Hiding in Plain Sight: Technocratic Tyranny Behind a Medical Mask

Introduction

There can be little doubt that big-tech global domination, taken shape over the past 250 years, is due in large part to the propaganda that supports it, that integrates humanity into a universal collective that captures, controls, and manipulates the material world, its manifold resources and natural processes, in ways that profit people in power. As the fervent pursuit of monetary profit drives us more and more toward technological developments, it also blesses us with the innovations we seek as well as new awareness of more efficient paths to take in increasing technological innovation. The upshot is increased future profits. This permanent feedback loop of conceptualization-production-profit-innovation, however, has a hardly noticed weakness imperceptible, it seems, to those fully invested mentally and monetarily in the system that has developed the world to its present late stage.

Our natural search, as humans, for the best tools to extend our physical limitations, and for technologies to extend our limited knowledge for applied purposes, has been corrupted and undermined. The ideology enjoins people possessed of irrational desires for profit and power to manifest in all walks of life the dictates of technocratic feudalism. The global dominance of big-tech can be understood as a kind of “demonic destructive suction tube”, as Martin Luther King observed, syphoning off the natural world, the material resources, the time, energy, bodies, and intellect of men deceived to embrace and take part in the construction of their own prisons — mental and physical. When the appearance of profit is perceived to be lurking in some new technological possibility, the suction tube moves into place to vacuum up another soul. At the center of this big-tech universe is the black hole of central banking currency untethered to any intrinsically valuable commodity.

We enter the world naked and hungry only to face a vast and relentless propaganda system that draws us into the pervasive myth that all high pursuits in life turn on the acquisition of this greatest of frauds. Money, in late stage capitalism, is the preeminent technology that now threatens to morph into a new and more efficient form of its present guise (fiat currency). The material medium of currency, used for millennia, owned and reproduced nowadays by the global system of central banking, will soon mutate into a new technology — coinage in digital bits and bytes. If technology is supposed to bridge gaps in knowledge of how to apply our purposes, money will become the key technology that (un)locks all gates to freedom and wealth.

This article traces the history of major technological developments as they are framed by the leading mythmakers in the mainstream media tasked to manage public perception and prop up this vast system of deception. Our goal is to give an overview of technology as the claimed saviour of humanity and offer critical analysis of the propaganda that seeks to integrate humankind into this global project of everlasting technological development. We see technocratic tyranny as a state of existence maintained by the captains of “Big Digital” — as Michael Rectenwald observes,

“the mega-data services, media, cable, and internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, apps, and the developing … monopolies … [that] will either … be incorporated by the state, or become elements of a new corporate state power.”

We divide the article into eight sections, using Covid-19 propaganda as an illustrative example. The first addresses the modern history of propaganda as an organised system of mass persuasion informed by theories in psychoanalysis and how this system has since been used by power centers to sell wars, policies, and products. The deployment of the Covid-19 crisis has served as the means by which to manufacture consent to a new social, economic, political and religious order, known variously as the Great Reset, Fourth Industrial Revolution (or New World Order). The second addresses how governments and agencies collaborate with big tech firms to create and manage public perception through media. The third looks at how audience emotions are manipulated in manufacturing compliance with questionable state policies and plans. The fourth addresses how big tech propaganda enables huge unelected global bureaucracies, funded largely by transnational corporate tech giants, to undermine national sovereignty and the will of the people.

The fifth discusses interconnections and overlapping interests across governments, intelligence agencies, and big tech contractors developing the long-planned technological architectures of a new bio-secure digital economy: the most sophisticated gate-keeping operation since monarchs ruled. The sixth discusses weapons development and its connection to big tech medicine. The seventh reflects on past propaganda campaigns launched by PR firms, which served to identify a common enemy, whip up outrage and hysteria and how, nowadays, the same sorts of operations are at work normalising the collapse of societies and the capture of public institutions. The final section discusses patterns of planned mass deception and social control, past and present, through psychological and technological programs and what these official programs portend for the future.

1 What Has Big Tech Propaganda Sold Us So Far?

It is useful to turn our attention, first, to the past century when propaganda techniques were informed by research in psychoanalysis and, subsequently, codified and applied in a global industry known today as Public Relations (public affairs, strategic communications, etc). In his seminal work, Propaganda (1928), Edward Bernays points out that “the steam engine, the multiple press, and the public school — that trio of the industrial revolution — have taken power away from kings and given it to the people. The people have actually gained power which the king lost. For economic power tends to draw after it political power; and the history of the industrial revolution shows how that power passed from the king and the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage and universal schooling reinforced this tendency, and at last even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the mass promised to become king”.

What the aristocracy lost, however, for a brief period of time over the past 250 years it has since regained in the guise of global power, consolidated in the hands of transnational corporate “Giants” as Peter Phillips describes in his book. Allied with governments, the Giants of this present age work to undermine democratic electoral processes, and to mystify policies and elite power relations that dispossess the masses of their ability to reproduce their lives. As members of mass culture, we are presented with a thick veil of public relations messaging manufactured for public schools and media consumption, to numb minds and efface the reasoning processes of consumers, directing their attention away from issues of vital public import. The technologies of mass communication both reveal and conceal — exposing citizens to necessary illusions meant to manufacture consent to the system of dispossession and concealing from public view the empirical world.

In an exposition of the relationship between power elites and contemporary propaganda, Professor of Political Sociology and the Sociology of Media, Peter Phillips and his colleagues, wrote a chapter in 2017 titled, “Selling Empire, War and Capitalism: Public Relations and Propaganda Firms in Service to the Transnational Capitalist Class”. The authors described a global news production apparatus in which over 80 percent of “news” is fed to “news” organisations by public relations and propaganda (PRP) firms representing corporations, governments, military-intelligence agencies, and a transnational elite “superclass” (a.k.a. Managerial Technocratic Aristocracy). That transnational superclass is comprised of “Davos-attending, private jet-flying, megacorporation-interlocking, policy-building elites of the world — people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid.” At the apex of the global power pyramid are “organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the Group of Seven (G7) and the Group of Twenty (G20), World Social Forum, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Bank for International Settlements, and other transnational associations.”

The implication, wrote Phillips et al. in 2017 is that, “journalists are taking an increasingly dependent secondary position to PRP firms and government press releases in corporate news media … The world today faces a PRP-military-industrial-media empire so powerful and complex that, in the majority of news venues, basic truths about world events are concealed, skewed, or simply not reported at all.”

