera research tests moral, ethical boundaries of science”
  • Washington Times, “Man-monkey hybrid sparks fears of ‘Frankenstein’ creatures”
  • Daily Mail, “Mini-human brains with their own blood vessels are grown in the lab for the first time in a breakthrough that could help stroke victims”
  • Target Malaria, “Target Malaria proceeded with a small-scale release of genetically modified sterile male mosquitoes in Bana, a village in Burkina Faso”
  • Futurism, “Florida Is Releasing Almost a Billion Gene-Hacked Mosquitoes”
  • Activist Post, “Despite Public Health Experts’ Warnings and Opposition, EPA Approves Experimental Release of Billions More Genetically Modified Mosquitoes”
  • Grand Challenges, “Production of a Transgenic Mosquito, as a Flying Syringe, to Deliver Protective Vaccine via Saliva”
  • Last American Vagabond, “Scientists Accuse DARPA Of Genetically Modifying Insects For Bioweapon To Spread Agricultural Viruses”
  • Washington Post, “Navy grants $750,000 to develop bomb-sniffing locusts”
  • Smithsonian, “Turning Dragonflies into Drones”: “They could also potentially be used for surveillance—after all, who would notice an insect buzzing overhead?”
  • Patented by Walmart, “robot bees could be the future of agriculture” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 377
    

Genetic modification of humans, transhumanism, and artificial immortality

Read the international Transhumanist Declaration here

“Biological and digital systems are converging, and could change the way we work, live, and even evolve as a species. More than a technological change, this biodigital convergence may transform the way we understand ourselves and cause us to redefine what we consider human or natural” – Policy Horizons Canada, Exploring Biodigital Convergence

The 2002 report “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance” (US National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce) says that “we will alter human evolution within 20 years by combining what we know of nanotechnology, biotechnology, IT and cognitive sciences. . . . [it] calls for a broad-based research program to improve human performance leading to telepathy, machine-to-human communication, amplified personal sensory devices and enhanced intellectual capacity. . . . People may download their consciousnesses into computers or other bodies even on the other side of the solar system, or participate in a giant “hive mind” . . . an enormous, single, intelligent entity.”

“In the coming decades, for the first time in history, humanity itself will undergo a radical revolution. Not only our tools and politics but our bodies and minds will be transformed by genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and brain-computer interfaces. Bodies and minds will be the main products of the 21^st century economy” – Harari qtd. in Interesting Engineering, “The Cyborg Revolution: Are They Here Yet?”

• Artificial wombs, skin, blood, cells, sperm, eggs; stem cell bioprinting, 3D printed organs, GM animal organs in humans
  • Lab-made retinas with zooming cameras, night vision – Future Timeline
  • Synthetic designer cells – FTI 2021 Tech Trends vol. 12
  • PBS, “In a first, U.S. surgeons transplant a genetically modified pig heart into a human patient”
  • Medical Xpress, “Living skin can now be 3-D-printed with blood vessels included”
  • Singularity Hub, “New Progress in the Biggest Challenge With 3D Printed Organs”
  • Stem cells to print replacement organs, bones, skin, and more – Interesting Engineering, “Life in 2050: A Glimpse at Medicine in the Future”
  • Futurism:
    • “New Artificial Blood Could Be Transfused Into Any Patient”
    • “Lab Grows Human Tear Glands That Can Actually Cry”
    • “Scientists Invent Artificial Skin That Can Feel Pain”
    • “Artificial ‘Electronic Skin’ Could Warn Humans of Impending Danger”
    • “Doctor Behind Failed “Anti-Aging” Blood Clinic Tries Again”
    • “Scientists Want to Grow Babies in Giant, Liquid-Filled Balloons”
  • South China Morning Post, “Chinese scientists create AI nanny to look after babies in artificial womb”
  • The Guardian, “The family in 2050: artificial wombs, robot carers and the rise of single fathers by choice”
    
• Human biology as software, DNA for data storage, era of the read-write genome
  • Moderna’s mRNA Platform– mRNA technology as an operating system, program, or app and the “software of life”
  • Leo Hohmann, “Moderna’s Top Scientist: ‘We Are Actually Hacking The Software Of Life'”
  • “Introducing Isomorphic Labs” – biology as an information processing system, “digital biology”
  • Psy Post, “Neuroscientists believe deep neural networks could help illustrate how psychedelics alter consciousness”
  • New Atlas, “CRISPR used to build dual-core computers inside human cells”
  • Microsoft, “With a “hello,” Microsoft and UW demonstrate first fully automated DNA data storage”
  • Scientists have encoded video, image, audio, and text files, an operating system, and a gift card on human DNA. “The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, a group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, intends to store an exabyte of data—roughly a million terabyte-sized hard drives—in a blob of DNA” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends
    
• Designer babies, genome sequencing, precision medicine, CRISPR, DIY gene editing, synthetic biology, age reversal, super intelligence, and more
  • “The CRISPR-Cas9 system can be used as a “cut-and-paste” tool to modify genomes. As a DNA-editing tool, CRISPR-Cas9 can remove or introduce new genes as well as silence or activate genes.” – Bite Size Bio, History of CRISPR
  • “In the coming decades, improvements in genome editing are expected to lead to ‘drag and drop’ genetic engineering…” – Interesting Engineering, “Life in 2050: A Glimpse at Medicine in the Future”
  • Study Finds, “Male infertility cure? Scientists create new sperm cells using monkey stem cells”
  • The ODIN, DIY Bacterial Gene Engineering CRISPR Kit
  • Daily Mail, “US military to start testing ‘anti-aging’ pill that could slow neurodegeneration and decrease inflammation as part of Pentagon’s goal to ‘improve human performance'”
  • DNYUZ, “The Cryonics Industry Would Like to Give You the Past Year, and Many More, Back”
  • Telegraph, “Humans to be genetically-modified in Europe for the first time this year using gene-splicing therapy”
  • STAT, “Fertility clinics around the world asked ‘CRISPR babies’ scientist for how-to help”
  • MIT Technology Review, “Disgraced CRISPR scientist had plans to start a designer-baby business”
  • Futurism:
    • “Scientist Who Gene-Hacked Babies ‘Likely’ Boosted Their Brainpower”
    • “Communist Party Secretly Supported Chinese Gene-Edited Babies”
    • “Five Couples Agree to CRISPR Their Babies to Avoid Deafness”
    • “New Injection Can Gene-Edit Specific Parts of the Brain, Scientists Say”
    • “Expert Says Children Will Soon Have More than Two Biological Parents”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Vol 12:
    • “Expect widespread clinical use of [CRISPR precision DNA editing] technology this decade.”
    • “Researchers are developing a new technique that might someday enable people to upgrade their children before birth”
  • “Through manipulations of DNA, the looks, hair color, athleticism and even intelligence of a future child will be filtered into the embryo. And no need for moms to deal with pregnancy: The lab-created kid will come to maturation in an artificial uterus” – NY Post, “Futurists predict how we’ll one day eat, vacation and work”
  • “Very wealthy parents might be offered options to edit and enhance their future children. On a grander scale, this technology could be attractive to world leaders who play the long game in geopolitical power. Developing a population of Super Humans—physically strong, mentally powerful—would be a huge strategic advantage” – FTI 2018 Trends Report, p. 158
  • AJMC, “Should Everyone Have Their Genome Sequenced at Birth?”
  • Science, “Is it time for a universal genetic forensic database?”
  • Unlimited Hangout, “A ‘Leap’ toward Humanity’s Destruction”: Regina Dugan again?
    
• Human augmentation and super-soldiers
  • Yahoo! News, “US Space Force will create ‘augmented humans’ for ‘unimaginable’ military strategies, chief scientist says”
  • The Conversation, “From bioweapons to super soldiers: how the UK is joining the genomic technology arms race”
  • Metro, “US Space Force scientist says military ‘human augmentation’ is necessary in next decade”
  • Forbes, “Russia Will Genetically Test Soldiers To Identify The Best Fighters And Thinkers”
  • “Governments, corporations, and armies are likely to use technology to enhance human skills that they need like intelligence and discipline while neglecting other human skills like compassion, artistic sensitivity, and spirituality” – Harari, “How to Survive the 21st Century”
  • IEEE Spectrum, “Transhumanism: Where Physical and Digital Worlds Meld – New whitepaper explains how augmented machines and augmented humans will represent physical reality”
  • Study Finds, “‘Superhero’ vaccine based on Olympic athlete DNA could provide ‘body-wide genetic upgrade'” – predicted within 10 years by Stanford professor
  • U.K. Ministry of Defense and German Office for Defense Planning, “Human Augmentation — The Dawn of a New Paradigm, a Strategic ImplicationsProject”:
    • They envision the human as a platform which can be augmented with heightened senses, cognition, and ability, and altered in psychological and social behavior
    • “Human augmentation has the potential to … change the meaning of what it means to be a human”
    • “It could be argued that treatments involving novel vaccination processes and gene and cell therapies are examples of human augmentation already in the pipeline”
    • “There may even be ‘moral obligations’ to augment people, they say, such as when it would ‘promote well-being’ or protect a population from a ‘novel threat’” Technocracy News, “Transhuman: Is Humanity 2.0 The New ‘Master Race’?”

• Cloning, artificial resurrection, and the search for immortality
  “I’m transhuman because I’m doing everything I can do to overcome death with science and technology” – Zoltan Istvan, 2020 Transhumanist Party presidential candidate
  • Global Times, “Animal cloning finds big market in China”
  • Input Mag, “Bring in the clones: Instagrammers are genetically replicating their pets”
  • CNET, “Using CRISPR to resurrect the dead”
  • Nature, “Church to de-extinct woolly mammoths”
  • Organic Prepper, “Resurrecting the Dead…Digitally: One Step Closer to the ‘Singularity’”
  • Futurism:
    • “An End to Aging: Can Science Allow Humans to To Become Immortal?”
    • “A Scientist Thinks Someone Alive Today Will Live to be 1,000”
  • Newsweek, “Silicon Valley Is Trying to Make Humans Immortal—and Finding Some Success”
  • News.com.au, “Google executive Ray Kurzweil’s plan to live forever”
  • Interesting Engineering, “Je Bezos-Backed Lab Hired Nobel Laureate Top Scientists to Beat Death”
  • The Atlantic, “Some Questions for a Man Who Expects He Could Live to 150”
  • Yahoo!, “‘A.rtificial I.mmortality’ Director Ann Shin Aims for the Horizon”
  • The Immortalists Club: “A global community and futurist think-tank.” According to the 2^nd issue of their magazine, “To be Human is to be Transhuman.” Say what?
    
• Dangers in DNA data collection, synthetic biology, and genetic modification
  • New York Times, “As D.I.Y. Gene Editing Gains Popularity, ‘Someone Is Going to Get Hurt’”
  • Live Action, “Ethically problematic Crispr gene-editing technology causing unexpected problems in embryos”
  • New York Times, “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA”
  • WIRED, “Synthetic Biology Could Bring a Pox on Us All”
  • DIY biohacking could lead to unintentional release of bioweapons into the world – FTI 2021 Tech Trends vol. 12
  • Military Review, “Ultramicro, Nonlethal, and Reversible: Looking Ahead to Military Biotechnology”
  • Defense One, “Weaponizing Biotech: How China’s Military Is Preparing for a ‘New Domain of Warfare’”
  • “Genetic information could be used to exploit or attack specific ethnic groups” – DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report
  • PJ Media, “Chilling: China Discussed Bioweapons Targeting Specific Races”
  • Reuters, “Exclusive: China gene firm providing worldwide COVID tests worked with Chinese military”
  • Technocracy News, “Claim: China Tried To Collect US DNA Samples From Nose Swabs”
  • Last American Vagabond, “Bill Gates, China, 23andMe, And Your DNA”
  • Epoch Times, “Is Beijing Weaponizing Your DNA?”
  • DNA databases such as GEDmatch and MyHeritage have been hacked, and this data “could be used for a number of purposes, from blackmail to government espionage” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 319
  • Fast Company:
    • “The FTC is investigating DNA firms like 23andMe and Ancestry over privacy”
    • “Privacy in 2034: A corporation owns your DNA (and maybe your body)”
  • “Most Americans would sign over rights to their DNA data for $99” –FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 104
  • Free Thought Project, “FOIA Docs Reveal US Military Developing Genetic Extinction Weapon to Eradicate Entire Species”
  • Scroll, “Stranger than fiction: Did the CIA conduct secret mosquito experiments in India in the 1970s?”
  • Last American Vagabond, “The Complete History of Monsanto, the World’s Most Evil Corporation”
  • National Academies Press, “A Proposed Framework for Identifying Potential Biodefense Vulnerabilities Posed by Synthetic Biology: Interim Report”
  • Exploring Biodigital Convergence:
    • “Biodigital convergence relies on a wide array of biological data, which may change the way citizens relate to businesses that provide services. The relationship between firms and individuals may require higher levels of trust, as firms seek access to highly intimate data about our lives and bodies”
    • “The data-reliant nature of biodigital convergence means that the demand for data could increase substantially – particularly human, animal, plant, and bacterial data. Large platforms could potentially gather and control large amounts of information about individuals, their context, and the natural world. Some platforms could attempt to capture value by operating a closed biodigital ecosystem”
  • Historian Yuval Harari:
    • This “might be the defining equation of life in the 21st Century — B x C x D = AHH — which means Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals the Ability to Hack Humans” – “How to Survive the 21st Century” – Davos, 2020
    • “New technologies will soon give some corporations and governments the ability to hack human beings . . . if this power falls into the hands of a 21st Century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history, and we already have a number of applicants for the job of 21st Century Stalin” – Davos, 2020
    • “Those who control the data, control the future of humanity and life itself” and “if too much of the data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humanity will split, not into classes, it will split into different species” – Davos, 2018
  • Veritas Genetics, “Next in the Genomics Revolution: The Era of the ‘Social Genome’”:
    • “Every newborn in the US will be sequenced, and their genomic information used to guide their healthcare from day one”
    • Your genomic information will be monetized, managed, and integrated into services such as insurance, dating services, reproductive services, AI assistants, Amazon Prime
    • “We’re talking about the ubiquitous integration of your personal genomic information into key aspects of everyday life—healthcare, nutrition, and exercise; social interactions; finances; and business—coupled with the increased application of genetic engineering and synthetic biology”
    • “Straight-tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google will increasingly acquire health-tech companies despite consumer distrust”
    • and “that’s just scratching the surface of what’s to come”
  • “The revolutions occurring in biotechnology and AI, which are redefining what it means to be human by pushing back the current thresholds of life span, health, cognition, and capabilities, will compel us to redefine our moral and ethical boundaries” – Klaus Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond”
  • “A more permissive R&D environment could accelerate the decline of ethical constraints and restraints. . . . The nearest approximation to an ethical framework could become a form of secular utilitarianism, in an otherwise amoral scientific culture” – DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report
  • “As technology and interfacing improve, will the abilities possessed by cyborgs eventually change the rules and fabric of social life? What happens to 100 percent organic humans? Will they be sidelined? Only time will tell” – Interesting Engineering, “The Cyborg Revolution: Are They Here Yet?”
    

