patrick.net

You Vill Not Eat Ze Bugs...

In the future, we will live in a high-tech surveillance state, our every movement, word, and even thought tracked by implanted chips feeding our data into a planetary grid encompassed by swarming multitudes of networked drones, sensors, and satellites from which nothing is invisible. Our cities will be antiseptic multi-ethnic utopias where light monorail systems powered by sunlight speed down gleaming white streets. The inhabitants will be androgynous vegans and insectivores, their psychologies carefully curated by scientifically designed curricula, social credit and cognitive nudge systems, and psychopharmacogenetic therapies all aligning to remove every trace of such antisocial traits as nativism, masculinity, sexual jealousy, or the selfish desire to own things. Agriculture will be a thing of the past, for the soylent, vegetation, and insect protein that sustains the posthumans will be manufactured in agricultural towers that require no soil or rainwater to work. The smiling, teeming hives of the high-density metropoles will contain the entirety of posthumanity, while the remainder of the planet reverts to wilderness. The posthumans have lost even their desire to interact with the physical world, spending their lives immersed in synthetic digital experiences, their enjoyment of which is ensured by direct electrical modulation of their pleasure centres.

This is essentially the vision being promoted by the World Economic Forum and its fellow travellers. Whether it looks like paradise or hell on Earth, the natural and desirable outcome of the evolutionary process or a Great Filter-scale cosmic failure mode, is a matter of perception.

It’s also almost irrelevant, because it won’t happen. ...

The last few years they kicked their efforts into overdrive. In the short term that resulted in an explosive growth in their power, but by abandoning their gradualist approach a very large fraction of the human species were shocked into their first awareness of this global project. “You will own nothing and you will be happy” was baby’s first redpill for a lot of people, and they didn’t like the taste one bit. The WEFites are exposed now, and there’s no going back for them. ...

The point is, the basic outlines of this plan date back to the previous media age: the time of one-to-many communications, in which whoever held control of the press, the radio stations, and the television networks had control over the minds of the population. ...

Ultimately, herding the population towards the future they have planned cannot be done coercively. There are too few of them and too many of us. They need the population to agree that this future is a good future (so they’ll work towards it), or if not that, an inevitable future (so they won’t resist it). Doing that requires that no criticism of this vision be permitted, whilst simultaneously no alternatives be presented. Doing that requires perfect control over the media organs by which perception is formed.

That’s where they got tripped up. They formulated their plans in an age in which total control over centralized media was possible and even standard; their plan involved the creation of digital communications networks in order to enable the necessary depth and breadth of surveillance; and they apparently failed to anticipate, until it was far too late, that these networks would change the media game. One-to-many became many-to-many, and the ability to manufacture consent started to dissolve as the voices of the press were drowned out in the cacophony of the Internet’s hive mind. ...

Their problem, which they don’t have a good solution to, is multiplex. First, they no longer have exclusive access to the eyeballs of the populace, but must compete with myriads of small, independent content producers working across the full array of media modalities. Second, their messaging – developed at great expense with professional public relations firms working through slow bureaucratic processes subjected to detailed managerial oversight – is almost immediately turned into fodder for memes by the nimble, open media ecology of networked humanity. Rather than being the ones who produce the entertainment, they have themselves in large degree become the entertainment. Every time they say anything, the Internet has a good laugh at their expense. Every time they push a new talking point, it is almost instantaneously appropriated by the memetic ecosystem, and a mutated version of it deployed against them.

They have no real defense against this. They can’t do the same thing in reverse. Everything they say is based on lies, while memetic content dies on the vine if it is not a projection of truth. Memes are not ideological, they are alethiological. When they try to appropriate memes, it turns into cringe, and cringe fails to propagate ... unless it gets repurposed as a meme to mock the one who made the cringe.

Their only useful tactic has been censorship. That’s a resource-intensive game of whack-a-mole, which imposes costs on the censors that are ultimately higher than the costs on the censored. In the short term, troublesome voices can be silenced on controlled social media platforms. In the long term, censorship resistant platforms that aren’t controlled by globalists are developed, and content creators migrate there. Meanwhile, even on the controlled platforms, the silenced voices have a tendency to re-emerge almost immediately after being booted. Further, the censorship itself simply becomes more fuel for the bonfire of ruling class vanity. Finally, the Streisand effect ensures that anything that gets censored immediately attracts attention. It’s a temporary ad hoc solution that generates far more trouble for them in the long run. ...

The billionaire gerontocrats who have patiently inched their plan forward for several decades woke up one day in the mid-teens and belatedly noticed that their social control technologies were dissolving before their very eyes due to the unanticipated power of the Internet to act as a universal ideological solvent. You might think it unlikely that such powerful, and presumably intelligent, people would fail to notice a dynamic that strikes digital natives as obvious ... but they’re not digital natives, and words like boomertech exist for a reason. Ever watch your grandmother try to check her email? What makes you think George Soros is much better?

Plans they’d expected to have another leisurely half century to gradually implement bit by unnoticeable bit were suddenly imperilled by the loss of their ability to shape minds. So they panicked. Agenda 2050 became Agenda 2030. They have to rush through everything, slam it into place now, or they’re fucked.