A crucial mechanism in the firepower of the military-industrial-media complex is the funneling of information to Western media via just three channels. The organisation Swiss Policy Research notes that, “it is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.” They are Reuters, AFP and AP, which together act not merely as gatekeepers but as “propaganda multipliers”. Such is the world today in the grip of powerful forces of corporate consolidation and capture of democratic institutions. “The key role played by these agencies,” the Swiss Policy analysis observed, “means Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording”.

As if to demonstrate the awesome might of the global news propaganda machine, in early 2020 global populations went to sleep during one news cycle and awoke the next day as if beamed by Scotty of Star Trek fame into a radically new social and political reality. With headlines blaring news in unison of a mysterious new killer virus on the loose, escaped from the killing fields of Wuhan wet markets, citizens came under fire from an information-blitzkrieg raining down confusion, fear and chaos, packaged up as news. Legacy media and social media platforms joined forces to deploy endless rounds of fragmentary explosive revelations in the form of stories, updates, snippets, numbers, warnings, announcements, analyses and official advice, suffused with vivid images of animals in various stages of unhygienic and inhumane slaughter, personnel in hazmat suits and people dropping dead. These global simulations of mayhem and disorder sent citizens scrambling for the safety of their homes, and the security of answers. Decisive answers. Coherent answers. Any answers. And fast.

It’s a novel deadly coronavirus!

You are unprotected!

Everyone is dangerous!

You are biohazard!

Stay home!

Follow instructions!

Once the clouds of hysteria and confusion began to settle and the contours of a “New Normal” started taking shape, Big Tech emerged from the plumes of chaos cloaked in a Brave New mantle, having been crowned premier gatekeeper of a Brave New discipline: The Science™. As The Science™ (a.k.a. Anthony Fauci) advanced, with Big Tech patrolling the margins of acceptable opinion, dazed and shell-shocked citizens grappled with the shrapnel of their former knowledge, trying to piece together a reasonable understanding of what had just occurred, as though their survival depended on it, which Google and Facebook told them it did. In the process, they found themselves clinging for dear life to their familiar news and social media feeds, holding onto their preferred outlets ever more tightly, with the frozen embrace of a frightened child.

Where else could they turn for their daily doses of trusted information with which to fight The Virus™, and, therefore, survive? How else were they to navigate the new and confusing micro-biologically dangerous world they suddenly found themselves inhabiting? Who else but Big Tech and Big Media to supply the kaleidoscopic stream of medical advice they craved, to ease the trauma of being stalked everywhere at all times by a mysterious and deadly pathogen, lurking in the very breath and touch of their dearest friend, promising to turn them into a deadly disease vector themselves? And where else but Big Tech and the World Wide Web could any of us go to continue conducting our daily lives? Having been banished from the natural world, the mediated online world was our only resort.

And so, with that, Big Tech deployed a rapidly spinning news cycle to drill its way deep inside the fabric of our lives, to make the narratives integral elements of the public mind and the psyche of every single person. Whereas once technology had been a convenience and an aid (if not at times a distraction), now we could scarcely live without it. A manufactured global health emergency with pseudo-medical martial law enabled Big Tech to construct not merely consent but societal symbiosis — connecting a technological umbilical cord from the social and economic system to humanity and our daily lives. A small step forward for Facebook, Microsoft and Google perhaps, but a giant leap for digital economies and the coming Virtual Age of a new Metaverse.

As “two weeks to flatten the curve” morphed into months and years, Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, representing the Davos-attending, private jet flying, policy-building elites of the world, followed behind Big Tech like a Herald of old, sounding the arrival of the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Our digital, physical and biological identities would soon merge, he proclaimed, as part of a “better” and more sustainable world. Technology guided by the loving hands of the Big Tech Giants would save us from our pestilence-stricken and wasteful selves, and deliver us from pathogens. Microsoft, Oracle and the Gates Foundation took the opportunity, together with military-intelligence spy tech contractor MITRE, to establish the infrastructure for digital certification and digital identities, while we all became accustomed to scanning ourselves in and out wherever we go, leaving a digital trail behind us, tracked, traced and appended like never before to our phones. Next on the Brave New technological agenda, Schwab informs us, is immersion in a virtual reality that “will contain environments where we will earn money [and] forge relationships … The distinction between being offline and online will become increasingly blurred and harder to identify, and the meaning of reality itself will evolve” [1].

Global finance is singing from the same hymn sheet and banking on its long-planned digital economy and virtual world, replete with technologically enhanced human beings. In 2021, the Bank of America issued “Moonshot” investment advice, listing 14 profitable “areas of disruption” that promise to deliver a financial boon, including brain-computer interfaces, emotional AI, bionic humans, synthetic biology, and a universe of “virtual worlds that interoperate with each other superseding the internet/physical world.” Bloomberg has written of the Bank of America’s moonshots, “the 14 technologies highlighted for the future currently represent only $330 billion in market size. Combined, they could increase 36% a year to $6.4 trillion by the 2030s. For context, profits from S&P 500 companies have grown 6% a year historically.” The Bank of America’s top three shareholders include BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. Described as a “secret world power” and “the fourth branch of government”, to the extent that the “boundaries between the state and the financial oligarchy are virtually non-existent,” BlackRock is expected to play a central role in banking and digital/crypto currency aspects of coming digital biometric identities and economies, potentially with financially-enforced social control.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has lodged a patent application, curiously numbered 2020 060606, for technology with which human body and brain activity data can be collected, used to mine and award cryptocurrency, and be transmitted to devices connected to the web, whether smartphones, computers, or screen-less devices on the Internet of Things and the forthcoming Internet of Bodies. Data to be collected and transmitted during the performance of various assigned tasks include body heat, internal imaging, eye movements, blood flow, and electrical brain activity. The sensors with which such internal and external body activity data would be collected, according to the patent application, “include, for example, but are not limited to, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanners or sensors, electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) sensors, heart-rate monitors, thermal sensors, optical sensors, radio frequency (RF) sensors, ultrasonic sensors, cameras, or any other sensor or scanner that can measure or sense body activity or scan the human body. For instance, the fMRI may measure body activity by detecting changes associated with blood flow. The fMRI may use a magnetic field and radio waves to create detailed images of the body (e.g. blood flow in the brain to detect areas of activity).” Whether the sensors transmitting these data to external devices and the blockchain would be macro, micro, or nano in scale is left wide open, as is the method of their attachment to and/or implantation in the human-animal-product host.