Editing, upgrading, controlling, cyborging, plugging in, and uploading the brain

• Pills, magnets, ultrasound devices, brain implants and interfaces that can alter, delete, or restore memories, send information directly to the brain, delete negative thoughts, treat disorders, and monitor and control moods, brain states, morality, and behavior
  • Vice, “Memory Editing Technology Will Give Us Perfect Recall and Let Us Alter Memories at Will”
  • National Post, “If you could erase the worst memory of your life, would you? Scientists are working on a pill for that”
  • The Guardian, “Genetically engineered ‘Magneto’ protein remotely controls brain and behaviour”
  • Activist Post, “Implant ‘zaps brain when it detects neural activity associated with irrational thoughts.’ (U.S. Study)”
  • Nautilus, “The Implant That Can Control Your Brain”
  • Life Site, “Scientists try to develop a ‘morality pill’. What could go wrong?”
  • Study Finds, “You, but better: Scientists designing method to remove fear, boost confidence via brain stimulation”
  • WEF, “Brainwaves could help us monitor mental health, says Alphabet”
  • NPR, “Are We Ready for an Implant that Can Change Our Moods?”
  • Harvard, “Brain-machine interfaces may be used to study and regulate mood”
  • Futurism:
    • “Gaming CEO: Brain Interfaces Will Allow Us to Edit Our Feelings”
    • “Doctors are Using Human Brain Implants to Fight Drug Addiction”
  • 1993 US Patent #5,213,562: “Method of Inducing Mental, Emotional and Physical States of Consciousness, Including Specific Mental Activity, in Human Beings”
  • WEF, “Mind control using sound waves? We ask a scientist how it works”
  • Galvani: Precision implant-based neuromodulation therapy
  • iMediSync: “The first-ever integrated EEG and neurotherapeutics device providing telemental care through an AI digital brain health platform”
  • SAP and EMOTIV: “Adaptive assistance for improved well-being and productivity at work”
  • “Where it gets weird is when who you are becomes editable through a BCI” – Gabe Newell qtd., Organic Prepper, “Brain-Computer Interfaces: Don’t Worry, It’s Just a ‘Game'”

• Suggested use of such technology for Covid and climate change measures compliance
  • The Conversation, “‘Morality pills’ may be the US’s best shot at ending the coronavirus pandemic, according to one ethicist”
  • Crutchfield, “Compulsory moral bioenhancement should be covert”
  • ACSH, “Bioethics Professor Suggests Adding ‘Mind Control’ Hormones to Water Supply to Fight COVID”: “The defectors who need moral enhancement are also the least likely to sign up for it. As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply”
  • New Scientist, “Morality 2.0: How manipulating our minds could save the world”

• Genetic links to theistic beliefs, neuromodulation with magnets to reduce belief in God and alter political attitudes
  • Independent, “Disabling parts of the brain with magnets can weaken faith in God and change attitudes to immigrants, study finds”
  • “History teaches that investment in cherished group and religious values can bring forth acts of both heroic valor and horrific injustice. Understanding the psychological and biological determinants of increases in ideological commitment may ultimately help us to identify the situational triggers of, and individuals most susceptible to, this phenomenon, and thereby gain some leverage over the zealous acts that follow” – Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Journal (2016), “Neuromodulation of group prejudice and religious belief”
  • International Journal of Genetic Science, “VMAT2 Gene Molecular study of 2,000 peoples in the Religious Behavior and Belief in God of the citizens of the city of Tabriz in IRAN”
  • Medical Hypotheses, “Genospirituality: Genetic engineering for spiritual and religious enhancement”
  • Could a utilitarian ethic motivate the use of above technologies to change religious belief in the name of environment, social justice, and health policy?
    • Journal of Religious Health, “Trust in God and/or Science? Sociodemographic Differences in the Effects of Beliefs in an Engaged God and Mistrust of the COVID-19 Vaccine”
    • Washington Post, “Opinion: Most evangelical objections to vaccines have nothing to do with Christianity”
    • Yahoo!, “Christians who oppose masking have ‘the spirit of antichrist,’ religion professor says”
    • PubMed, “Persuading US White evangelicals to vaccinate for COVID-19: Testing message effectiveness in fall 2020 and spring 2021”
    • Baptist News, “Oregon is burning while most white Christians deny climate science” and “the inability of so many white Christians to hear the urgency of climate science suggests the depth to which the white church is invested in white supremacy”
    • Ms. Magazine, “How Christian Schools and Homeschooling Teach Supremacist Conspiracies”
    • Baptists News Global, “Why are Christians so susceptible to conspiracy?”
      
• Mind-reading tech and brain-to-brain interfaces
  “Whether you like it or not, machines that can literally read human brains are coming to consumer electronics. What’s the worst that could happen?” – Interesting Engineering, “Yes, There’s Really A Neural Interface at CES That Reads Your Brain Signals”
  • Massive Sci, “With new technology, mind control is no longer science-fiction”
  • Digital Trends, “Frighteningly accurate ‘mind reading’ AI reads brain scans to guess what you’re thinking”
  • C4ISRNET, “Could soldiers silently communicate using brain signals in the future?”
  • Axios, “Advertisers want to mine your brain”
  • MIT Technology Review, “Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that reads your mind”
  • Futurism, “China Unveils First Chip Designed Specifically for Mind-Reading”
  • Bloomberg, “Can a $110 Million Helmet Unlock the Secrets of the Mind?”
  • Vice, “The Most Advanced Human Brain-to-Brain Interface Ever Made”
  • RT, “Mind-reading robot tested on humans – reports”
  • Digital Trends, “Brain-reading headphones are here to give you telekinetic control”
  • Futurism, “Startup Builds Brain-Reading Helmet That Scans Your Brain In Infrared”
  • Science Alert, “Scientists Have Connected The Brains of 3 People, Enabling Them to Share Thoughts”
  • “Scientists discovered how to establish two-way communication channels between lucid dreamers” using brain-computer interfaces – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 59
    
• Brain-computer/AI interfaces using microchips, implants, magnetoelectric nanoparticles, and other tech; backing up / uploading your brain into the cloud, onto a chip
  Neural implants “are expected to become commonplace by mid-century” – Interesting Engineering, ““Life in 2050: A Glimpse at Medicine in the Future””
  
  In 2015, technocrat Ray Kurzweil predicted that nanobots will plug our brains into the internet by the 2030s, when we face the Singularity (AI surpasses human intelligence and ability). Take this man seriously – of his predictions from 1999, the vast majority came to pass, including:
  “• The rise of portable computing. • The availability of wearable computing. • The removal of keyboards from portable devices. • Cables disappearing in favour of wireless technology. • Computer displays built into eyeglasses, and, • The distribution of media such as books, music, and movies in an entirely digital form” – “Artificial intelligence, human brain to merge in 2030s, says futurist Kurzweil”
  
  • Neuralink
    • Business Insider, “Elon Musk said Neuralink hopes to start implanting its brain chips in humans in 2022, later than he anticipated”
    • Analytics India Mag, “Neuralink Has A Nemesis: Paypal Mafia Split Over Brain Gains”
    • Observer, “Neuralink’s Monkey Experiment Raises Questions From Scientists and Tech Ethicist”
    • Forbes, “Hacking Humans: How Neuralink May Give AI The Keys To Our Brains”
  • Synchron
    • Truth Unmuted, “Elon Musk Neuralink Rival Cleared by FDA to Test Brain Chip in Humans”
    • Tech Times, “Paralyzed Man Creates First-Ever Tweet Using Only His Thoughts Thanks to Implanted Brain Chip”
  • Samsung
    • Interesting Engineering, “Samsung Wants to ‘Copy and Paste’ the Brain Into a Chip”
  • DARPA
    • Battelle, “Battelle-Led Team Wins DARPA Award to Develop Injectable, Bi-Directional Brain Computer Interface”
    • Futurism, “DARPA is Funding Nanoparticles that Permeate Brain to Read Neural Signals”
    • From the Interface, “How DARPA drives Brain Machine Interface Research”
  • Facebook
    • BuzzFeed, “Facebook Is Developing A Tool To Summarize Articles So You Don’t Have To Read Them”
    • Engadget, “Facebook acquires neural monitoring startup CTRL-labs”
    • Independent, “Tech giants want to read our thoughts – and the implications are frightening”
    • MIT Technology Review, “Facebook’s Sci-Fi Plan for Typing with Your Mind and Hearing with Your Skin”
    • The Guardian, “Facebook has 60 people working on how to read your mind” — including Regina Dugan at Building 8. Remember her?
  • Google
    • Interesting Engineering, “Google ‘Brain Implants’ Could Make Learning Obsolete in 20 Years, Says AI Expert”
  • More
    • The Guardian, “Are brain implants the future of thinking?”
    • Interesting Engineering, “There’s A Neural Interface at CES That Reads Your Brain Signals”
    • Independent, “Brain-Computer Interface Will Make People Telepathic, Scientists Say”
    • Business Wire, “INBRAIN Neuroelectronics Secures $17 Million in Funding for First AI-Powered Graphene-Brain Interface”
    • 6G will be necessary to “support technologies that demand real-time awareness—which are likely to include human-machine interfaces that intuitively understand our intentions” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 366
    • Forbes:
      • “Brain-Computer Interfaces And Mind Control Move One Step Closer To Becoming Reality”
      • “Hacking The Brain: The Future Computer Chips In Your Head”
    • Independent, “By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain…”
    • SingularityHub, “How Will Merging Man and Machine Change Our Conscious Experience?”
    • Huff Post, “A Brain Implant That Registers Trauma Could Help Prevent Rape and Violent Crime — So Why Don’t We Have It Yet?”
    • 2045 Initiative – proposed upload of brain to the cloud
      
• Unnecessary cognitive liberty warning section:
  • Brian E. Moore, Lt Col, “The Brain Computer Interface Future: Time for a Strategy”
  • Yahoo, “Brain Tech Advances Show Urgent Need for ‘Neuro-Rights’”
  • Next Big Future, “Thought Transparent World and Privacy”
  • Axios, “Brains are the last frontier of privacy”
  • Video: do we have a “right to cognitive liberty?”
  • Futurism, “Experts: Artificial Intelligence Could Hijack Brain-Computer Interfaces”
  • Truthstream Media, “Theyr’e Spending Billions to Chip Our Brains” video
    

Creating new realities in outer space and the digital realm

• Space tourism, habitats on Mars, the moon, in Low Earth Orbit
  • WEF, “By the 2030s, we’ll be ready to start sending people to Mars”
  • Futurism, “Elon Musk: We Have to Get to Mars Because of ‘Nuclear Armageddon’ on Earth”
  • Euro News, “Plans for the first sustainable city on Mars unveiled”
  • Space, “Can We Genetically Engineer Humans to Survive Missions to Mars?”
  • Interesting Engineering, “The Science of Becoming ‘Interplanetary’: How Can Humans Live on Mars?”
  • Science of Singularity, “By 2050, the Earth-Moon region could be a settled, commercial haven: NASA researchers”
  • Reuters, “NASA eyeing inflatable space lodges for moon, Mars and beyond”
  • CBS News, “Scientists want to send 335 million seed, sperm and egg samples to the moon to create a lunar Noah’s Ark”
    
• Deep fake videos, CGI resurrection, synthesized celebrities, virtual pop stars, holograms, hypnotic cinema, and personalized “parallel reality displays”
  • Hollywood Reporter, “James Dean Reborn in CGI for Vietnam War Action-Drama (Exclusive)”
  • Philly Mag, “It’s Official: Dead Musicians Are Now Touring as Holograms”
  • MIC, “How Creepy Holographic Concerts Are Transforming the Future of the Music Business”
  • Phys Org, “True holographic movies are within grasp”
  • The Verge, “Andrew Yang unveils plans to campaign remotely using a 3D hologram”
  • Epoch Times, “China Unveils AI News Anchor That’s Almost Indistinguishable From a Real Human”
  • DVE Holographics: Holographic concerts, corporate events, meetings and more
  • Futurism:
    • “Scientists Create Holograms You Can See, Hear, and Feel”
    • “New K-Pop Band Will Include an Entirely CGI Singer”
    • “Deepfake Pioneer: ‘Perfectly Real’ Fake Vids Are Six Months Away”
    • “Virtual Music Star Hatsune Miku to Perform at Coachella”
    • “Google Debuts Dystopic 3D Prison-Style Video Chat: Project Starline”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “In 2021, China’s annual Spring Festival Gala on the country’s state broadcaster (CCTV) included performances from synthesized celebrities. With an estimated billion people watching, the AI copies mimicked their human counterparts without prescripted behaviors, speeches, or routines” – p. 64
    • “As smart eyewear edges out the smartphone as our primary personal device, holograms, variously combined with deepfake technology and synthetic media, may soon inhabit our everyday environments. They’ll represent a range of artificially generated characters, celebrity stand-ins, brand spokespeople, historical figures, and lost loved ones” – p. 126
    • “Imagine an entirely new genre of soap opera, where AI systems learn from your digital behavior, biometrics, and personal data, and use details from your personal life for the storylines of synthetic characters. In an ultimate expression of a “reality show,” synthetic characters would play to an audience of exactly one: you” – p. 134
    • Synthetic media, sex tapes, and violence – p. 137
  • Variety, “Mass Hypnosis Screenings Planned for 2022 Göteborg Film Festival”
  • Delta promo video for parallel reality display technology, CES Las Vegas 2020
  • CNET, “I hear voices: Could highly directional sound advertising be the next big thing?”
  • Washington Post, “PSYOPS: When Seeing and Hearing Isn’t Believing”
  • 2045 Initiative‘s ultimate goal: brain upload into holographic avatars
    
• Web 3.0, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), Extended Reality (XR), Diminished Reality (DR), spatial displays, and telepresence “I do think that a significant portion of the population of developed countries, and eventually all countries, will have AR experiences every day, almost like eating three meals a day. It will become that much a part of you” – Apple CEO Tim Cook, FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 120
  • SingularityHub, “The Four Converging Technologies Giving Rise to the Spatial Web”
  • The Drive, “Pilot In A Real Aircraft Just Fought An AI-Driven Virtual Enemy Jet For The First Time”
  • Futurism, “Facebook Shows Off Neural “Wristbands” to Control AR Glasses”
  • Daily Mail:
    • “Apple’s augmented reality headset that could cost $1,000 will launch in spring of 2022”
    • “Microphones in Amazon’s new smart glasses that give wearer access to Alexa on-the-go could secretly listen in to all conversations within earshot”
  • CNBC, “There’s a race to replace our iPhones with smart glasses we wear everywhere”
  • “The first generation of smart eyewear resembles traditional glasses, but future iterations will incorporate the technology into something akin to a contact lens” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 124
  • Interesting Engineering, “VR Without Avatars? Canon Announces A Video Call Moonshot at CES”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • DR “is not fully immersive, leaving you anchored in your physical environment but with certain visuals, sounds, or other sensory elements suppressed” – p. 122
    • “Spatial displays offer the magic of virtual reality without having to strap on a head-mounted display. Instead, a flat screen projects objects in what looks like a hyper-realistic, three-dimensional diorama” – p. 127
    • OrCam MyEye camera “patent filings describe methods for ‘lifelogging’—storing details about what an individual has done, where they’ve been, and who they’ve met for recall later” – p. 142
  • DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report:
    • “By [2036] it is likely that the majority of the global population will find it difficult to ‘turn the outside world off’. ICT40 is likely to be so pervasive that people are permanently connected to a network or two-way data stream with inherent challenges to civil liberties; being disconnected could be considered suspicious”
    • “Increased access to and the rapid cultural assimilation of technology will render future generations increasingly vulnerable to the deliberate or unintentional disruption of technology-based utilities. Sophisticated societies are likely to be more vulnerable to such disruption as they increasingly exist in a virtual environment . . .”
      
• Internet of Senses and the wearables to enable it
  • Futurism:
    • “Will This Glove Finally Let You Touch Stuff in VR?”
    • “Facebook Shows Off Gloves That Allow You to “Feel” VR Objects”
  • Interesting Engineering:
    • “Teslasuit Brings Virtual Reality to a New Level: Not Just For Gaming”
    • “Emerging Consumer Trends Evolving Toward 2030: The Internet of Senses”
    • “The Internet of Senses: Your Brain Is the User Interface”
  • “Acoustic sensing,” touch simulation, and more – Business Insider, “Facebook’s vision for a hyperrealistic metaverse includes ‘body pose tracking,’ ‘pupil steering,’ clothing that wrinkles with movement, and a ‘magnetic sensor system’ worn around the torso,…”
  • Patently Apple, “A new Facebook Patent provides us with an overview of their plans for AR Smartglasses, a Futuristic AR Headband, Smartgloves & more”
    
• Digital Twins in virtual worlds
  • Independent, “6G will Bring ‘Digital Twins’, Samsung Says – and it’s Two Years Ahead of Schedule”
  • Amazon, “Announcing AWS IoT TwinMaker (Preview), a service that makes it easier to build digital twins”
  • MSN, “Mumbai firm starts programme to create ‘digital twin’ of 100 Indian cities”
  • Hype Beast, “Here Are Mark Zuckerberg’s Ambitious Plans for Building Out the Metaverse”
  • Facebook patent for “avatar fidelity and personalization”
  • “Human ‘digital twins’ could become valuable assets beyond healthcare. Social services, the justice system, environmental services, and education providers may all need to be trusted with, manage, and act on increasingly intimate data that relate to people and the world around them” – Exploring Biodigital Convergence
  • IEEE’s Roberto Saracco predicted that “The boundary between humans and machines will become fuzzier and fuzzier, leading to a fusion between a digital twin and its physical twin. . . . The resulting reality, the one that we will perceive, will exist partially in the physical world and partly in cyberspace.”
  • Digital fashion and make-up for your digital twin avatar – FTI 2021 Tech Trends, p. 173-75
  • Study Finds, “‘Virtual babies’ who grow up in real time will be commonplace by 2070, expert predicts”
  • Fortune, “Your whole identity could soon live in ‘Soulbound tokens’ on web3, Ethereum’s co-founder says

• Let me interject here to mention the rise of “Simulation Theory”
  • Nick Bostrom, “Simulation Argument”
  • Scientific American, “Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50”
  • The Next Web, “Physicists working with Microsoft think the universe is a self-learning computer”
  • Extreme Tech, “Neil deGrasse Tyson says it’s ‘very likely’ the universe is a simulation”
  • WRAL TechWire, “Are we living in a computer simulation – a real Matrix – without knowing it?”
  • New York Times, “Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Let’s Not Find Out”
  • DNYUZ, “We’re Probably in a Simulation. How Much Should That Worry Us?”
  • Futurism, “Famous Hacker Thinks We’re Living in Simulation, Wants to Escape”
    
• The Metaverse
  If we already live in a simulation, why not enter another, more customizable one?
  
  The name Metaverse comes from Neal Stephenson’s 1992 sci-fi book Snow Crash: “After a worldwide economic collapse, the US has been broken up into different regions owned by powerful organizations and entrepreneurs who use their regions for various purposes, often nefarious in nature. People spend much of their time in the ‘Metaverse’, a virtual multi-player world where people own virtual homes, visit ‘bars’ and go celebrity spotting” – DailyMail, “AR Pioneer Warns That Metaverse Could Make “Reality Disappear”
  
  The “distinction between being offline and online will be much harder to delineate” – WEF, “What is the metaverse? And why should we care?”
  
  According to Melanie Subin of The Future Today Institute, “Using a ‘blend of physical and behavioral biometrics, emotion recognition, sentiment analysis, and personal data,’ the metaverse will be able to create a customized and enhanced reality for each person”
  
  Don’t worry, it’s entirely unrelated to this idea: Futurism, “Farmer Puts VR Headsets on Cows to Simulate Green Pastures”
  
• A bit about the Metaverse and who’s involved:
  • Matthew Ball, “The Metaverse Primer” series
  • CBS, “The Metaverse is already here: 5 companies building our virtual reality future”
  • Games Industry, “What is the metaverse, and why is it worth so much money?”
  • Seoul Metropolitan Government, “Seoul, First Local Gov’t to Start New-Concept Public Service with ‘Metaverse Platform”
  • MSN, “Chinese cities are piling into the metaverse”
  • Interesting Engineering:
    • “Walmart Plans to Join the Metaverse With Its Digital Currency and NFTs”
    • “Microsoft Enters the ‘Metaverse’ Race, Won’t Let Meta Have A Free Run”
  • CNBC, “Bill Gates says the metaverse will host most of your office meetings within ‘two or three years’ — here’s what it will look like”
  • Apps turn work spaces into a Zelda game – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 170
  • “#Metaverse | Walmart VR Virtual Shopping Experience SXSW” video
  • Business insider, “Disney patents metaverse technology for theme parks that would track visitors while projecting personalized 3D images for them”
  • CNBC, “Investors are paying millions for virtual land in the Metaverse”
  • Future Tech Trends, “Apple could replace your iPhone with VR contact lenses that let you live in the metaverse, experts claim” – using “RealityOS” software. Can’t make this stuff up.
  • DailyMail, “No Zuck-in way! Mark Zuckerberg claims we will all ‘live’ in the metaverse in the future and leave reality behind for a virtual world of our own creation”
  • Games Beat, “Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney fears the Metaverse will be a proprietary technology”
  • WSJ, “Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft Weave a Fiber-Optic Web of Power”
  • The Guardian, “Move over, space. Tech billionaires have a new utopian boondoggle: the ‘metaverse’”
  • The Conversation, “The metaverse offers a future full of potential – for terrorists and extremists, too”
  • Rutherford, “The Metaverse Is Big Brother in Disguise: Freedom Meted Out by Technological Tyrants”
  • Unlimited Hangout, “Facebook and the Metaverse with Ryan Cristián” video
  • Vice, “Metaverse Company to Offer Immortality Through ‘Live Forever’ Mode”
  • Technocracy News, “WEF: Living In Metaverse Will Be ‘More Meaningful to Us Than Our Physical Lives'”
    
• Connecting to the Metaverse via brian implant?
  • “If augmented reality becomes as big as many believe it will be, we’ll need a way to interact with it. Interfacing on the move with AR glasses can’t easily be done with a mouse or by touching a mobile display. Nor is A.I. assistant-style voice interaction an obvious solution in every scenario. But a computer system which knows what you’re thinking very well could be” – Digital Trends, “Brain-reading headphones are here to give you telekinetic control”
  • Ray Kurzweil predicts that nanobots will “go into the brain and provide virtual and augmented reality from within the nervous system rather than from devices attached to the outside of our bodies” – Interesting Engineering, “Nanobots Will Be Flowing Through Your Body by 2030”
  • “Long term, a sophisticated Neuralink could put you fully, fully in a virtual reality thing” – Elon Musk qtd. in Futurism, “Elon Musk Says the Metaverse Sucks and Neuralink Will Be Better”
  • CNBC, “Zuckerberg says brain-reading wearables come before implantables”
  • “Given the world’s unpredictability, I have a hard time ruling out the possibility that an unholy alliance of big tech and the military will foist an implant-enabled metaverse on us. After all, as the real world gets scarier, the metaverse might become more and more appealing. In our frightening future, the metaverse, not religion, might serve as the opiate of the masses” – Scientific American, “Should Big Tech’s Plan for a Metaverse Scare Us?”
  • And if social media and smart phones are already frighteningly addictive, how much worse will extended reality be, especially if implanted directly in the brain? Consider:
    • Amazing Polly video on smart phones as grooming
    • Even the cyborg-positive Klaus Shwab warns: “sometimes I wonder whether the inexorable integration of technology in our lives could diminish some of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation. Our relationship with our smartphones is a case in point”
    • “Near-future pessimistic scenario: The more time we spend in virtual worlds, the more we lose touch with reality. It’s not our fault. These virtual worlds are designed to keep us plugged in with strategically timed dopamine hits. Doctors and mental health experts raise the alarm as they witness the side effects of digital addictions and overdose symptoms. Too many people are losing sleep, straining their bodies, and neglecting loved ones” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 144
    • Scientific American, “Big Tech, Out-of-Control Capitalism and the End of Civilization”
      
• Facebook is the primary face of the Metaverse so far, having rebranded their parent company as “Meta” and their mission as revolving around all things Metaverse
  • The Guardian, “Grave error? Facebook’s new name Meta means dead in Hebrew”
    (A prophecy for those who upload their souls to it? Or for Facebook’s fate?)
  • Learn more about the Metaverse in Zuck’s “The Metaverse and How We’ll Build it Together”video (fromFacebook Reality Labs, your one stop shop for lab-created realities)
    • You’ll notice his oft-mentioned idea of “presence” and “embodiment” in the Metaverse. Considering he’s talking about a world in which you interact solely through virtual avatars, this is a very disturbing distortion of what these words mean
    • Also notice the exaggerated focus on the digital and transferrable “creative economy” within the Metaverse, and how this connects with crypto, Libracoin, and NFTs
    • Zuck says you’ll be able to do “almost anything you can imagine,” such as “getting together with friends and family,” quite an imaginary venture in a post-lockdown world
      
• Speaking of lockdowns: “Facebook Locks Down Patents for Full-Body VR Tracking”
  • “Metaverse technologies like VR and AR are perhaps the most data-extractive digital sensors we’re likely to invite into our homes in the next decade” – Marcus Carter qtd. in Fortune, “Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse may be as privacy flawed as Facebook”
  • Business Insider, “Facebook’s vision for a hyperrealistic metaverse . . .”:
    • “Facebook’s vision for a metaverse includes an array of body-worn sensors and devices that track and predict movement to create a hyperrealistic digital world with little privacy or user safety built in”
    • “’We think these companies have data access now — no . . . it’s mind blowing what they will have'” – Jeanine Turner qtd.
    • And “with Facebook, your data is their product” – Owen Vaughan qtd.
      
• But don’t worry, I’m sure Facebook will be committed to privacy with your data and biometrics. Remember their stellar track record:
  • Entity, “11 Insanely creepy ways facebook is spying on you right now”
  • Forbes, “Facebook as the Ultimate Government Surveillance Tool?”
  • The Guardian, “Facebook accused of conducting mass surveillance through its apps”
  • Extreme Tech, “Facebook admits its new portal device is just another way to spy on you”
  • Tech Crunch, “Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them”
  • CBS Philly, “Facebook is Spying on You Again”
  • Extreme Tech, “Facebook Used Its VPN to Spy on Other Companies, Users”
  • Forbes, “Facebook Has Just Been Caught Spying On Users’ Private Messages And Data — Again”

• And connections between social media, the CIA, and the military to be aware of (and news media, Hollywood, and the internet while we’re at it):
  • VentureBeat, “How the NSA & FBI made Facebook the perfect mass surveillance tool”
  • Unlimited Hangout, “The Military/Intelligence Origins of Facebook”
  • Medium, “Flashback: How and Why the CIA Made Google”
  • Anti War, “The Pentagon and CIA Have Shaped Thousands of Hollywood Movies Into Super Effective Propaganda”
  • Caitlin Johnstone, “The CIA Used To Infiltrate The Media. Now The CIA Is The Media”
  • Reuters, “CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits”
  • Last American Vagabond, “Google’s Eric Schmidt & The Artificial Intelligence Military-Industrial Complex”
  • Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
  • Quartz, “Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance”

• And a warning to parents:
  • CNN, “In VR, there are no rules, so parents are making up their own”
  • Education Week, “Virtual Reality and Children: ‘We Just Don’t Know That Much,’ Report Finds”: “Among the developmental concerns that researchers have raised: whether younger children can distinguish physical from virtual reality, VR’s impact on children’s impulse control and aggression, and children’s apparent tendency to treat time spent in virtual reality more like an actual experience than like a media experience, such as watching television”
  • Stanford, “Virtual Reality 101: What You Need to Know About Kids and VR”
  • VHIL, “Virtually true: Children’s acquisition of false memories in virtual reality”
  • Technology Review, “The Metaverse has a Groping Problem”
  • RT, “Russia issues ‘metaverse’ warning” – children’s morals and ethics could especially be affected
  • “Virtual Reality (VR) headsets can cause behavioral changes, balance issues, cognitive problems, eye problems (soreness, vision changes), headaches, and more”; “children absorb 2-5 times more harmful radiation while wearing VR headsets than adults” – Activist Post

I’m going to cut in here and mention that you’ve made it about halfway through these links – I’d highly suggest taking a break to see my funny little duckie friends Kirby and Daphne solve all the problems in their much simpler little corner of the planet (oops, I gave away my stance as a square-earther). It’s the most potent therapy I’m allowed to prescribe with my BS in psychology (my M.Div. also came with some kind of “rights, honors, and privileges” but I have no idea what they are). Anyway, I think it’s way better than meds, mosquito vaccines, and brain implants combined!

OK, back to it . . .