The implications for real-time mass surveillance, bodily autonomy, and integration with digital identities, digital currencies, and virtual worlds are stark and alarming, particularly given pronouncements made by the Giants of the Fourth Industrial Revolution that our digital, physical, and biological identities will soon merge. Elon Musk at once warns us that the risk of “digital super-intelligence” being weaponised against populations by the powerful is “far more dangerous than nukes.” In the same breath, however, he simultaneously sells the inevitability of surrendering our meaningful participation in society to the superiority of AI, and seeking refuge in a fusion between biological intelligence and digital machine intelligence, or between brain and technology. Much of the glamour appearing in the Big Tech propaganda discourse glosses over and conceals the tensile strength of the digital chains that bind human beings in the metaverse of their own digital caves — a pervasive simulacrum in which inhabitants mistake the mediated hyperreal for the empirical world where Big Tech Giants amass and use the power to judge who can participate in the New World Economy. But how did we get here? Where is the outcry? Whither humanity?

2. Conjuring Illusions with Information: Incantation as News

Big Tech is at the very center of communicating the claimed benefits of tolerating human existence in a global simulacrum. Offering a window onto the tactics by which elites maintain the power structure and its key relationships through deception, and thereby induce populations to comply unwittingly with agendas they would otherwise reject, in 2014 The Intercept published a set of leaked training materials designed for those tasked with deceiving the world. The materials were developed by the UK’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG hereafter) — a cyber-operations unit of the UK Signals Intelligence Agency, GCHQ, tasked to target issues of terrorism. Since its publication in 2014 and since the meaning of “terrorism” has recently expanded to include anyone who questions prevailing political wisdom, the JTRIG materials are crucial to understanding how mass manipulation and control are achieved. The training materials were called “The Art of Deception: Training for a New Generation of Covert Operations” and were presented at what NBC News described as NSA cyber-spy conferences in 2010 and 2012.

Since 9/11 — and all subsequent global psychological operations — has destroyed public discourse and has turned dissenting groups, institutions, or governments into “terrorists” (or “terrorist” sympathizers), we adopt the JTRIG materials to frame our analysis and to help readers understand more deeply how big tech propaganda techniques are deployed against populations.

JTRIG’s leaked documents, courtesy of Edward Snowden, summarised literatures in psychology and cognitive science relevant to achieving “influence in cyberspace”, across “all areas of the globe”. The order of business was to “deceive”, “disrupt” and “degrade” audiences described as “targets” by JTRIG. Technologies used as communications platforms included Facebook, Twitter, web pages, and the global news media. To harness these avenues of dissemination, “constructing news media” and attending to the “financial architecture of media” were advised. The targets to be deceived and manipulated ranged from individuals to groups to “general population[s]” on a “global” scale. The ultimate purpose of the training was to “create cyber magicians” who could effectively manipulate human perception and behavior so as to “make something happen in the real or cyber world”. Nudging terrorized populations toward voluntary “sheltering in place” from a virus with a ~0.1% infection-fatality rate would be one example. Nudging them to behave reflexively and to wear masks as effective against viral particles as a chain-link fence against mosquitoes would be another.

Many of the approaches to social conditioning listed in the JTRIG documents revolved around deploying the tactics of magic tricks, perceptual illusions, and the “principles of scams”. All of which rely upon exploiting vulnerabilities in the human information processing system, such that “targets” can be prevented from seeing what is in front of their eyes and induced, instead, to see things that aren’t there. Failing to see the key tactics of totalitarianism when it locks you in your home, strips you of your civil rights, forcibly injects (rapes) you, and censors or bans all opposition, would be one example. Seeing the “Novel” Coronavirus™ (with a 99.86% survival rate) on every street corner would be another. Safe is dangerous. Dangerous is safe. “Swap the real for the false, and vice versa” instructed JTRIG.

How do cyber-magicians achieve such perceptual sleights of hand? Subliminal messaging perhaps? Covert hypnosis? Electronic mind control? Possibly. The vast body of knowledge gleaned from MK-Ultra studies conducted on unwitting citizens may have since informed techniques in covert mind manipulation and behaviour modification as new bio- and nanotechnologies have developed. Neuroscientist and specialist in Biowarfare and Biosecurity for DARPA, the Pentagon, and the US Special Operations Command, Dr. James Giordano explained in 2018 that the thoughts and actions of targeted individuals can be manipulated not only through traditional informational means but also through biological and neurological technologies. He listed “cyber-linked neurocognitive manipulation”, “directed energy devices”, “nanoneurotechnologicals”, ”transcranial neuromodulation” and more. Giordano told the Westpoint Modern War Institute in a talk titled, “The Brain is the Battlefield of the Future” that it is possible to “disrupt an individual from the level of their cell to their system, and disrupt individuals on a variety of levels from individuals all the way to the social fabric.”

Where disrupting the social fabric with propaganda is concerned, states and their perception management apparatuses have been deploying magicians’ skills for decades. From Jasper Maskelyne who led a ‘Magic Gang’ in the British military during WWII, to John Mulholland who worked with the CIA in the 1950s, adapting his conjuring skills to clandestine activities, culminating in The CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, the art of illusion is woven into the very fabric of contemporary governance. By 2012, JTRIG described itself as “conjuring with information”. The fundamental “building blocks” in all instances, explained JTRIG in a slide showing the components of deception dwarfing the world, stem from controlling one simple, but crucial, human resource: attention.

Perception management is “attention management” noted JTRIG. The first step in its matrix of “gambits of deception” was to “control attention”, a maxim upon which the legacy media lives and dies. Consider, for example, the finding that a person in a gorilla suit can walk across a screen in front of an audience sight unseen, if viewers are simply instructed to count the number of times a ball is thrown back and forth by others in the frame. Attention, the human mind’s spotlight, renders that within its field visible and recognisable, and relegates that outside its beam to languish in the perceptual dark. So, with all eyes on the back-and-forth of daily COVID case counts, hospitalisations and deaths, warnings, advice, restrictions, The Science™ and vaccination rates, the technocratic tyrannical monstrosity lumbering towards us scarcely requires its medical disguise. It is as invisible as the person in a gorilla suit, hiding between the news volleys in plain sight.

The blinding effect of attention can be dialed up by intensifying emotion, or ‘affect’ in JTRIG’s psychological parlance, which simultaneously primes the perceptual backdrop for emotional projections fashioned from thin air. “Create cognitive stress”, “create physiological stress” and “create affective stress” JTRIG counseled. And what better technique than a killer virus, daily death reminders, house arrest, economic destruction, lockdowns, lockouts, coercion, rules, division, and isolation, with no end in sight? Under stress, targets are prone to reflexive, automatic and emotional responding. Propaganda-friendly emotions such as fear and rage are therefore more readily evoked. Fear and rage, in turn, lock attention — laser-like — onto the source of the perceived threat: a killer virus, the unvaccinated, anti-maskers, terrorists. All of which engender irrational fixation and blindness.