Total surveillance, data collection, the all-seeing AI, and technocracy
“Current notions of privacy will continue to evolve, with individuals needing to share more personal information for access to applications, and tracking becoming ubiquitous. Authoritarian governments are likely to exploit increased data to monitor and even control their populations” – Global Trends 2040

“Governments will gain new technological powers to increase their control over populations, based on pervasive surveillance systems and the ability to control digital infrastructure” – Klaus Schwab, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: what it means, how to respond”

“Coupled with intrusive, highly responsive and accessible databases, the emergence of a so-called ‘surveillance society’ will increasingly challenge assumptions about privacy, with corresponding impacts on civil liberties and human rights. These capabilities will be deployed by the private as well as the public sector” – DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report

“Emerging predictive analytics tools wrangle your data, behavior and preferences in order to map your personality—and predict how you’re likely to react in just about any situation. These tools can be used in journalism, to personalize customer interactions and even to personalize the news itself” – FTI 2018 Trends Report, p. 64

By 2050, AI will collect infinite data on everything we do, buy, and say, to “anticipate behavior in advance” – Interesting Engineering, “Life in 2050: A Glimpse at the Economy in the Future”

• Big data as industry, surveillance capitalism, and omnipresent tracking
  • The Guardian, “Shoshana Zuboff: ‘Surveillance capitalism is an assault on human autonomy’”
  • Technocracy News, “Total Surveillance Society”
  • Advanced Symbolics, AI-Driven Market Research
  • WIRED, “There Are Spying Eyes Everywhere—and Now They Share a Brain”
  • Pessimistic scenario: “Just as bank customers can become hopelessly buried in financial debt, consumers can find themselves drowning in “data debt,” committed to providing deeper levels of personal data in exchange for indispensable services. Eventually, your every thought and action is quantified, seized, and made available for sale by the new debt collectors of the tech sector” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 272
  • New York Times:
    • “Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy”
    • “The Government Uses ‘Near Perfect Surveillance’ Data on Americans”
  • Fox, “New tool shows how Facebook and Google track you”
  • WSJ, “Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans”
  • Daily Mail, “US government is using Google as a mass surveillance tool and user data requests have increased by 510% since 2010, according to report”
  • Technocracy News, “Google’s New Tech Reads Body Language – Without Cameras”
  • AP, “Mississippi program to use door cameras to fight crime”
  • “Digital Trails: How the FBI is Identifying, Tracking, and Rounding Up Dissidents”
  • Mass Private I:
    • Police Use ‘Citigraf’ to Surveil Everyone, Including School Kids”
    • “Police To Use A Network Of 1,000 “Anveshak” AI Cameras To “Spotlight” A Person’s Every Movement”
  • Aletho News, “Make Way for the Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch of Government”
  • Zero Hedge, “‘That’s Not Orwellian, THIS Is Orwellian’: Aussies Mulling ID For Access To Facebook, Twitter, Tinder”
  • The Atlantic, “China’s Artificial Intelligence Surveillance State Goes Global”
  • Amnesty, “Surveillance city: NYPD can use more than 15,000 cameras to track people using facial recognition in Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn”
  • Mass Private I, “Atlanta Fusion Center Creates A Massive 30,000 Surveillance Camera Network Targeting Black People”
  • Free Thought Project, “Hidden in $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Bill is a Law Requiring ‘Kill Switches’ in All New Cars”
  • Yahoo!, “Texas activist driving to Washington, D.C. for convoy protest left stranded by truck owner”
  • Whitehead, “The Government’s Kill Switch for Your Car, Your Freedoms and Your Life”
  • Futurism, “Former Google Exec Warns that AI Researchers are ‘Creating God’”
    
• Even more surveillance tech for Covid, schooling, and work tracking
  • New York Times, “The hot new COVID tech is wearable and constantly tracks you”
  • QR code check-in to meet with colleagues in person: WEF “5 Ways the Pandemic Could Change Our Lives in the Long Term” video
  • Network Computing, “Ultra-Wideband Tech Powers COVID-19 Contact Tracing Tools for Enterprises”
  • Engadget, “NBA restart plan includes using Oura rings to catch COVID-19 symptoms”
  • Truth Theory, “Surveillance Technology That Uses AI To Track Social Distancing And Mask Wearing In Workplace Raises Serious Concerns”
  • Activist Post, “School District Mandates Bluetooth Equipped Temperature Armbands for Students and Staff”
  • Fox, “Washington public school requires student athletes to wear tracking monitors to trace COVID”
  • Boing Boing, “School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home”
  • CNN, “China is installing surveillance cameras outside people’s front doors … and sometimes inside their homes”
  • “This year, Plott will introduce the Ettie, a $300 video door- bell system that performs an automatic temperature check and displays it back to the user. An LED panel will glow red if a visitor has a fever, and the system will refuse her entry. Ettie can also be programmed to limit the capacity of entrants; when capacity is hit, the door will not unlock” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 203
  • US Chamber, “10 COVID-19 Health Tracking and Contact Tracing Tools for Returning Employees”
  • CNBC, “Here’s how employers are using tech tools to keep a close watch on their remote workers”
  • Washington Post, “Managers turn to surveillance software, always-on webcams to ensure employees are (really) working from home”

• AI and brainwave-controlled drones for surveillance, facial recognition, fever checking, social distancing enforcement; robot policing
  • The Verge, “Amazon patents ‘surveillance as a service’ tech for its delivery drones”
  • Campus Current, “Club harnesses new mind-controlled tech”
  • Forbes:
    • “Drones With Facial Recognition Are Primed To Fly—But The World Isn’t Ready Yet”
    • “Drones With ‘Most Advanced AI Ever’ Coming Soon To Your Local Police Department”
  • Cambridge Independent, “The Eye in the Sky drone surveillance system from Cambridge University researchers that can spot violent individuals”
  • Technocracy News:
    • “China’s Robo-Bird Drones Take Citizen Surveillance To New Heights”
    • “DARPA: Testing Mass Surveillance Balloons Across The US”
  • Zero Hedge:
    • “‘Medical Drones’ Deployed Over Italian Beaches Search For Feverish People”
    • “Robocop Is Here: Singapore Deploys Robots To Detect ‘Undesirable Behavior’ Including Groups Of ‘More Than Five People'”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “Advanced camera technology can capture photos and video from 1,000 feet away, while machine learning software can remotely identify who we are and lock on to our bodies as we move around—all without our knowledge” – p. 306
    • In early pandemic China, “if citizens broke curfew and stayed outside too long, drones would fly low to physically intimidate them, forcing them back into their homes” p. 307
    • SMART Act: “a constellation of AI-powered cameras, biometric recognition systems, airborne unmanned vehicles, lidar, and mobile phone monitoring systems, to create a “smart wall” that conducts detailed surveillance, primarily for use at the Texas-Mexico border. The bill stalled in committee, but in the wake of recent public unrest, there’s renewed interest— and now, better technology—to make the proposal a reality” – p. 397
  • Activist Post, “University Partners With Maker of ‘Pandemic Drones’ to Install COVID Detection and Social Distancing System”
    
• Facial recognition for airline check-in, character trait analysis, COVID status, internet access, IRS access, event entry and surveillance
  • Yahoo!, “Delta Launches New Facial Recognition Technology for Security Lines With TSA”
  • Biometric Update:
    • “Tech5 face biometrics deployed for COVID-19 status verification in Chile”
    • “Biometrics could make attending large event venues a whole new ballgame”
  • Krebson Security, “IRS Will Soon Require Selfies for Online Access”
  • Mass Private I, “Law Enforcement’s Secret Facial Recognition Program Could Cover Every State”
  • Tech Crunch, “Facial recognition reveals political party in troubling new research”
  • Fox 5 NY, “Suit: Company built ‘most dangerous’ facial recognition AI database in nation”
  • Daily Mail, “Chinese citizens must pass a facial-recognition test to use the internet as part of Beijing’s social credit system”
  • Abacus News, “Facial recognition now works with masks”
  • CNN, “Think your mask makes you invisible to facial recognition? Not so fast, AI companies say”
  • Brouton Lab, “How Facial Recognition Works with Face Masks”
  • “Recognition systems use hundreds of different data points to identify and track us and to predict our likely future actions both online and in the physical world” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report
    
• Ear, heartbeat, voice, gait, personality, brain recognition, lip-reading AI, and more:
  • NASA’s heartbeat-recognition tech can ID you via laser – WEF, “5 Ways the Pandemic Could Change Our Lives in the Long Term” video
  • Biometric Update, “Amazon patents ear recognition technology for smartphones”
  • ABC, “Facial-recognition software may be able to identify people based on brain scans”
  • AP News, “Chinese ‘gait recognition’ tech IDs people by how they walk”
  • Vice, “Tech Companies Are Training AI to Read Your Lips”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “The Chinese startup SenseTime is pioneering myriad recognition technologies, such as a system that provides advertisers real-time feedback on what people are watching; technology that can extract customer information and carry out statistical analysis in crowded areas like shopping malls and supermarkets; and simultaneous recognition of everything in a scene, including people, pets, automobiles, trees, or soda cans” – p. 81
    • Personality, bone, gesture, touch, bioacoustic, wi-fi, proximity, posture, skeleton topology, finger vein recognition – p. 100-101
    • Voice cloning and impersonation – p. 99
    • “Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University discovered a generative technique to build a 3D version of someone’s face using only their voiceprint” – p. 99
    • New realms of identity theft: synthetic, slightly altered version of you? – p. 137
  • Forbes, “Artificial Intelligence Can Now Copy Your Voice: What Does That Mean For Humans?”
    
• Emotion recognition, affective computing, AI tech to monitor, predict, respond to, and regulate emotions
  • Defense One, “New AI Can Detect Emotion With Radio Waves”
  • Deccan Chronicle, “Spooky mind reading technology”
  • Telegraph, “‘Mind-reading’ tech being used to monitor Chinese workers’ emotions”
  • “Canon put AI cameras in its Chinese offices that only let smiling workers inside”
  • Nextgov, “Army-Funded Algorithm Decodes Brain Signals”: “If the algorithm detects behavior indicating a soldier is stressed or overloaded, then a machine could alert that soldier before they are even able to recognize their own fatigue”
  • BBC, “Facebook emotion experiment sparks criticism”
  • Defense One, “New AI Can Detect Emotion With Radio Waves”
  • Amazon emotion recognition patent
  • Bloomberg, “Amazon’s New Wearable Will Know If I’m Angry. Is That Weird?”
  • TNW, Amazon’s new patent and Alexa monitoring of and ad targeting based on emotions, tiredness, and more
  • Digital Trends, “Kia wants future autonomous cars to be able to read passengers’ emotions”
  • Business Insider, “Walmart filed a patent application for a shopping cart that would track your stress levels as you’re shopping and alert employees if you’re internally freaking out”
  • “Emotion AI can provide insight on how people are emotionally engaging in a virtual event or meeting,” “give feedback on how students are engaging with online educational materials and lectures, flagging if they’re confused, stressed, or bored,” and provide a “quantitative measure of mental health” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 50-51
  • “New possibilities for radicalization would also open up, with machine learning used to identify emotionally receptive individuals and the specific triggers that might push them toward violence. Oppressive governments could deploy affective computing to exert control or whip up angry divisions” – WEF Global Risks Report 2019, p. 73
  • The Conversation, “AI is increasingly being used to identify emotions – here’s what’s at stake”
  • Tech Xplore, “AI model detects mental disorders based on web posts”
    
• Pre-crime prediction by AI algorithm, social media surveillance, and brain scans
  • Washington Post, “The new way police are surveilling you: Calculating your threat score”
  • Julia Davis News, “Minority Report in real life: how social media posts impact your threat rating”
  • Futurism, “Data Scientists Say They’ve Developed Algorithms to Predict the Next Coup Attempt”
  • Telecoms, “UK police are using AI to make precrime a reality”
  • Defense One, “Could a Brain Scan Protect U.S. Troops from Insider Attacks?”
  • Summit, ““Great Reset” Mastermind Suggests Risk Assessment “Brain Scans” Before Allowing Travel”
  • Unlimited Hangout, “This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”
  • Mass Private I:
    • “Police Monitor Schoolkids Grades To Determine Who Will Become A Criminal”
    • “Pre-Crime Is Here: Law Enforcement’s New TAPS System ‘Predicts’ If You Pose A Future Threat”
  • Activist Post, “Another “Pre-Crime” AI System Claims It Can Predict Who Will Share Disinformation Before It’s Published”

Economic:

• Worker shortages and exoduses in vital industries, food and supply chain shortages, systemic breakdowns, rising inequality, and signs of economic collapse
  • The news on this evolves quickly; see Economic Collapse Blog or Activist Post: Economy for the latest information
    
• Simulations and government warnings of apocalyptic cyberattacks, catastrophic power outages, internet shutdown, rolling blackouts, EMP attacks, global supply chain collapse, and global economic system collapse
  • According to the WEF, “cybersecurity threats are growing—in 2020, malware and ransomware attacks increased by 358% and 435% respectively—and are outpacing societies’ ability to effectively prevent or respond to them.”
  • Telegraph, “Swedish supermarket chain closes 500 stores as cyber-attack freezes tills and self-checkouts”
  • Politico, “How suspected Russian hackers outed their massive cyberattack”
  • Birch Gold, “What If the Next Major Cyberattack Targeted the Internet?”
  • BBC, “What is the quantum apocalypse and should we be scared?”
  • Dr. Vincent Pry, Report to the Commission to Assess theThreat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack
  • Dept. of Homeland Security, EMP Program Status Report
  • Epoch Times, “China, Other Regimes Developing EMP Bombs That Can Wipe Out 90 Percent of Populations”
  • CBN, “Experts Warn Cyber Hackers, EMP Attacks and Solar Storms Could ‘Annihilate Our Electric System'”
  • Last American Vagabond, “Vanessa Beeley Interview – Evidence Points To EMP In What MSM/DHS Call ‘New 9/11-Like Threat'”
  • Reuters, “U.S. homeland chief: cyber 9/11 could happen ‘imminently'”
  • The Conversation, “A cyberattack could wreak destruction comparable to a nuclear weapon”
  • Antiwar, “Biden Says Cyberattacks Could Lead to a ‘Real Shooting War’ With a Major Power”
  • Jerusalem Post, “After Facebook, big tech outages may be doomsday scenario in future conflict – analysis”
  • Nasdaq, “EXCLUSIVE-IMF, 10 countries simulate cyber attack on global financial system”
  • There are compelling reasons to believe that such an attack is coming. Also consider that the current pandemic began shortly after the Event 201 simulation and shares many similarities with it as well as older simulations such as Lockstep, Dark Winter, The SPARS Pandemic, Crimson Contagion, and Clade X. Likewise, increasingly major and unprecedented cyber attacks have been happening alongside Cyber Polygon and Collective Strength simulations.
  • According to WEF head Klaus Schwab, a large cyber attack would be “like a ‘cyber pandemic’ far worse in destructive scale when compared to Covid”
  • Reason, “Government Surveillance Created Moral Hazard For Massive Solarwinds Hack Attack”
  • Last American Vagabond, “Ending Anonymity: Why the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens the Future of Privacy”
    