Meanwhile fight-flight responses sit on a hair trigger, waiting to be discharged at a common enemy. Unvaccinated neighbours, dissenting scientists, protesters and independent thinkers are held up to be shot down with ready-made propaganda smears: Covidiot, Antivaxxer, Conspiracy theorist, Free-dumb fighter. “Exploit shared affect” explained JTRIG in its covert deception manual. “People make decisions for emotional reasons, not rational ones”. In a supplementary document titled ‘Behavioural Science Support for JTRIG’s Effects and Online HUMINT Operations’, a Ministry of Defence psychologist explained that part of the art of deception is to “discredit”, “denigrate”, “degrade”, and “promote distrust”, for instance of those who stand in the propagandist’s way. The value to cyber-magicians is that as populations discharge their pent-up emotions at denigrated propaganda targets, reality can be turned on its head. Speech can be made dangerous and censorship safe; the government your friend and your friend your foe; and freedom a trap while captivity will set you free, courtesy of the Official Enemy of the Day™. Just as swapping the Queen of Hearts for the Ace of Spades takes place under cover of commotion, swapping the real for the false in the sociopolitical world takes place while “decoying” and “dazzling” with emotion. The manoeuvre is akin to pulling a coronavirus variant out of your hat.

3. The High Art of Illusion

As they lurk in the darkness of targets’ perceptual blind spots, power elites must project alternate realities with which populations can engage, to mobilise the masses in the construction of their own prisons, mental and physical. The propagandist’s task in this respect is to induce illusory perception capable of nudging targets’ behaviours in desired directions. The key to this component of conjuring is to manage expectations.

“We are biased to see/hear/feel/smell/taste what we strongly expect to see/hear/feel/smell/taste” JTRIG informed its cyber-magicians in 2012. A ball, for instance, can be made to disappear in mid-air simply by virtue of the viewer’s expectancies. After a series of ball tosses upwards, should a magician gesture to throw the ball upwards once more while dropping it covertly into his or her lap, the majority of the audience will see the ball leave the magician’s hand, in line with their expectations. At the moment that their perceptual system catches up with reality, the ball is seen to disappear.

And so it is with social and political perception. Populations in states of heightened emotion and focused attention will see what they expect to see. Frightened for their lives and transfixed on all things viral, for example, the medicalized citizen expects not an advancing technocracy but a set of medical problems, medical solutions, and medical answers. The assumption by Big Tech of unfettered power to dictate what is and is not acceptable truth, and define scientific reality, is seen, therefore, not as tyranny but as sound medical advice. Social media gatekeepers silencing technocracy’s dissenters is seen not as censorship, nor as totalitarian control, but as defending The Science™ (a.k.a. the economy of the New Normal). The rise of digitised currency, identity and economies is seen not as a biometric control grid but as good medical hygiene — staying ‘separate together’ and ‘COVID safe’. And the enslavement of humanity by technology through all of these means is seen as eradicating The Virus™. You see technocracy, I see the medical establishment. “Hide the real” and “show the false” instructed JTRIG with the insight of an expert magician.

The same levels of stagecraft apply to the rollout of COVID-19 “vaccines”. With watchful eyes both sides of the COVID narrative focused on medical and microbiological harms, whether from COVID-19 or the clot-forming, organ-destroying, novel gene-based vaccines, the COVID injections enjoy a largely positive public image as pharmaceutical, rather than technological, tools. Framed by medical and scientific expectancies, steeped in stress and fear, their central role as instruments of technocratic enslavement remains obscured — faint and poorly defined — behind the blaring, glaring, dissent-ensnaring, medical mirage.

While COVID vaccines have delivered an historic windfall gain to Big Pharma, their utility to the emerging technocratic world order is beyond compare. The mandatory global vaccination campaign has been the tip of the spear in a global digital identity agenda, via vaccine passports, with multiple entry points to digital currency and social-credit style financial and biometric control. Regular Bio-Nano injections (updates), such as Pfizer and Moderna have facilitated under COVID-19, moreover, provide a delivery system for the global hardware necessary to roll out Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies such as the Internet of Bodies, human-machine and brain-web interfaces, and other technological upgrades to human beings. The fact that the funding push for industry to develop mRNA vaccines in 2012 came from the US military rather than the medical world, via its Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is perceived not as a central feature but as a footnote to the vaccination campaign. In other words, as the medical and microbiological data attests, the injections forced upon populations the world over in the name of COVID-19, brought to you by the US military, have been neither necessary nor effective as a public health measure. They are, however, critical elements of the digital infrastructure for a new world ruled by a sociopathic technocracy.

To illustrate the perceptual power of eliciting expectancies such as medical versus technological frames, would-be cyber-wizards in 2012 were shown an image of a bird. Or a rabbit. Depending upon how the image is framed, audiences primed with expectancies such as “Easter” or “Bugs Bunny” are inclined to see a rabbit whereas those primed with concepts such as “flight” or “wings” would see a bird.

You see a vaccination campaign. I see a Fourth Industrial Revolution.

4. The World Health Organization (WHO) as Actor on the Global ‘Health’ Stage

As any good magician will know, conjuring requires not just technical proficiency but acting ability and theatrical skill. Enacting a scenario convincingly is central to capturing an audience’s attention and evoking sufficient emotion to transport the onlooker to an illusory world. The importance of convincing performances, what’s more, was not lost on JTRIG in terms of deceiving mass media consumers. Use “elegance” and “creativity” in “constructing experience in [the] mind of [the] target which should be accepted so they don’t realise it”, JTRIG advised. Posing as a trusted ally was part of the plan. “Mimicking”, “mirroring” and “simulating” in order to infiltrate were all key tactics, as was building trust, “gaming” empathy, and exploiting targets’ needs, for safety and security for example.

As Big Tech covertly lays the legal conduit in its matrix of global power, the WHO is centre stage, playing at present the leading role in conjuring the worldwide illusion of a genuine medical intervention under which technocratic tyranny can hide.