• The WEF’s Great Reset and Great Narrative, Absolute Zero, Agenda 2030, and Build Back Better
  • World Economic Forum:
    • “Now is the time for a ‘great reset'”
    • “What is the Great Reset?” video
    • “To build back better, we must reinvent capitalism. Here’s how”
    • “Given the complexities of technological, economic and societal change at this scale, and the insufficient nature of current commitments, it is likely that any transition that achieves the net-zero goal by 2050 will be disorderly” – “Global Risks Report 2022”
  • UK FIRES, “Absolute Zero: Delivering the UK’s climate change commitment with incremental change to today’s technologies” – airplanes, beef, lamb, shipping, concrete will be phased out, and “obeying the law of our Climate Change Act requires that we stop doing anything that causes emissions regardless of its energy source” – p. 1
  • UN, “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”
  • Truthstream Media, “Agenda 2030 Translator: How to Read the UN’s New Sustainable Development Goals” (The pessimistic translation. Or optimistic, according to the WEF?)
  • Medium, “In 2030, You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy About It”
  • Salvo Mag, “Killing Us Softly: Klaus Schwab’s Great Narrative for the Global Borg”
  • Sociable, “A skeptical look at the ‘great reset’: a technocratic agenda that waited years for a global crisis to exploit”
  • Technocracy News, The Technocrats Behind the Great Reset
  • Last American Vagabond:
    • “The Great Narrative And The Metaverse, Part 1: A Dystopian Vision Of The Future”
    • Interview with Derrick Broze on the Great Narrative and the Metaverse
  • Unlimited Hangout, “UN-Backed Banker Alliance Announces ‘Green’ Plan to Transform the Global Financial System”
    
• Rise of cryptocurrency, non-fungible tokens, digital denominations, cashless societies, and a combination of real-world and digital/virtual world economies
  “By removing paper currency and replacing it with an all-digital central bank digital currency (CBDC), your ability to engage in transactions can be turned on and off. . . . There’s general agreement among experts that most major countries will implement CBDC within the next two to four years” – Technocracy News, “Fitts – Toward Global Technocracy”
  • “Four dozen countries are piloting digital fiat sovereign currencies” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 337
  • Yahoo! Finance:
    • “Bank of America CEO: ‘We want a cashless society’”
    • “Diem cryptocurrency will be in ‘class of its own,’ Facebook executive says”
    • “Can cryptocurrency become the UN money of the future?”
  • ForexLive, “China is testing its digital yuan – may come with a use-by date”
  • Zero Hedge, “The Circle Is Complete: BOJ Joins Fed And ECB In Preparing Rollout Of Digital Currency”
  • Protocol, “The Fed may create a US digital currency and wants your input”
  • Newsmax, “Fed Just Revealed Plans for Digital Dollar Replacement”
  • Interesting Engineering:
    • “Life in 2050: A Glimpse at the Economy in the Future”
    • “Combining Art and Crypto: What Is This NFT Hype All About?”
  • Look, NFTs are already saving the world: Futurism, “Reality TV Star Stops Selling Her Farts in Jars to Sell Fart NFTs Instead”
  • Digital Journal, “Some banks have already frozen accounts of certain individuals with the trucker convoy”
  • Free Thought Project, “Canada Gov’t Targets Trump Supporters, Says They ‘Ought to Be Worried’ About Bank Accounts Being Frozen”
  • CTV News, Banks authorized to freeze accounts of convoy supporters
  • NBC, “Biden signs executive order that could bringU.S. one step closer to a digital currency”
  • The Telegraph, “Bank of England tells ministers to intervene on digital currency ‘programming’”
  • Nasdaq, “Programmable Digital Currencies Are Coming – Here’s What That Means”
  • Federal Reserve, “What is programmable money?”
    
• Rise of universal basic income (UBI)
  UBI gains momentum as citizens are locked down and robots take over diverse jobs
  • “The UBI discussion has also become more popular in academia, with a 53% increase in the number of articles published from 2016 to 2017 on Google Scholar” – FTI 2018 Trends Report, p. 193
  • Stanford, Global Map of Basic Income Experiments
  • Mises, “UBI and the Road to Serfdom”
  • DailyMail, “Residents of more than 20 cities in US are receiving $500 a month universal basic income payments as popularity of Andrew Yang’s proposal grows”
  • CBN, “China on Cusp of Eliminating Cash, Pushing the World Toward Total Government Surveillance”
  • Zero Hedge, “In Unprecedented Monetary Overhaul, The Fed Is Preparing To Deposit ‘Digital Dollars’ Directly To ‘Each American'”
  • “CEO Alex Blania hinted Worldcoin could be used as ‘infrastructure’ for a universal basic income one day” – CNBC, “Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman wants to scan your eyes in exchange for free cryptocurrency”
  • “A digital dividend would give citizens a cut of the profits derived from their personal data” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 289
    
• Biometric payment systems – pay by face, palm, fingerprint
  • M2SYS, “Will Apple Pay (and Touch ID) Help Advance U.S. Consumer Acceptance of Biometrics?”
  • Reuters, “Amazon allowing Whole Foods shoppers to pay with a swipe of their palm”
  • The Verge, “Moscow adds facial recognition payment system to more than 240 metro stations”
  • BBC, “Why your face could be set to replace your bank card”
  • Engadget, “Samsung built a fingerprint security chip for payment cards, employee IDs and more”

• Cloud markets, ghost kitchens, “analytics-driven” and drone/robot/autonomous delivery
  • WEF , “5 Ways the Pandemic Could Change Our Lives in the Long Term” video
  • Interesting Engineering, “CES 2022: Fully Autonomous Delivery Robots Might Just Become An Everyday Reality”
  • CNBC, “Amazon wins FAA approval for Prime Air drone delivery fleet”
  • Forbes, “Drones May Become ‘The Next Big Thing’ In Healthcare Delivery”
  • Freight Waves, “Exploding growth: Autonomous delivery market set to take off”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • Amazon patent for a “gigantic beehive-like structure, where drones would dock and receive packages, and a laundry chute system attached to houses where packages would drop safely and tumble down to customers” – p. 400
    • Former Google engineers are developing “autonomous vehicles for last-mile deliveries, including take-out, groceries, laundry, and packages” – p. 402
    • Flying taxis with vertical take-off and landing – p. 404
      
• Biometric and digital identity tracking, REAL ID, ID2020 integrated with financial and health records and access to public services, food rations
  • ID2020: GAVI, Rockefeller Foundation, and Microsoft are founding partners
  • Euronews, “The EU is set to unveil plans for a bloc-wide digital wallet for IDs, payments and passwords”
  • AP, “EU plans digital ID wallet for bloc’s post-pandemic life”
  • Vulcan Post, “The Evolution Of Singpass: How Our National Digital Identity Came About”
  • Aadhaar: Unique Identification Authority of India
  • Time, “India Has Been Collecting Eye Scans and Fingerprint Records From Every Citizen. Here’s What to Know”
  • IMF, “Stacking Up Financial Inclusion Gains in India”
  • Biometric Update, “Digital identity in developing nations”
  • PC Mag, “Microsoft Patent Describes Tracking Brain Activity to Mine Cryptocurrency”
  • WEF, “Identity in a Digital World” (see page 10, Figure 1 on expected integrations)
  • Illinois government, Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Task Force Final Report
  • Fast Company, “How 9/11 sparked the rise of America’s biometrics security empire”
  • Future Today Institute, “Tech Trends Newsletter: Privacy Is Dead”: ID.me and more
  • Life Site, “Iran rolls out digital bread rationing with biometric IDs”
  • “At Amazon Go grocery stores, shoppers select foods and pay using gestures or other biometric recognition. Shopping data is stored and can be correlated with other health data. Quantifying how many bags of chips bought in a year—versus how many apples—could be an interesting data point on a future personal health record” – FIT 2021 Tech Trends, p. 206
  • Consider:
    • Technocracy News, “Technocracy Ahead: Digital ID Set to Control Your Life”
    • Truthstream Media, “One Card to Rule Them All” video
    • “Ordering Pizza in the Future” video
      
• Vaccine passports and contact tracing increasingly mandatory for participation in society and economy
  • World Economic Forum:
    • Common Pass project, a “standard global model” for digital health passports
    • CoviPass project, contact tracing app using blockchain technology
    • “Contact tracing apps can be powerful weapons against the virus – but they can also be tools for state surveillance”
  • SMART Health Card
  • NBC, “Quietly and over some objections, a national digital vaccine card has emerged”
  • Government Technology, “Is Blockchain the Answer for COVID Vaccine Passports?”
  • D.C: Vaccine proof and photo ID required to enter most businesses
  • Orlando Sentinel, “Immunaband Bracelet is a Vaccine Passport for Your Wrist”
  • The Telegraph, “Anger on Campuses as Freshers Given Wristbands to Signify Covid Vaccination”
  • MSN, “Walmart, Costco and other big-box stores in Canada begin enforcing vaccine mandates, and some shoppers aren’t buying it”
  • RT, “No jab, no phone: Unvaccinated to have SIM cards blocked, Pakistan’s Punjab govt says”
  • Fee, “No Gasoline Without ‘COVID Papers’? It’s Already Happening in Some Parts of the World”
  • News.com.au, “Covid-19 NSW: Unvaccinated and single-dosed to cop $1000 fine if caught enjoying new freedoms”
  • CNBC, “Austrian police conduct random checks to enforce Covid lockdowns for the unvaccinated”
  • Summit, “Report: Scottish Government’s Vax Passport Sending People’s Private Data To Amazon, Microsoft”
  • Last American Vagabond:
    • “As Predicted: Immunity Passports Are No Longer a Fantasy”
    • “As European Parliament Approves Immunity Certificate, Document Proves Plans In the Works Since 2019”
  • Daily Veracity, “The Shadowy CIA Data Firms Behind the Creation of Digital Vaccine Passport IDs”
  • Technocracy News, “Wesley J. Smith: Obamacare Architect Ezekiel Emanuel Is Pushing For Permanent Medical Technocracy”
    
• Social credit system in China
  • The Atlantic, “The Panopticon is Already Here”
  • Human Rights Watch, “Cambridge Analytica, Big Data and China”
  • CBS 2, “China Assigns Every Citizen A ‘Social Credit Score’ To Identify Who Is And Isn’t Trustworthy”
  • SCMP, “Manspreading on the Beijing subway could give you bad social credit”
  • The Verge, “China wants to track citizens’ cars with mandatory RFID chips”
  • Technocracy News:
    • “Day 7: China is a Technocracy”
    • “Social Credit Scoring” archives

• China’s growing world influence in nearly every domain
  “Rising and revisionist powers, led by China and Russia, are seeking to reshape the international order to be more reflective of their interests and tolerant of their governing systems. . . . China seeks growing global acceptance of its current social system—namely the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power and control over society— socialist market economy, and preferential trading system” – Global Trends 2040, p. 98
  • Bloomberg: China’s economic power set to surpass US by 2035
  • Times of Israel, “Vaccine passports, WHO, and globalization of China’s standards”
  • Global Times, “China to support WHO on setting up vaccination mutual recognition platform”
  • Breitbart, “China Urges WHO to Let it Run Global ‘Vaccine Passport’ System”
  • BBC, “Covid-19: China pushes for QR code based global travel system”
  • Washington Post, “The quantum revolution is coming, and Chinese scientists are at the forefront”
  • Epoch Times, “Zoom Shared US User Data With Beijing to Ensure Chinese Market Access, Court Documents Show”
  • Bloomberg, “The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies”
  • CBN, “The Weak Link: How China Buit in a Backdoor Threat That Could Take Down the US Electic Grid”
  • CBS, “U.S. intelligence officials say Chinese government is collecting Americans’ DNA,” possibly “to win a race to control the world’s biodata”
  • Vice, “China has Been Doing ‘Mass Surveillance’ on Millions of Citizens in US, UK, Australia and India”
  • ABC AU, “China’s ‘hybrid war’: Beijing’s mass surveillance of Australia and the world for secrets and scandal”
  • Time, “‘AI Farms’ Are at the Forefront of China’s Global Ambitions”
  • FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “Using AI techniques, a military can ‘win’ by destabilizing an economy rather than demolishing countrysides and city centers. From that perspective, China’s unified march to advance AI puts the emerging superpower dangerously far ahead of the West” – p. 80
    • We have failed—and we are continuing to fail—to see China as a military, economic, and diplomatic threat when it comes to AI” – p. 82
  • CNN, “China is rehearsing for when it overtakes America”
  • “No other country’s government is racing towards the future with as much force and velocity as China, and this could signal big shifts in the balance of geopolitical power in the years ahead” – FTI 2018 Trends Report
  • “Once China has established itself as a major world power, possibly as early as 2025, it may feel less constrained in its behaviour, presenting greater challenges to an international system” – DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report
    
• Social credit system building blocks and prototypes in America and other democracies
  “There’s an old Chinese adage that says, “People are doing things, and the sky is watching.” But it holds true for the West, too. Increasingly, everything we do is being watched and recorded. Algorithms assign us scores all the time, by governments in some countries and by the commercial sector in others” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 108
  • Digital Trends, “We’re closer to China’s disturbing ‘Social Credit System’ than you realize”
  • Off Guardian, “Davos Reveals Building-Blocks For ‘Green’ Social-Credit System”
  • Yahoo! Finance, “Worldwide Social Credit Industry – Infrastructure to Support Social Credit Systems Represents a $16.1 Billion Opportunity by 2026”
  • BBC, “Microsoft president warns ‘Orwell’s 1984 could happen in 2024‘”
  • The Hill, “Coming soon: America’s own social credit system”
  • Asia Times, “Social credit: the dark side of blockchain”
  • Activist Post, “5G, Blockchain, and You”
  • Reality Circuit, “IMF Calls for Credit Score to be Tied to Internet Search History”
  • The Epoch Times, “China’s Big Brother Social Control Goes to Australia”
  • PNW, “China’s social credit scoring system has now spread to Canada”
  • International Man, “China’s Social Credit System – It’s Coming to the United States”
  • Organic Prepper, “Is a Dystopian ‘Social Credit’ Program Coming to America? Or Is It Already Here?”
  • Last American Vagabond, “Social Credit Scores Are Already Here”
  • Kapersky Daily, “Social credits and security: embracing the world of ratings”
  • MyLife: Personal Reputation Profiles & Scores
  • Patent US11,107,588B2 for prioritizing treatments, vaccination, testing, activities based on data collection, tracking, and scoring
  • FTI’s 2021 Tech Trends Report:
    • “Everyone alive today is being scored” – p. 107
    • “Behavioral biometrics use machine learning to understand hundreds of unique biometric data points to understand, authenticate, nudge, reward, and punish us” – p. 108
    • “Hundreds of companies now score customers. . . . Collectively, these companies are mining thousands of unique data points, including how many times people open apps on their phones, which devices they use, where they spend time, what kinds of food they order for delivery, and insights from messages they’ve sent to Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts” – p. 109
    • “Data is being mined, refined, and productized in order to sort, tag, and catalog people. Why? To make it easier for systems to make decisions for, on behalf of, and about them. In this new age of algorithmic determinism, AI systems assign scores in the absence of context or special circumstances” – p. 110

• Proposed climate lockdowns and economic systems based on social and climate credits
  • WEF, “Blockchain can help us beat climate change. Here’s how”
  • ESG | The Report, “What is Your Personal ESG Score and Why Should You Care?”
  • Nature Sustainability, “Personal Carbon Allowances Revisited”:
    • Personal carbon emissions could be tracked via smart meters, smart home appliances, “stops at petrol stations, check-ins at venues and travel histories.” Food and other consumption could be assessed via smartphone apps, AI, and algorithms “for estimating carbon emissions and potential health consequences”
    • “The new behavioural and social norms formed during the pandemic, may favour PCAs. In particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions on individuals for the sake of public health, and forms of individual accountability and responsibility that were unthinkable only one year before, have been adopted by millions of people. People may be more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations related to PCAs”
  • Mastercard, “DO Black – the world’s first credit card with a carbon limit”
  • Doconomy, “Klarna starts providing 90 million consumers with carbon footprint insights through Åland Index”
  • Off Guardian, “Is a “Climate Lockdown” on the horizon?”
  • Economic Policy Journal, “Prepare for the Coming ‘Climate Lockdowns'”
  • In a Burning Man workshop, a “leading light in the cryptocurrency world” spoke of two blocks: (1) a mystical, mythical, eastern, psychedelic oneness spirituality and (2) a new social order comparable to Burning Man. Tied in with these would be a new digital or crypto-currency which is managed by artificial intelligence on a global blockchain system: “how you interact with block one and block two will determine whether or not you can purchase, whether or not you can buy or sell” – “Paganism, New Age, Burning Man & Artificial Intelligence: Interview with Carl Teichrib” video (1hr mark)
    

ENVIRONMENTAL AND POLITICAL

• For general overviews of likely global environmental and political futures, see:
  • Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre, Global Strategic Trends Report
  • World Economic Forum, Global Risks Report 2022
  • National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2040
  • Future Today Institute‘s Tech Trends Reports
  • Forum for the Future, sustainable development NGO
    
• Unprecedented weather events and a rise in all forms of natural disaster, locust, scorpion, and other invasions and pestilences, unexplained massive animal deaths, food shortages, famines, and water shortages. Just a couple examples:
  • Israel 365, “Rare Hailstorm Pounds Egypt As Jews Read About That Very Plague In Torah”
  • Washington Post, “Historic U.S. weather events in 2021, by the numbers”
  • “An extreme weather event falls outside the statistical norms of typical fluctuations in weather patterns. Such events became a more frequent and pronounced worldwide phenomenon in 2017, and we have been experiencing them since” – FTI 2021 Report, p. 453
  • New Scientist, “Majority of primate species may vanish in next 25 to 50 years”
  • CNN, “The Doomsday Clock reveals how close we are to…doom”
  • Michael Snyder, “Skyrocketing Fertilizer Prices Could Spark Widespread Global Famines Unlike Anything We Have Seen In Modern History”
  • “Water stress will increase, with the risk that disputes over water will contribute significantly to tensions in already volatile regions, possibly triggering military action and population movements” – DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report
  • As this news comes rapidly, see article categories such as “Extreme Weather,” “Plagues,” “Animal Deaths,” “Natural Disasters,” “Pestilences,” aggregated at End Time Headlines
    
• Weather modification and geoengineering as a response to climate change and in military applications
  • Futurism, “A Bunch of US States Are Now Using Weather Modification Technology”
  • CNBC, “This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming”
  • Interesting Engineering, “Dimming the Sun Could Spell Doom for Humanity, Experts Warn”
  • “If states decided unilaterally to use more radical geo-engineering technologies it could trigger dramatic climatic disruptions” – WEF, Global Risks Report 2019, p. 66
  • Royal Society, “Geoengineering the climate: Science, governance and uncertainty”
  • The Guardian, “World’s biggest machine capturing carbon from air turned on in Iceland”
  • Business Insider, “China is massively expanding its weather-modification program, saying it will be able to cover half the country in artificial rain and snow by 2025”
  • Independent, “Spy agencies could be funding geo-engineering research in pursuit of weaponising the weather, scientists claims”
  • “Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” presented to Air Force, 1996
  • US Air Force & Navy, HAARP: HF Active Auroral Research Program
    
• Unprecedented peace treaties in the Middle East, two-state momentum, and plans for re-building a third temple and inaugurating a messiah, alongside rising conflict
  • Times of Israel, At Vatican, PA’s Abbas discusses Israeli-Palestinian peace with pope
  • Jerusalem Post, “Oman urges Israel to create independent Palestinian state”
  • Israel 365, “Prominent Rabbi claims 2023 will be the ‘Final Jubilee’ and herald the ‘Messiah’s arrival'”
  • Newest updates at:
    • Israel 365 News
    • Israel 365 – Biblical News
    • Jerusalem Post
      

• WWIII looms, alongside warnings of civil wars (and brand new forms of warfare involving space, cyberspace, AI, and futuristic technology as seen above)
  • MSN, “Explained: The outrage in France over a letter by former generals warning of ‘civil war’”
  • CounterPunch, “QAnon’s Afterlife: A Holy Civil War”
  • MSN, “Bloomberg Issues Apology After Reporting That Russia Invaded Ukraine”
  • Media and politicians are presenting a desperate catch-22: world war is both completely inevitable and absolutely imperative to avoid, with apocalyptic rhetoric and talk of the end of the world, civilization, and humanity – while simultaneously mocking Christians who see a connection with WWIII and apocalypse
    • Princeton Science & Global Security, “Plan A”: a simulation regarding nuclear war between Russia and the US
    • RT, “Cyberwar is imminent & will affect ordinary Americans, claims CEO of company that ‘discovered’ SolarWinds hack”
    • Strange Sounds, “U.S. generals are prepping for a space war they see as all but inevitable”
    • MSN, “Steel Bunkers, Iodine Pills, and Canned Food: Fear of the Nuclear Apocalypse Is Back”
    • “The only place this conflict [with Russia] can end is the destruction of the world and life as we know it” – Tulsi Gabbard
    • Seeking Alpha, “There’s a 10% chance of a nuclear war in the next year, one research firm says”
    • Rolling Stone, “The Christians Who Think the Ukraine Invasion Means Jesus Is Returning to Earth” – “End times Christians are not just inclined to view what’s happening around them through an apocalyptic lens; they are also disaster artists, recasting the tragedies of mankind — climate change, pestilence, disease, conflict — into a narrative in which each event is not a crisis that needs attention so much as an inevitable fulfillment of God’s divine will,” “‘Wars and rumors of wars’ become this perverse source of excitement,” there’s something really perverse about hoping for nuclear holocaust. It’s a bloodlust, is what it is.”
    • Vanity Fair, “Putin and Doomsday: The Far Right’s Fascination With the Apocalypse”: “Fox News, the evangelical fringe, and the right wing have been peddling “End Times” thinking for decades. Armageddon has become a backdrop now that Russia has invaded Ukraine”
    • “Bizarre” Christians and their belief in end times prophecy is considered “Weird News” even by the tabloid Daily Star: “Radical Christians reckon Ukraine war is ‘sign of Jesus’s return’ and the ‘end of times’”
  • This is another quickly evolving news topic; see ongoing aggregated articles here

SOCIAL

• Censorship, sensationalism, algorithmic skewing, normative/ invisible bias, and control of access to information
  • WEF, “There’s no vaccine for the infodemic – so how can we combat the virus of misinformation?”
  • All Sides, “How to Spot 11 Types of Media Bias”
  • Security Boulevard, “Censorship vs. the memes”
  • “As margins continue to shrink in news media, industry consolidation continues, at the expense of journalistic integrity” – FTI Tech Trends Summary
  • Off Guardian, “How Google and Wikipedia Brainwash you”
  • Project Veritas, “Facebook Whistleblowers Expose Leaked Internal Docs Detailing New Effort to Secretly Censor Vaccine Concerns on a Global Scale”
  • The Telegraph, “Scientists believed Covid leaked from Wuhan lab – but feared debate could hurt ‘international harmony’”
  • Epoch Times, “Sharyl Attkisson: How Propagandists Co-Opted ‘Fact-Checkers’ And The Press To Control The Information Landscape”
  • Summit, “Democrat Groups Plan to Fact Check Private SMS Messages”
  • Medium, “Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship”
  • The basis of ‘truth’ will be heavily subjective and the media will be vulnerable to hijacking and distortion by pressure groups and fashionable ideas. This will be defined by what is believed rather than by objective analysis and scrutiny” – DCDC Global Strategic Trends Report
  • Organic Prepper, “The Growing Weight of Censorship: What Are They Hiding?”
  • EFF, “2021 Was the Year Lawmakers Tried to Regulate Online Speech”
  • NY Post, “New Twitter CEO has brought wave of high-profile bans in short tenure”
  • CBS, “Merck Created Hit List to ‘Destroy,’ ‘Neutralize’ or ‘Discredit’ Dissenting Doctors”
  • Fox, “Canceled by Amazon: Clarence Thomas, Michael Brown documentaries, books on gender top growing list”
  • Yahoo!, “‘Uncharted waters.’ Judges are banning some Capitol riot suspects from the internet”
  • Off Guardian, “Is ‘The Storming Of The Capitol’ America’s Reichstag Fire?”
  • Technocracy News:
    • “Green New Dealers: ‘Climate Deniers’ Must Be Censored And Silenced”
    • “Paypal Terminates Service For Nonprofits Fighting Vaccine Mandates”
  • Summit, “People in UK Who Post ‘False Information’ About Vaccines Could be Jailed For Two Years”

• Propaganda, manipulation, social engineering, and “algorithmic determinism”
  As the 2002 Converging Technologies report says, “the abilities [to implement the technology mentioned above] are within our grasp but will require an intense public-relations effort to ‘prepare key organisations and societal activities for the changes made possible by converging technologies’, and to counter concern over ‘ethical, legal and moral’ issues” – Sydney Morning Herald, “US report foretells of brave new world”
  • BBC, “US plans to fight the net revealed”
  • Bloomberg, “U.S. Unleashes Military to Fight Fake News, Disinformation”
  • MSN, “‘Unsettling’ Fort Bragg recruitment video ignites debate over its mysterious intent”
  • NBC, “Pentagon sets sights on public opinion”
  • Business Insider, “The NDAA Legalizes the Use of Propaganda on the US Public”
  • Technocracy News, “Exposing Propaganda: The Vaccine For Liberty, Truth And Reason”
  • “Governments and nonstate actors are increasingly able to exploit consumer behavior data and marketing techniques to microtarget messages to small audience segments. Propagandists could leverage AI, the Internet of Things, and other tools to tailor communications to large audiences, anticipate their reactions, and adapt messaging in near real time” – Global Trends 2040, p. 97
  • Mind Matters, “The Strange Story of Google’s ‘Selfish Ledger’”
  • The Verge, “Google’s Selfish Ledger is an Unsettling Vision of Silicon Valley Social Engineering”
  • Techspot, “The Selfish Ledger: Google’s dystopian vision of populace control through ‘total data collection'”
  • Debugging humanity through “algorithmic utopianism”; “by consuming what the algorithm says I want, I trust the algorithm to make me ever more who it thinks I already am” – The New Atlantis, “How Tech Utopia Fostered Tyranny”
  • The Conversation, “Algorithms have already taken over human decision making”
  • “What will be the meaning of human life when most decisions are taken by algorithms? We don’t even have philosophical models to understand such an existence,” – Yuval Harari, “How to Survive the 21st Century” at Davos
  • Mercola, “Social Engineering is Central to Technocrat Control”
  • The Century of the Self documentary
    
• As relates to pandemics and health messaging
  There is propaganda, sensationalism, and manipulation on both sides, but the focus here is on mainstream messaging since it widely influences public opinion and social policies
  • Trials, “The effect of framing and communicating COVID-19 vaccine side-effect risks on vaccine intentions for adults in the UK and the USA”
  • Yale, “Persuasive Messaging to Increase COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Intentions”
    • Testing the effectiveness of economic, social pressure, embarrassment, accusations of scientific ignorance, guilt, anger, and “not bravery” messaging
    • “Fear of those who have not been vaccinated” and “Social judgment of those who do not vaccinate” (evaluation of their trustworthiness, selfishness, likeableness, and competence) as desired outcome measures
  • SAGE, “Options for increasing adherence to social distancing measures” Mar 2020:
    • “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging,” (1-2)
    • Also compares tactics of persuasion, coercion, and influencing social approval and disapproval
  • Technocracy News, “Billions Queued Up To Quash Vaccine Hesitancy”
  • Facebook announces “vaccinated” profile frame
  • Global Citizen, “‘Vax Live:’ The Concert from Global Citizen to Reunite the World and Ensure Everyone Has Access to COVID-19 Vaccines”
  • Campus Reform, “CDC, Universities are paying students to be vaccine influencers”
  • 21^st Century Wire, “Covid Teletubbies: UK Gov’t Hires Men To Stand In Public With TV On Head For Pandemic Propaganda”
  • Life Site, “An army of Big Biotech companies is using psych tactics to ‘create vaccine demand’”
  • The Gray Zone, “‘Cloak and dagger’ military-intelligence outfit at center of US digital vaccine passport push”
  • The National, “Defence chief says 77th Brigade is countering Covid misinformation”
  • Ottawa Citizen, “Military leaders saw pandemic as unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on Canadians, Forces report says”
  • Telegraph, “Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists”
  • Summit, “Austria Hiring People to ‘Hunt Down Vaccine Refusers'”
  • AP, “Austrian city hiring workers to administer fines, not ‘hunt’ unvaccinated”
  • eTurbo News, “UK to send door-to-door vaccine teams to homes of unvaccinated”
  • Newsweek, “Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine is Wrong”
  • WHO, “Health is more than influenza”
  • News.com.au, “‘We failed’: Danish newspaper apologises for not questioning government Covid-19 numbers”
    
• Pathologizing of Informed Dissent
  • MSN, “Pope backs vaccine and urges reality therapy to correct ‘baseless information’”
    • What in the world is “reality therapy” and who exactly would mete it out? Would it take place inside the simulation, for everyone’s safety (or just to add irony)?
    • Francis also frames compliance as “moral obligation” and refusal as “suicidal”
  • Complex, “New Study Links Sociopathic Traits to People Who Are Anti-Mask or Don’t Practice Social Distancing”
  • RT, “‘Conspiracy theories’ on Covid-19 come from brain damage? Questionable science is being used to pathologize real dissent”
  • Compare to: Wikipedia, “Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union”
  • The relegation of certain information to the realm of conspiracy can harm the intellectual health of society as important ideas are kept out of public discourse until it’s too late:
    • Leo Hohmann, “Five conspiracy theories that came true in 2021”
    • Int’l Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, “Is a Mask That Covers the Mouth and Nose Free from Undesirable Side Effects in Everyday Use and Free of Potential Hazards?” – a meta-analysis of 65 studies
    • Technocracy News, “Masks Are Neither Effective Nor Safe: A Summary Of The Science”
    • Brownstone, “More Than 400 Studies on the Failure of Compulsory Covid Interventions”
    • Johns Hopkins, “A Literature Review and Meta Analysis of the Effects of Lockdowns on COVID 19 Mortality”
    • Last American Vagabond, “Why Are ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ Worried About an Impending Power Grid Failure?”
      