With all eyes now focused on Ukraine, the WHO has been quietly orchestrating an unprecedented power grab in benign bureaucratic disguise, under the auspices of an international treaty on pandemic prevention and preparedness. To be drafted and negotiated during the course of 2022, with international negotiations launched on March 3 2022, the treaty seeks to establish a centralised mechanism of global command under the WHO, granting it universal dominion over all nations’ pandemic responses. The treaty, if signed, would enable the WHO to override countries’ constitutions and civil laws, with the aim of enforcing “strict public health measures”, “digitalized surveillance” and “infodemic management”, or censorship. One of the treaty’s chief architects is a research lead at a ‘Governing Pandemics Institute’ funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Once implemented, the treaty would be binding under international law and and would empower unelected bureaucrats at the WHO, installed by their fellow elites, to govern the world by dictatorial decree, courtesy of the Health Emergency™ of the day.

In order to reach this unprecedented level of global influence, the WHO has traded on unquestioning trust and its stellar reputation as an upstanding leader of the international health community. However, while the WHO is widely perceived as representing the health interests of nations around the world, in reality it does the bidding of power and performs for the profit-seeking interests atop the global power pyramid. Just as the FDA under Anthony Fauci is funded by the industry bodies it pretends to oversee, and the CDC foundation’s donors read like a Fortune 500 list, the WHO is an exemplar in corporate capture. Having commenced its existence in 1948 as an intergovernmental agency funded by member states, the extra “donations” from private sources, over time, began flowing in, such that by 2020 extra-budgetary funds comprised 80% of the WHO’s budget. In an examination of Bill Gates’ global empire-building under the guise of “health”, Greenstein and Loffredo have noted that the balance of funding sources is fundamental to the character and ethical sense of the WHO, as voluntary funds “can be earmarked for specific causes … In other words, most of the WHO’s money comes with strings attached.” Those strings, moreover, lead back to the world’s preeminent figurehead for Big Pharma-Tech interventions — Bill Gates. During 2020-2021, for instance, between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Gates- and Rockefeller-backed GAVI the Vaccine Alliance, Gates’ financial influence at the WHO was second to none, totaling over a billion dollars across the two organisations.

During the WHO’s long transition from public servant to captured body, analysis in The Lancet raised concerns, in 2002, that the WHO’s “mission is being manipulated” by large donors who exert “powerful budgetary control”. This level of manipulation had led to a “politically driven focus” at the time, the analysis warned, noting that, “the likelihood is that these pressures will only increase.” Twelve years later, in 2014, a report based on testimony from global health insiders found that the WHO’s funding arrangements had spawned a commercial, pharma-friendly single-disease approach to global health governance, which was focussed myopically on marketable technological interventions, particularly in medicines and vaccines. The single-disease, technology-focussed model was known within global public health spheres as the “Gates approach”. It had been pushed both at the WHO and in global public health more generally by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and GAVI, whose website states that its “long-term ambition is to improve the health of … vaccine markets.” Alongside the shift towards market-friendly global health governance, health policy experts described a shift away from “health system strengthening”, which focuses less narrowly on medicines and vaccines and more broadly on factors such as health infrastructure and social determinants of health. The “Gates approach”, accordingly, has “arguably contributed to decimating poor countries’ health systems” the 2014 report concluded.

Throughout the response to COVID-19, for example, while the WHO played its scripted part convincingly as trusted health body, it and the Gates Foundation co-ordinated their approaches to exploiting “facilitated regulatory pathways” to deem clinical trials for new medicines and vaccines “unethical”, enabling the fast-tracking of “emergency” “medical countermeasures” to market. Fortunately for nanotechnology, the head of the WHO’s fast-tracking mechanism is a specialist in nanoparticles, with a background advocating more expedient regulatory processes for nanomedicines, such as the mRNA Covid vaccines.

The 2014 report said of interviews with global health officials, “Bill Gates and his foundation were frequently depicted as an extreme expression of the technical bias in US thinking about health systems. “They’re obsessed with this”, commented a UK-based vaccine expert with strong global-level policy ties. “And I think it is Mr. Gates himself who sort of believes that the world can be cured by technology … These new global health actors’ agenda-setting power is clearly more than just financial, however, and reflects the personal power that Bill Gates has acquired as a global health leader. While public health experts often privately criticised him for being “incredibly strong-minded” and derided his techno-oriented approach as naïve, Bill Gates is also clearly venerated: ‘When Bill speaks, people listen’”, an insider observed. Once a tech titan, always a tech titan, it seems.

In JTRIG’s terms, the buying and blustering by a tech mogul of power over global health governance, via the WHO, would come under the category of an infiltration operation. Since the Lockstep era of Covid-19, moreover, whereby disease control and population control are one and the same, he who controls the WHO controls the world.

The WHO’s proposed pandemic prevention and preparedness treaty, therefore, grants preeminent technocrat Gates, and the predatory interests he represents, power to rule-the-world-by-health-emergency. Big Tech’s tried and tested infrastructure for manufacturing global health emergencies using trickery and scams, what’s more, places global governance in illusionists’ hands. Those hands hold the power not only to medicalise the governance of the world, but to “fact check” away the true face of global leadership, including credible allegations of terrorism, political violence and genocide.

5. The Brave New Future of Technology

Once the technological framework is applied to COVID-19, Big Tech is visible at every turn. From pandemic planning scenarios and futures documents published in decades past, to tech titan Gates funding the WHO and directing global “health” policy, to Google and Facebook policing and dictating The Science™, to big data firm Palantir with its fingers in the digital pandemic pie, it is Big Tech riding the crest of the COVID tidal wave all the way to the peak of the global power pyramid, as Peter Phillips describes it.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s Lockstep scenario, for example, which prophesied with uncanny detail many of the world’s most repressive political responses to COVID-19, revolved around promoting sweeping technological — rather than medical or pharmaceutical — change. The 2010 report was titled “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development” and aimed at helping global actors “imagine and then rehearse different strategies” to politically and economically “shape the potential of technology” in decades to come. The report’s objective was to foster an “understanding [of] the range of possibilities” so as to “scale and spread” new technologies.

The scenario that became a reality 10 years later — Lockstep — was one in which a virus originating in wild geese “streaked around the world”. In response, leaders took “a firmer grip on power” and implemented new technologies, including “biometric IDs for all citizens.”