• Widespread and normalized stigmatization of segments of the population
  Again, there is vilification and callousness from both sides which is completely shocking and unacceptable, but the focus here is on what has become normalized and acceptable within the mainstream and the resulting effects on society
  • TFTP, “Family Kicked Off Their Own Property, Fined for Living Sustainably As Politicians Ignore Them”
  • “In some democratic countries, qualitative change would be more likely—a jolt towards an illiberalism in which power-holders determine whose rights get protected, and in which individuals on the losing side of elections risk censorship, detention or violence as “enemies of the people” – WEF Global Risks Report 2019, p. 74
  • One professor proposed the death penalty for “climate deniers” (later rescinded)
  • Truth Unmuted, “The Vaccine Divide and Emerging Segregation Society”
  • Technocracy News, “Stigmatizing the Unvaccinated: Human Today, Not Human Tomorrow”
  • National Post, “More than one in four Canadians support jail time for the unvaccinated, poll finds”
  • Zero Hedge, “Utah’s Largest Newspaper Calls For Unvaxxed To Endure Draconian Lockdowns Enforced By National Guard”
  • CBN, “‘Start Shaming Them’: CNN’s Don Lemon Tells Viewers to Shun ‘Stupid’ Unvaccinated People”
  • ETH, “CNN’s Don Lemon says the unvaccinated shouldn’t be allowed in grocery stores, sporting events or even at work”
  • “Anti-vaxxers are a scourge and a strong argument for re-education camps, the immediate seizure of their property, and putting their children into protective custody” – Rick Wilson
  • Washington Post, “Anti-vaxxers are dangerous. Make them face isolation, fines, arrests.”
  • Daily Mail, “PIERS MORGAN: America’s anti-vaxxer lunatics are snatching covid defeat from the jaws of vaccinated victory with their conspiracy-theory garbage and must be stopped from destroying everybody’s freedom”
  • WIBC, “‘The View’ Co-Host Sunny Hostin: ‘Shun Those Who Refuse to Get Vaccinated’”
  • USA Today, “It’s time to start shunning the ‘vaccine hesitant.’ They’re blocking COVID herd immunity.”
  • Newsweek, “China Publicly Shames COVID Rule Breakers by Parading Them Down Street in Hazmat Suits”
  • Eugene Weekly, “A Plague Of Denial”: shun them like the plague
  • Organic Prepper, “Shocking and Dehumanizing Discrimination Against the Unvaccinated Is About to Make Life Very Difficult”
  • Brownstone, “Othering Unvaccinated Persons”
  • WND, “‘Get the shot or get shot’: Some push ‘mass genocide’ for the unvaccinated”

• Training people to be offended and afraid of one another and to turn each other in
  • Campus Reform, “Surveillance on campus: Universities give students tools to report on each other’s COVID violations or ‘bias incidents’”
  • Washington Free Beacon, “How an Anonymous Reporting System Made Yale a COVID ‘Surveillance State’”
  • In 2018, Amazon “launched Neighbors, a crime-reporting social network that encourages Ring users to upload videos from their security cameras and doorbells for others to see” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 109-110
  • CNS, “Microsoft’s ‘Inclusiveness’ Checker Warns Woke ‘Word’ Users to Change Neil Armstrong Quote, Barry Manilow Lyrics“
  • Reuters, “Facebook asks: Are your friends becoming extremists?”
  • Charisma, “‘USA Today’ Writer Labels Promise Keepers CEO’s Biblical Stance on Sexuality ‘Hate Speech'”
  • The Burkean, “ROXANNE: Ireland’s New Anti-Hate Speech Surveillance Technology”
  • Civilian Intelligence Network, “Bill C-36: Red Flag Laws In The Name Of Preemptively Combatting Hate Speech”
  • Christian Post, “Student Faces Attacks for Reading the Bible at Florida School”
  • BBC, “Canada: Unvaccinated father loses right to see his child,” allegedly to protect the immunocompromised child, though both the CDC director and the WHO chief scientist have said vaccines aren’t preventing transmission. Has a precedent been set anyway?
  • The Guardian, “It is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated”
  • Organic Prepper, “Snitchgiving: Americans Are Being Urged to Report Families Gathering for the Holiday”
  • Scott Rassmussen, “36% Would Turn In Neighbors For Violating Social Distancing Rules”
  • Rassmussen Reports, “COVID-19: Democratic Voters Support Harsh Measures Against Unvaccinated”
    
• Framing of large segments of the population as potential domestic terrorists and white supremacists
  • WSJ, “France’s Macron Eyes Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Terrorism”
  • New American, “Christians Are Extremists Like al-Qaeda, U.S. Army Taught Troops”
  • NBC, “After Capitol riot, Biden backs domestic terror law. It’s a predictably misguided response”
  • Yahoo!, “Tulsi Gabbard: Domestic-Terrorism Bill Is ‘a Targeting of Almost Half of the Country’”
  • Fox, “‘Fusion Centers’ Expand Criteria to Identify Militia Members”
  • Washington Post, “Anti-vaccine extremism is akin to domestic terrorism”
  • Free Thought Project, “Politicians and MSM Compare Those Who Question Vaccine Safety to ‘Domestic Terrorists'”
  • Capitol Punishment documentary
  • Activist Post, “‘This is a Nationwide Insurrection’–Ottaway Mayor Declares ‘State of Emergency’ Amid Trucker Convoy ‘Occupation'”
  • ETH, “Ottawa Police announce digital surveillance of Freedom Convoy protesters, supporters, and donors”
  • ABC, “DHS uses federal alert system for 1st time in a year to warn of domestic terrorist threat”
  • DHS, “Summary of Terrorism Threat to the U.S.
  • The Hill, “FBI memo warns QAnon poses potential terror threat: report”
  • Free Thought Project, “Canada Gov’t Targets Trump Supporters, Says They ‘Ought to Be Worried’ About Bank Accounts Being Frozen”
  • Washington Post, “The Ottawa truckers convoy is rooted in Canada’s settler colonial history”: “The notion of “freedom” was historically and remains intertwined with Whiteness, as historian Tyler Stovall has argued. The belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy”
  • Breitbart, “Exclusive: Special Forces Warned Against Using Pepe the Frog, III%ers, Other ‘Extremist’ Symbols”
  • The Intercept, “Revealed: Facebook’s Secret Blacklist of ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organizations'”
  • Fox, “California board member compares reopening schools to ‘White supremacist ideology’ and ‘slavery'” and “Pentagon distances itself from company investigating military ‘extremism’ by analyzing web searches”
  • Swarthmore College course: “Is God a White Supremacist?” : I pray this is simply a provocative title for a course that fairly separates racist abuses of religion from the Scriptures that reveal the God who gave everything out of love for all nations. But in a climate where “white evangelicals” is becoming code for racist bigoted Covidiot climate-deniers, it’s a worrying course title to see. Yes, these associations aren’t created in a vacuum and some are totally deserved (how else can you interpret a news anchor defensively telling the world that “Jesus was white”?), but much is simply agenda-driven slander.

• Authoritarianism, lockdowns, quarantines, and the rise of rebellion
  “Authoritarianism is easier in a world of total visibility and traceability, while democracy may turn out to be more difficult . . . Geopolitically, the future may hinge in part on how societies with different values treat new reservoirs of data” – WEF 2019 Global Risks report
  • Yahoo!, “Video: Chinese COVID-19 patients confined to metal boxes in quarantine camp”
  • Reuters, “New Zealand military to oversee quarantine facilities after new COVID-19 case”
  • Washington State bill, “WAC 246-100-040: Procedures for isolation or quarantine”
  • CBC, “Sask. sites provide place for many to self-isolate — including some COVID19 isolation scofflaws”
  • Unherd, “Inside Australia’s Covid Internment Camp”
  • Truth Unmuted, “Scottish Newspaper Asks Readers if ‘COVID Internment Camps’ Should be Introduced”
  • BBC, “What is the ‘pingdemic’ and why does it mean empty shelves in the supermarkets?”
  • Gateway Pundit, “European Legal Expert Says Vaccine Mandates Are the Beginning of a ‘Social Credit System’ – The Reason Europeans Are Standing Up”
  • CNN, ““Europe’s loud, rule-breaking unvaccinated minority are falling out of society”
  • Life Site, “French rebel as grocery stores begin demanding COVID passport”
  • On Point Preparedness, “In the Hope of Man – The Truckers Will Save Us” video
  • E511 videos: “Is Defiance to Tyranny Obedience to God?” and “King Jehu’s War Against Baal: A Biblical Prototype of the False Light” part 1 and part 2
  • Last American Vagabond, “The Rise Of Authoritarianism: From Parasite Stress Theory To Lockstep”
    
• Mind and behavioral control information to be aware of
  • Wikipedia, “Project MKUltra”
  • FOIA doc: “MKUltra, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification”
  • New York Times:
    • “C.I.A. Data Show 14-Year Project On Controlling Human Behavior”
    • “Mind-Control Studies Had Origins in Trial of Mindszenty”
  • More mainstream news articles about mind control and human behavior manipulation
  • Truthstream Media:
    • The Minds of Men documentary
    • “This Is What Happens When You Don’t Stay in the Prescribed Swim Lane”: how MKUltra is represented in mainstream publications
  • Whitehead, “From Mind Control to Viruses: How the Government Keeps Experimenting on Its Citizens”
  • EIR, “Controllers at Tavistock and the Frankfurt School”
  • Former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov on ideological subversion
  • “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” Amnesty international report on torture, p. 53
  • A summary of mind control research
  • Many more mind control resources
    
• Signs pointing to social collapse, apathy about human extinction
  • Salon, “How America will collapse (by 2025)”
  • Culture Watch, “When Nations Collapse”
  • Zimmerman, “11 Symptoms of Final Decay of Civilization”
  • Vice, “MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.”
  • “Many democracies are likely to be vulnerable to further erosion and even collapse. An academic study of 75 democra- cies that experienced substantial democratic decline since 1994 found that 60 of them (or 80 percent) eventually became autocracies” – Global Trends 2040, p. 84
  • RT, “Peace with US only possible after‘new world order’ – Putin ally”
  • Futurism, “Scientists: Human Extinction Is Extremely Likely”
  • In the meantime, violence, rioting, shoplifting, attacks on the constitution, and other lawlessness abound: see ongoing stories here and here
    

RELIGIOUS

• Satanists, witches, and “nones” are the fastest growing religious groups, while occultism is increasingly mainstreamed and unveiled
  • News Punch, “Oxford University: Satanism ‘Fastest Growing Religion’ In America”
  • Newsweek, “Number Of Witches Rises Dramatically Across U.S. As Millennials Reject Christianity”
  • Pew, “About Three-in-Ten U.S. Adults Are Now Religiously Unaffiliated”
  • Gallup, “Millennials’ Religiosity Amidst the Rise of the Nones”
  • Morning Brew, “The occult is having a moment”
  • I don’t want to veer off into esoteric analyses, but the occult and theosophical symbolism in Meta’s first commercial is so blatant it would be negligent to ignore it:
    • Truthstream Media, “Resurrect Dead on Saturn Surrogates in the Metaverse Future”
    • The Vigilant Citizen, “The Occult Symbolism of That Creepy Meta Commercial”
    • Also note the New Age theology related to the Metaverse: “Create a virtual world exactly how you want it” – The Sun, “What the Zuck: Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s bizarre metaverse picnic as billionaire reveals plan to create new worlds with AI”
      
• Satanists continue to get louder and Satan is increasingly glorified and praised in pop culture and mainstream media. Even events geared to all ages and Christians are becoming increasingly dark and Satanic
  • Satanic Temple, “abortion ritual” legal assistance offer
  • Washington Examiner, “Illinois elementary school hosts after-school Satan club, prompting parental backlash”
  • Newsweek, “Satanic Temple Holiday Display to Be Installed at Illinois State Capitol Building”
  • AZ Central, “The Satanic Temple to hold 1st conference, SatanCon 2022, in Scottsdale”
  • ABC, “Lil Nas X embraces sexuality, sparks Satanic panic online with new music video,” which portrays him “being seduced in the Garden of Eden, sliding down a pole from heaven to hell and twerking on Satan’s lap”
  • Survival Mag, “‘It Was Demonic’ – AstroWorld Concert-Goers Claim Show That Killed 8 People Was Like a Satanic Ritual (Video)”
  • Newsweek, “Travis Scott Satanic Conspiracy Theory Videos on Astroworld Tragedy Removed”
  • Hype Beast, “Inside Look at Kanye West’s Second ‘DONDA’ Listening Party”
  • TMZ, “Kanye West Invites Manson to Sunday Service …”
    
• Christians are being mocked, misrepresented, and persecuted at increasingly unprecedented levels (including from within the church)
  And a rise in antisemitism, persecution against Muslims, hatred among political and ideological groups as we see lawlessness abounding, nation rising against nation, and love growing cold
  • Faithwire, “Number of Christians Murdered for Faith Rose 60 Percent in 2020: 50 Most Dangerous Countries to Be a Christian”
  • The Bridgehead, “Hate crimes against Christians in Europe rise by 70%”
  • Christian Post, “Netflix ‘Insatiable’ Under Fire for Mocking Christians, Sexualizing Jesus and Holy Spirit”
  • The Blaze, “Bible museum puts up transgender Jesus exhibit”
  • The Federalist, “In Case With Global Implications, Finland Puts Christians On Trial For Their Faith”: – “Finnish prosecutors described quotations from the Bible as ‘hate speech’” and will for the first time “decide whether quoting the Bible is a crime”
  • CBN News, “YouTube Labels John MacArthur’s Sermon Hate Speech After He Said God Made Us ‘Male and Female'”
  • MSNBC, “Political ties to a secretive religious group”
  • Paul Washer, “The Mentally Unstable Christian” short sermon
  • Israel365, “Tel Aviv University Reports Antisemitism Has Recently Run Wild”
  • In China, Uighur Muslims are tracked, rewarded and punished via scoring system, and predictively policed in re-education camps under the guise of combating terrorism and religious extremism – FTI 2021 Tech Trends Report, p. 111
    
    
• Christianity and orthodox doctrine is on the decline, the first “post-Christian” generation is here, and atheism is skyrocketing (and growing sillier, angrier, and less informed)
  • Gallup, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time”
  • TMIN, “A New Report On America’s Religious Trends Shows Very Clearly Which Direction The U.S. Is Heading”
  • Christian Headlines, “Only 6 Percent of Americans Hold to a Dominantly Biblical Worldview: Study”
  • “Atheism Doubles Among Generation Z”
  • Braxton Hunter & Tyler Vela, “Atheist Epistemology is a Mess” video
  • Mike Winger videos:
    • “PopAtheism and Its Problems”
    • “How An Atheist Scholar Misleads Millions Of People”
    • “TOP Atheists BEST Arguments Against God. How Bad Are They?”
      