In 2020, when objective reality imitated — with lockstep precision — the Lockstep “fiction” of 2010, one of the report’s contributors, Peter Schwartz, found himself Chief Futures Officer at Salesforce, which, together with Microsoft and military-intelligence contractor MITRE, backed the digital COVID vaccination ID system, Vaccine Credential Initiative (VCI) — one of several potential conduits to a biometric ID system worldwide. The Rockefeller Foundation, for its part, together with the Gates Foundation, funded the WHO’s global digital vaccine certification standards in 2021. Then, in early 2022, technocracy’s envoy, the World Economic Forum (WEF), proposed artificially intelligent “data intermediaries” to manage the use of data attached to digital identities. A February report titled, “Advancing Digital Agency: The Power of Data Intermediaries”, authored by senior WEF personnel from the Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Data Policy and Governance, proposed that not only should our most essential daily activities require us to adopt a digital identity, but that AI, rather than ourselves as autonomous agents, should decide where our data goes, who sees it, and why. Submitting our personal data, agency, and autonomy to AI is all part of “reshaping human-technology interaction” wrote the WEF, lauding AI for its power to lovingly relieve us of the human burden of our sovereignty and consent.

From shopping and banking to medical treatment and monitoring, to travel, obtaining and using telecommunications devices, being monitored by telecommunications service providers, to accessing government services and social media, if the WEF has its way, we will be, via digital identities, imprisoned in the gaze of the all-seeing eye — the general AI.

Outsourcing human agency to AI is a pressing social need in the minds of the aspiring global technocrats. “Getting to an acceptable default state is more urgent than ever as the world moves toward the creation of the metaverse where the metaphysical state of human–technology interaction becomes ever more seamless”, wrote the WEF in its Digital Agency report. “As they move towards the complexity of screenless metaverse issues”, the WEF added, “people’s “understanding of ‘humanness’ is transforming”.

Among those at the top of the global power pyramid looking down on humanity, the “understanding of ‘humanness’” may well be transforming fundamentally. But for those empathetic and ethically informed humans on the ground who are partial to their humanity, agency and consent, and attached to their offline identities as self-defined — rather than Klaus Schwab-defined — beings, humanness is as human, and as sacred, as it ever was.

Transforming our traditional understanding of humanity to make way for the metaverse has little, if anything, to do with viruses, or with medicine and science. Rather, the transformation has everything to do with the transhumanist Fourth Industrial agenda serving the aims of technocratic elites whose intentions are reliably rebranded in the slick and enlightened language of the World Economic Forum, bathed in the discourse of false benevolence, harmony and kindness. The rhetoric of oneness and equity punctuates the pages of the World Economic Forum’s dogma, as a tonic for readers weary of the depredations of COVID-19 — like the warm and loving embrace of phenobarbital sedative as it courses through your veins, relieving you of the burden of your humanity.

In the spirit of a manufactured mutual “trust”, AI will deliver you, “meaningfully” and “seamlessly”, from your common sense understanding of sovereignty and agency to a new world of an all-encompassing digital simulacrum. As the JTRIG training manual shows, “Blend [and] imitate” to deceive, like a praying mantis on a flower “mimicking” its environment to ensnare its prey.

6. The Tools of Medical Technocracy: Weapons Technology as Health Technology

Shortly after the 2010 Lockstep report, the Rockefeller Foundation held a 2013 summit in Beijing with the Chinese Department of Education, to once again workshop scenarios for the future of global governance. As in 2010, the focus was on technology, this time, under the guise of health. Summit participants read like a who’s who of contemporary COVID-19 powerbrokering, including 19 members of the Rockefeller Foundation; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; senior representatives of the World Bank; representatives of the pharmaceutical industry; the CDC, whose foundation has received over $174 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and whose donors and partners include AstraZeneca, Emergent BioSolutions (later to become a contractor to Operation Warp Speed), Facebook, IBM (which is a partner in ‘data-driven’ and technological responses to Covid-19), Janssen / Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer and the Schwab Charitable Fund, of the Charles Schwab Corporation. Consistent with the imperative to “hide the real”, gate-keeping such information on conflicts of interest appears in contemporary practices: As of 2022, the CDC Foundation’s ‘donors and partners’ page, previously publicly accessible, now requires ‘authorization’ for access.

The Rockefeller-Beijing summit advised the global governance community to expect a number of technological developments from 2020 to 2030, with “a high level of certainty”. Those technologies included the “re-engineering of humans through genetic engineering or mixed human-robots”, nanobots and nanotechnology, synthetic biology and “human-designed life”, optogenetics, or remote brain monitoring and control using light signals, tissue-implantable sensors that interact with big data, self-replicating AI, delivery of medical and health services through telemedicine and AI, and a future in which the “abundance of data, digitally tracking and linking people may mean the ‘death of privacy’ and may replace physical interaction with transient, virtual connection.”

Once again substituting “the real for the false and vice versa”, the technologies listed in the 2013 Beijing summit report harkened back to a 2001 NASA-Langley presentation titled “Future Strategic Issues / Future Warfare”. Many of the same technologies cited as health interventions by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Chinese Government in 2013 had been listed as tools of warfare by NASA-Langley twelve years earlier. In what it called a “heads up” to the “intel community”, the NASA document provided a technological roadmap to 2030 and beyond, enumerating the fruits of its futures work with over 30 other national security bodies including DARPA, the CIA, DIA, FBI and others.

The leaked lecture noted in its introduction that the world was, at the time, in the throes of what it called “triple / exponential technological revolutions”, with technological changes occurring in “scales of months instead of decades”.

NASA’s “heads up” included alerting its national security partners that by 2020 the world would see the commencement of what it termed a Bio-Nano Age. The Bio-Nano future would entail technological innovations including tele-everything, genetic modification of human beings, AI, synthetic biology, smart dust, cyborgs, “surreptitious nano tagging”, with microwave interrogation, of “everything/everyone” for “identification and status” purposes, brain-machine interfaces, and wearable / implantable, on-person electronics, with communication, computing, sensory augmentation, health monitoring and brain stimulation functions. Following the Bio-Nano Age of 2020 was to be the Virtual Age, which would arrive at an unspecified date, in which the Metaverse would come into its own [2, 3, 4].

The call for such technology, NASA noted, was that by comparison human beings possess “increasingly critical limitations / downsides”, including being “large, heavy, tender” and “logistically” demanding. As a result, “humans have rapidly decreasing-to-negative ‘value added’” compared to robotics, which “saves lives, enhances affordability” and “enhances effectiveness.” The document’s author, NASA-Langley Chief Scientist Dennis Bushnell, told an audience of environmental scientists in 2011 that “humans, increasingly, can’t compete … What people will do all day [in coming decades] is not clear.” Bushnell’s foreboding prophecy to specialists is foregrounded in the public discourse by Time Magazine’s bizarre cover and trans-humanist claim that humans will, in the coming decades, transition to new and improved beings, upgraded for a time when machines will make them obsolete.

In terms of navigating a smooth transition to the trans-humanist technology that promises to decommission human beings, the Rockefeller-Beijing summit cited futurist Michell Zappa, an expert in Emerging Technology and Human Behavior at Singularity University, part of the Singularity Group, which was co-founded by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil, a luminary in US governmental and academic fields, has famously predicted that by 2045 there will be no distinction “between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality”. In the 2030s, Kurzweil expects human brains to connect to cloud-based computers via nanobots (tiny robots) inside the human body that transmit bidirectionally between individual neurons and electronics in the outside world. Kurzweil’s colleague in Singularity, Zappa, proclaimed in the Rockefeller-Beijing report,

“we have no other option than to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to this precipice.”

The passive formulation Zappa uses to couch the claim is characteristic of a disturbing Big Tech trend, an unwillingness to acknowledge explicitly in public discourse the powerful parties responsible for “dragging” us to the edge. Is it the magical forces behind The Science™ shoving humanity along this trans-human path?

Notably, six years after the Beijing summit, its co-host, the Peking Union Medical Centre (PUMC), was jointly responsible for the declaration of the pandemic that ultimately changed the world, and brought human populations to the technological precipice, whether kicking and screaming or pliantly led. Scientists from the PUMC were on the team that analysed bronchoalveolar specimens from five patients hospitalised with pneumonia in Wuhan in December 2019. The team reported having isolated a virus, extracted nucleic acid, and identified a “novel bat-borne CoV” … that is associated with severe and fatal respiratory disease in humans”. The rest, in terms of establishing a new technocratic global “health”-governance order, is history.

7. Big Tech to the False Rescue

Since the earliest days of the treatable, easily survivable respiratory virus whose agitation propaganda shook the world, the principles outlined in the JTRIG manual of trickery and deception have been on full display. One could, thus, say that the application of these principles is itself a huge technological leap forward for mass brainwashing campaigns waged on publics. Some of the earliest scenes of the Wuhan Walking Dead, the grainy video of a mysterious figure who suddenly collapses (but with sufficient strength to break his fall) from the implied effects of a deadly pathogen, trigger the audience’s primal fears of the unknown. From the media blitzkrieg of information following the first pneumonia cases in Wuhan (”present story fragments”, “create cognitive stress”, “create affective stress”, “dazzle”, “decoy”) to the perceptual sleights of hand conjuring technocratic tyranny away (“control attention”, “hide the real, show the false”, ”swap the real for the false, and vice versa”), while conjuring a health emergency out of mass hysteria, malpractice, censorship and juggled data (”exploit shared affect”, “mimic”, “discredit” “invent”), illusion has been the order of the day.

It is a pervasive and powerful illusion in which Big Tech poses as good Samaritan offering a helpful handful of tools to ease our pain: protecting us from “misinformation”, tracking our exposure to our “diseased” fellow human beings, and delivering us from lockdown, online. At its most fundamental operational level, the illusion has been what JTRIG describes as a “false rescue operation”, a close relative of the false flag. Rather than dragging us kicking and screaming to the precipice of a transhumanist abyss, Big Tech has lured and ensnared us in a mirage of safety and protection from Covid-19. This is, of course, not the first false rescue operation, nor will it be the last.

While stage actors starring in the “Babies in Incubators Drama” of 1990, for example, moved a whole nation to mount a heroic rescue of Kuwait with the Desert Shield/Storm invasion, productions of this sort also helped to prepare the public mind to accept subsequent performances in the illusion genre. The Jessica Lynch story stoked patriotic passions for a manufactured heroine needed to keep action going forward in an unpopular war. The Rendon Group, a powerful PR firm, was central in the manufacturing of the myth in March 2003. From terrorism to WMDs to Red Scares to COVID-19, a declared state of emergency serves to set the stage for the propagandists’ conjuring and sleights of hand. Whether the national security state, Big Tech or Big Pharma, it is predatory transnational power in a saviour’s disguise to the rescue, every time. As the props in the COVID magic show began to split and fray under the strain of their own deceptions [5, 6, 7, 8, 9,10, 11], elites began dazzling and decoying with the threat of WWIII while readying their next emergency backdrop for a coming cyber-magic display.

A new pathogen, a clash with Russia, cyber attack [12, 13], supply-chain breakdown, or a climate emergency are all in the frame. With a fresh crisis in place, false flag and false rescue narratives will write themselves. Power elites will protect the planet, defend the internet, restore goods and services, or fight pathogens, using (nano)technology, censorship, totalitarian control, and removal of citizens’ freedoms and rights, or what is left of them. Between the story fragments of the daily State of Emergency™ Show, Big Tech will continue to hide and advance. Perceived as our ally, thanks to propagandists’ perceptual tricks and scams, the technocracy will lure us, from the safety of the blind spots in our stress and trauma and fear, ever closer to the precipice, where humanity and technology collide.

8. What Does Big-Tech Propaganda Threaten?

As we have shown so far, the global system of technological research, development, and production poses considerable threats to the public mind and, therefore, to human agency and sovereignty, and possibly human survival itself. How can this be so? Isn’t technology a natural outcome of man’s effort to apply his limited knowledge to desired purposes? Known today as “The International Community,” this global order is the offspring of a long and complex process of social, economic, and political development and organization — the gestation period of which spans centuries. Professional guilds and societies comprised of men and women across disciplines in law, medicine, banking, statecraft, and religious order manufacture the leading narratives and, thereby, maintain acceptable views of the world and human purpose made compatible with the system of perpetual production, destruction, and consumption.

In the estimation of Bernays, this process is guided by the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses”. The guidance is elemental to the global system headed by “our invisible governors” — the Giants who “pull the wires which control the public mind, harness old social forces, and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world” (10). As Jacques Ellul likewise notes,

“Classic propaganda is … vertical propaganda — in the sense that it is made by a leader, a technician, a political or religious head who acts from the superior position of his authority and seeks to influence the crowd below. Such propaganda comes from above. It is conceived in the secret recesses of political enclaves; it uses all technical methods of centralized mass communication; it envelops a mass of individuals, but those who practice it are on the outside”.