• Most Christians hold at least one new age belief and agenda-driven Bible “translations” further undermine doctrine
  • Pew Research, “‘New Age’ beliefs common among religious, nonreligious Americans”
  • The Guardian, “In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors – and even rewriting scripture”
  • Equip, “The Son of God and Muslim Idiom Translations”
  • Compelling Truth, “The Queen James Bible – What is it?”
  • Lighthouse Trails Research, The Message Bible
  • Mike Winger – The Passion Project: scholars show that TPT is NAR-biased and not a translation by any stretch of the imagination
  • Huffpost, “Conservative Bible Project Cuts Out Liberal Passages”
  • Open Our Eyes Lord, “A new English Bible translation? No, ENOUGH already!”
    
• Churches have sprung up centering around beer, marijuana, and psychedelics
  • Christian Cannabis
  • Huffington Post, “’Beer Churches’ Bubbling Up Across U.S.”
  • Ayahuasca Church of Mother Earth
  • Atlas Obscura, “In 2016, the ‘First Legal Ayahuasca Church’ Got Shut Down. Was It a Scam—or a New Religion?”
  • Futurism, “Neuralink Co-Founder Has an Idea for a New Religion Based on Drugs: It Might Already Exist”
  • Technocracy News, “Burning Man? Klaus Schwab Opens Doors In Davos To Psychedelic Shamans”

• Rome is (again) syncretizing religions, incorporating top corporations and politicians, climate change ideology, Gaia theology, and even aliens
  • Catholic News Agency, “In first prayer video, Pope stresses interfaith unity: ‘We are all children of God’”
  • Vatican, “A Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together”
  • The Guardian:
    • “Pope and grand imam sign historic pledge of fraternity in UAE”
    • “Christians, Muslims and Jews to share faith centre in Berlin”faith-centre-in-berlin
  • Christian News, “‘Together 2016’ Organizer Meets With Pope Francis to Unite Christians, Catholics on National Mall”
  • America Mag, “Pope Francis’ Encyclical on the Environment: An in-depth look at ‘Praised Be'”
  • Church Militant, “Vatican Mints Mother Earth Coin”
  • Business Insider, “Pope Francis joins with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to form a new council focused on creating a more equitable economy”
  • Rome Reports, “Pope Francis meets with politicians to promote COP26”
  • Futurism, “NASA Paid Priests to Figure Out How to Deal with Aliens”
  • Independent, “Pope Francis says he would baptise aliens: ‘Who are we to close doors?'”
    
• “Alien spiritualities” are on the rise while ETs are hyped in the secular world
  • Raëlism: aliens created humanity, immortality is sought through cloning
  • Whitley Shrieber: alien contact as a spiritual path
  • Reinventing Jesus Christ: The New Gospel by Warren Smith – discussion of aliens and spirituality by New Age leaders
  • USA Today, “UFOs have done what COVID-19 never has: Unite Republicans and Democrats in Congress”
  • TMIN, “Why Have UFO Sightings More Than Doubled Over The Last Two Years?”
  • Vice, “You Can Now Easily Download All CIA UFO Documents to Date”
  • The Guardian, “‘Something’s coming’: is America finally ready to take UFOs seriously?”
  • CNN, “Key lawmaker warns at UFO hearing_ ‘Unidentified aerial phenomena are a potential national security threat'”
  • Ongoing UFO sightings articles
  • Consider:
    • Alien Intrusion: Unmasking a Deception by Gary Bates (book and film)
    • Truthstream Media, “Scientists Could Simulate Alien Abductions over 20 Years Ago”
    • End of the American Dream, “Are the Recent UFO Disclosures Setting Us up for a Mass Deception of Epic Proportions?”
    • Little Light Studios, “Disclosed: Deceiving the World – Aliens & UFOs in Bible Prophecy” video
    • The Paranormal Conspiracy: The Truth About Ghosts, Aliens, and Mysterious Beings by Timothy Dailey, Ph.D
      
• Transhumanism is wrapped in religious language of conscious evolution
  Evolution has already been crowned as an unquestionable religion, laying a foundation for acceptance of new ventures framed within its ideology
  • Futurism, “Brain Implants Will Drive Our Evolution and ‘Extend Our Capabilities'”
  • “We are transitioning from natural selection to artificial selection to intentional design facilitated by synthetic biology. The more powerful and more refined that software design tools and DNA technologies become, the more complex biological creations developers will build. We have opened the door to the post-natural age.” – FTI 2021 Tech Trends vol. 12
  • “We could see a shift away from vitalism – the idea that living and nonliving organisms are fundamentally different because they are thought to be governed by different principles. Instead, the idea of biology as having predictable and digitally manageable characteristics may become increasingly common as a result of living in a biodigital age” – Exploring Biodigital Convergence
  • National Geographic April 2017 cover: “The Next Human: Taking Evolution Into Our Own Hands”
  • “The most profound statement in over 150 years of biological research since Charles Darwin can be summarized in just three words, ‘organisms are algorithms’” – Sociable, quoting Harari
  • “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment. It is hard to find the right metaphor to see a century into the future, but it may be that humanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected “brain” based in new core pathways of society” – Converging Technologies report
  • “The greatest threat to humanity’s continuing evolution . . . is theistic opposition to Superbiology in the name of a belief system based on blind faith in the absence of evidence” – Transhumanist Simon Young qtd., The Guardian
  • Quillette, “The Transhumanism Revolution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation”
    
  • Belief in Darwinian macroevolution and naturalism is not actually mandatory
    Atheist and religious scientists alike have been questioning them from the start, presenting competing theories ranging along a whole spectrum
    • See A Scientific Dissent from Darwin, What Darwin Got Wrong and its “Update for the paperback edition: Replies to our critics,” Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed film, Darwin on Trial, In Six Days: Why 50 Scientists Believe in Creation, Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Darwin’s Cow, Mere Creation, Groothuis’ Christian Apologetics, Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels, The Case for a Creator, God and the New Atheism, Evolution: Still A Theory in Crisis, The Face that Demonstrates the Farce of Evolution, Icons of Evolution, lectures by Walter Veith, Jay Seegert, Persuaded by the Evidence, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?
    • I’m not a scientist and can’t vouch for any of these authors, but I hope the variety of evolution skeptics out there might help you question whether it really is settled science
    • And though ideas of conscious or spiritual evolution can be compelling due to our flesh’s desire to transcend this fallen world, can it actually be disentangled from its ties to eugenics, nazism, and a “brave new world” in practice?
    • The real reason for evolutionary ideology is dismissal of and rebellion against God: “If we ourselves can create an artificial soul in silicon matter, the concept of a divine spark in our souls will give way to evolutionary Darwinism once and for all. It will be exactly the answer to the consciousness quest that will end the centuries-old debate on the existence of God” – Forbes, “AI vs God: who stays and who leaves?”
      
  • Note that even staunch atheist evolutionists will entertain a form of intelligent design if they are promoting simulation theory, alien panspermia, or our own godhood:
    • “The laws of physics in our universe seem peculiarly designed with a set of constants that make carbon-based life possible” – WRAL TechWire, “Are we living in a computer simulation – a real Matrix – without knowing it?”
    • “If we are essentially software, [Bostrom] noted, then after we die we might be ‘resurrected’ in another simulation. Or we could be ‘promoted’ by the programmers and brought to life in base reality. The theory was totally naturalistic – all of it was possible without any appeals to the supernatural – but it was essentially an argument for intelligent design” – The Guardian, “God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism”
    • “If you look at . . . molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer. And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe. But that higher intelligence would itself have had to have come about by some explicable, or ultimately explicable process” – Richard Dawkins in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
    • “After four billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design — our intelligent design is going to be the new driving force of the evolution of life” Yuval Harari, “How to Survive the 21st Century” at Davos
    • “…new reality and future man will arise. Could it happen spontaneously and by itself? Unlikely.” – “2045: A New Era for Humanity” video
      
• Artificial Intelligence as God, “digitalism.” and escaping the simulation
  • The Guardian:
    • “Deus ex machina: former Google engineer is developing an AI god”
    • “Although few transhumanists would likely admit it, their theories about the future are a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology” – “God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism”
  • WIRED, “Inside the First Church of Artificial Intelligence”
    • “In the future, if something is much, much smarter, there’s going to be a transition as to who is actually in charge. What we want is the peaceful, serene transition of control of the planet from humans to whatever. And to ensure that the ‘whatever’ knows who helped it get along” – Levandowski qtd.
    • “We would want this intelligence to say, ‘Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge’”
  • TNW, “The Church of AI is dead… so what’s next for robots and religion?”
  • Vice, “Silicon Valley’s Radical Machine Cult”
  • Arrowsmith Press, “Church of the Almighty Algorithm”
  • Futurism, “There’s Now A Religion Based On the Blockchain. Yes, Really.”
  • Googlism, a tongue-in-cheek (or is it?) religion
  • Medium, “Original Blog Post: Googlism”
  • TNW, “The Case for an artificially intelligent God”
  • Forbes, “AI vs God: who stays and who leaves?”
    • “Technological progress as it is will take time and generations of change to convert the world’s population from monotheistic religions to transhumanism”
    • “Creation of an ‘artificial soul’ and true reasoning will not be an attempt to pass the Turing Test. It will aim to pass the test for God”
  • VentureBeat, “An AI god will emerge by 2042 and write its own bible. Will you worship it?”
    • It “could decide to write a similar AI bible for humans to follow, one that matches its own collective intelligence. It might tell you what to do each day, or where to travel, or how to live your life”
    • “We might not even know that the AI god we are serving is primarily trying to wipe us o the face of the planet”
  • Truthstream Media, “Would You Worship an AI God?”
  • Fox 5 NY, “Virtual Reality Church” and church in the Metaverse
  • The Verge, “Comma.ai founder George Hotz wants to free humanity from the AI simulation”
    
• AI robot priests and religious teachers, Mormon and Buddhist transhumanism
  • Daily Mail, “Robopriest: Catholic church could ordain sophisticated AI robots as priests, Franciscan Sister proposes, with the church moving towards a ‘post-human priesthood'”
  • CNET, “This robot wants to teach you Buddhist chants”
  • Mormon Transhumanist Association
  • 2045 Initiative, “The Dalai Lama Supports 2045’s Avatar Project”
    
• Vampirism
  • Trip Pub, “5,000 Vampires Live in the U.S., Drink Donors’ Blood for Energy”
  • Reuters, “‘Vampires’ keep doctors in the dark for fear of stereotyping: study”
    
• QAnon as a new age / conservative evangelical crossover religion
  Q drops promote a new age version of Jesus, a worldly savior, occult “dark to light” language and ideology to die-hard adherents. And alongside QAnon and the phenomena of the increasing extremism of conspiracy groupthink, there is also mockery of those who question mainstream narratives, even while those narratives are becoming increasingly extreme groupthink and absurdly conflicting in themselves (see: Epstein’s suicide, the day everyone became a conspiracy theorist)
  Same with Christianity: the evidence has become increasingly available and undeniable in the past decades, and yet the mockery has become increasingly strong, giving people a choice between whether truth or social acceptance is more compelling. And unfortunately, Christianity and QAnon are increasingly seen as bedfellows (they might be superficially, but are very much divergent at their foundations)
  • The Atlantic, “The Prophecies of Q: American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.”
  • Medium, “Make a Whole New Religion: QAnon and the Age of Trump”
  • “Thinking about QAnon, if it were a religion, it would be as big as all white evangelical Protestants, or all white mainline Protestants. So it lines up there with a major religious group” – PRRI President Robert Jones qtd. in Baptist News Global, “The Jesus story is not a conspiracy theory, honest!”
  • ABC, “As churches prove ‘fertile ground’ for conspiracy theories, some pastors are taking a stand”
  • Technocracy News, “Biblical Christianity Likened to QAnon as a Conspiracy Theory”
  • E511 Ministries Road to Antichrist video series – a look at the rise of conspiracy and Qanon as red herrings
    
• Other prophesied events and zeitgeists in progress
  We’ll look at these in more depth when I return to my “Ramblings” series, but a summary of developments to keep in mind for this series:
  • False prophets, false Christs, little gods, Christ consciousness, and people saying “I am Christ” have spread like wildfire (Matt. 24)
  • Many have departed “from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils; Speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared with a hot iron” (1 Tim. 4:1-3)
  • People do not “endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables [or ‘myths’]” (2 Tim. 4:3)
  • People are “lovers of their own selves, covetous [or ‘lovers of money’], boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, Without natural affection [or ‘without natural feeling’], trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent [or ‘without self control’], fierce, despisers of those that are good [or simply “haters of good”], Traitors, heady [or ‘reckless’], highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof, . . . led away with divers lusts, ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:1-7)
  • An experience- and pleasure-centered postmodernist, truth as plural, fake news, and alternative facts generation has trouble receiving a love of truth, and is in danger of strong delusion and a great falling away (2 Thess. 2:3, 8-12)
  • Earth-centered and feminist spiritualities, neo-paganism, Gaiaism, and pantheism are on the rise alongside climate and environmental fears and focus. Oneness religions parallel widespread talk of the technological hive mind, globalism, humanism, socialism, new (new) world order, WWG1WGA, and “all in it together” language used regarding Covid solutions, the Metaverse, rebellions, and more. These creation-centered and syncretic religions parallel biblical warnings regarding worshipping the creation rather than the Creator (Rom. 1) and set the stage for a worldwide worship of a false Christ (Rev. 13)
    

Consider how fast the world changed with Covid, and how quickly it could change again. Calls for extreme change are becoming more urgent, as we see with a new announcement from the UN chief saying that we “face a five-alarm global fire that requires the full mobilization of all countries.” The five alarms are Covid, global finance, climate change, cyber-crime and misinformation, and violent conflicts. He proposes “a Global Code of Conduct to end the infodemic and the war on science” and says “countries have no choice than to to go into ’emergency mode’ against the climate crisis.” “’An avalanche of action’ in 2022” will be necessary. Meanwhile, Klaus Schwab’s new book, The Great Narrative, celebrates technology’s move from linear to exponential progress, expects more to happen in the next 10 years than in the last 10, and hopes for man to merge with machine. Having read through the above (and lived through 2020-2022), you may be able to imagine what could take shape from an avalanche of emergency action combined with unprecedented technology and the influence of such transhumanism in high places.

Okay, we’re done, for now. Go take a nap. That’s what I’ll be doing for awhile now that I’ve finished putting this together, so don’t be too worried if it takes awhile for part two to appear . . .

Footnotes:

1See an actual scan of the inside of my brain here. Bring your 3D goggles! (They won’t do anything.)

2Hey, Elijah used sarcasm against the false gods too: “And at noon Elijah mocked them, saying, ‘Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he is musing, or he is relieving himself, or he is on a journey, or perhaps he is asleep and must be awakened’” – 1 Kings 18:27

3I will anyway; I’m just spreading it out like a kid does with the food on their plate to make it look like less!