The production of capital as a tool for spurring technological development is intimately bound to the manufactured need for higher rates of efficiency and speed. Absent these elements of production, capital investment flies away to cheaper labour markets. Fiat currency is the synthetic oil that lubricates all of the key components, mechanical and biological, of industrial production and motivates the movements of the machines and the men who hold the levers. As the promise of capital gave birth to innovations in time-keeping, modern propaganda has helped to maintain the necessary illusions that hard work, mental stress, missed meals, upset stomachs, and money are all reasonable token rewards and results of complicity in a self-destructive system. “Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort”, observes Bernays, “to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group. This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common”.

The “pictures in the minds of millions” have spread exponentially to billions since Bernays’ observation nearly a century ago. As mass media infrastructures have grown around the world, the Giants of post-industrial society have successfully acquired and mobilized public consent for their plans through technological advances in cybernetic communications. Efforts to control perception and awareness of issues of public import have been greatly enhanced through media consolidation and have, especially since 9/11, advanced to higher levels of influence. Central to the process of controlling the masses is controlling perception of key issues.

Snowden’s disclosures in 2013, for example, did much to reveal how technology is deployed to manipulate and control the public mind. The Guardian interview with Snowden did more than verify what many people had already suspected about their own governments in the post-PATRIOT-Act epoch: they spy on their own people with impunity. To citizens aware of history, however, news of the NSA’s PRISM program was hardly surprising as the preceding century had revealed a cornucopia of government efforts to break through and violate the private lives of people everywhere. Operation SHAMROCK (1945-1975), Project MINARET (1967-1973), COINTELPRO (1956-1971), Main Core (1980s-present), STELLARWIND (2001-2011) and ECHELON (1966-present?) all show, in part, the extent to which elite power in “free” societies operates to assert its sweeping privileges.

With increased uses of personal handheld devices to communicate messages across the world there has also arisen increased belief in the Internet to equalize power between private citizens and the Giants of Big Tech disguised by the legal fictions of corporate personhood. The public at large still appears possessed by a mostly false hope in its relative power and autonomy to access and direct the forces of digital communication in ways that moderate traditional forms of elite control over public discourse. The digital nature of information and the near-real-time production of stories disseminated in texts, images, and videos enable “elite domination of [mass] media and the marginalization of dissidents” with the temerity to challenge authority and alert the public to its hidden flaws and abuses. The very infrastructure of mass media communication belongs to the Giants of Big Tech.

Behind corporate media consolidation stands the convergence of power and joint coordination. Mark Klein, a telecommunications expert formerly with AT&T for over twenty-two years, testified in a class action suit filed in June 2006 that he was required as part of his job to maintain a “splitter” that effectively shared all AT&T communications data traffic with the NSA. He also “learned that other such [splitters] were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles, and San Diego.” Advocates for the preservation of civil rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation describe how, “AT&T’s deployment of NSA-controlled surveillance capability apparently involves considerably more locations than would be required to catch only international traffic.” Such efforts to coordinate Big Government-Big Tech control over communication have emerged from presidential decrees which, in recent years, are “lawlessly bypassing Congress … and gutting privacy protections.”

In accordance with the “Assignment of National Security and Emergency Preparedness Communications Functions” – an Executive Order defining justification for an Executive Internet “kill switch” — the Big Tech System is also part of “ … a joint industry-Government center … capable of assisting in the initiation, coordination, restoration, and reconstitution of NS/EP communications services or facilities under all conditions of emerging threats, crisis, or emergency.” The banal name for this Order, whose enforcement is free from judicial review, reflects corresponding efforts in corporate (and social) media to enhance their dominance over the public’s free speech rights.

As regards party politics, Ian Haney López says that, “They’re giving over control of the regulatory state to the corporations, they say they want to shrink the … deficit, but in fact they’re spending massive amounts of money either on tax cuts for the really rich or in big subsidies that go to corporations”. Though López identifies a singular party as the culprit, both wings are, in fact, merely two sides of the same coin, the War Party. The public’s voice is effectively filtered out (censored) of having any say in how Big Tech operates today. The voices of the “herd” (Lippmann) are further undermined by “corporate managers [who] can, in effect, buy elections directly”. Beyond American party politics, the larger international System, beholden to the imperatives of transnational big business, assumes a global standing next to states and governments. In its turn, mainstream corporate media have, through the gift of deregulation, seized power over the public discourse to marginalize dissenting views that might challenge or defy elite interests. The process of systematic marginalization has been decades in the making and was identified by Aldous Huxley in a discerning observation:

“… if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in Brave New World, partly by these new techniques of propaganda.”

The ever-spreading fascination and preoccupation with prescriptions and medications since the early 1960s, and the rise of a Western pharmaceutical hegemony, shows how vast swaths of populations around the world have been rendered comfortably numb, silenced, sedated and marginalized over decades of “massive over-prescription” [14, 15, 16]. “They will do it,” observed Huxley, “by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so making him actually love his slavery” [17]. With the plethora of personal home assistants from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et al., now appearing in countless homes, the universal yearning for social connection, safety, and security has been attended to through constant eavesdropping by the leading merchants, marketers, and the state.

Conclusion

The technological transformations we have described throughout this article offer one window on the near future when the Giants of a new technocratic order presume to rule the world. We have described a wide range of illusions and tricks, born of technological innovations, which have been or appear to have been deployed against the bewildered herd — to dazzle, cajole, and coerce into acceptable states of obedience to the demands of technocracy.

The transformations we have described presuppose a necessary fundamental transformation in our shared concepts of what it means to be both a citizen in society and a human being in a larger civilised world. This change in our concepts comes when control over communication has been fully realised. In “The Illusion of World Government”, Reinhold Niebuhr observed, nearly 70 years ago, that the

“… tragic character of our age is revealed in the world-wide insecurity which is the fate of modern man. Technical achievements, which a previous generation had believed capable of solving every ill to which the human flesh is heir, have created, or at least accentuated, our insecurity.”

To some readers, Niebuhr may appear to be a prophet as he described with great accuracy the serious social ills of the present age when “technical achievements” have meant disaster for men who seek to maintain basic public communication with one another. Who seek to preserve guarantees to privacy and sovereignty provided by constitutions, civil laws, and natural human rights. Who seek dialogue with those serving in positions of power but who are, at present, selling out their responsibilities to the people in the hope and false name of safety and security.

With hard currency now in the crosshairs of the transnational Banking and Big Tech Giants, we can see how the digital revolution is actively ushering in a state of global slavery with the claimed urgencies of speed, safety, and security at all costs. This planned global convergence of data, identity, and currency is man’s last stand in preserving personal autonomy, sovereignty, agency and bodily integrity. We wonder who will write the history of this moment. Man or machine?

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(Featured Image: “VR Future” by Kurayba is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.)