The Palantir Panopticon

Michael Rectenwald | REKT

In my book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (2019), I argued that the main danger with AI is not a rogue super-intelligence that might rebel against humanity; the far greater danger is perfect AI obedience. AI could function as the ultimate instrument of authoritarian "elites," faithfully executing total surveillance, behavioral scoring, and preemptive social control.

Further, AI reliance risks the wholesale abdication of human agency and the flattening of human intelligence and sociality. As decision-making authority is ceded to algorithms, people will become passive nodes in a system that replaces human thinking with AI information processing — "Bots R Us" — eroding autonomy, creativity, and genuine deliberation.

Geopolitically, AI threatens to produce unrivaled systems of ideological and political dominance and cohesion. The dominant worldview is the worldview that dominates AI. The AI race is not toward liberation but toward a hybrid post-human order in which freedom is rendered obsolete, and free will, as Yuval Noah Harari says, is "history."

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Privacy for the Powerful, Surveillance for the Rest: EU’s Proposed Tech Regulation Goes Too Far

Elen Irazabal Arana and Nikolai G. Wenzel | The Daily Economy

Protecting kids is a weak pretext for total digital surveillance. What's worse, the EU's monitoring exempted its own politicians from scrutiny. Their privacy matters, but not yours.

Last month, we lamented California's Frontier AI Act of 2025. The Act favors compliance over risk management, while shielding bureaucrats and lawmakers from responsibility. Mostly, it imposes top-down regulatory norms, instead of letting civil society and industry experts experiment and develop ethical standards from the bottom up.

Perhaps we could dismiss the Act as just another example of California's interventionist penchant. But some American politicians and regulators are already calling for the Act to be a "template for harmonizing federal and state oversight." The other source for that template would be the European Union (EU), so it's worth keeping an eye on the regulations spewed out of Brussels.

The EU is already way ahead of California in imposing troubling, top-down regulation. Indeed, the EU Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024 follows the EU's overall precautionary principle. As the EU Parliament's internal think tank explains,

"the precautionary principle enables decision-makers to adopt precautionary measures when scientific evidence about an environmental or human health hazard is uncertain and the stakes are high."

The precautionary principle gives immense power to the EU when it comes to regulating in the face of uncertainty — rather than allowing for experimentation with the guardrails of fines and tort law (as in the US). It stifles ethical learning and innovation. Because of the precautionary principle and associated regulation, the EU economy suffers from greater market concentration, higher regulatory compliance costs, and diminished innovation — compared to an environment that allows for experimentation and sensible risk management. It is small wonder that only four of the world's top 50 tech companies are European.

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The planetary bio-surveillance grid

unshadowed.substack.com

 

Let's imagine a world where a faulty worldview in a mechanistic reality has given birth to a psychotic technocratic elite that seeks to monitor every aspect of reality in AI "digital twin" systems -- but the public is increasingly showing awareness of (and resistance to!) wearable IoT devices and the surveillance state. What is a future-AI-as-god-worshipping-technocrat to do?

Naturally, preferring asymmetric warfare, you change tactics and attack in an invisible way: synthetic biology. You create surveillance microbes, stage a crisis that demands their mass deployment "for your safety." You flood the zone with them, quickly replacing the natural microbiome across farms, forests, foods, guts, and wastewater. Suddenly, humanity is being monitored from within -- no wearable devices, no microchip implants. You welcome the myriad problems this disconnection from our ancestral microbiome will inevitably create, as each offers a chance to further use biotechnology and tighten your grip.

In Part One of this series, we explored that genetically engineered microbes have already been deployed across 2% of US farmland, with no oversight or containment.

In Part Two, we saw that the system is reclassifying microbes as "critical infrastructure," moving both to construct global governance for microbes and to shield the biotech companies who manufacture them from any liability.

Now, we expose what this infrastructure actually does, and in doing so, finally learn what the technocrats mean when they say "biodigital convergence": the construction of a planetary-scale surveillance grid comprising genetically engineered (GE) microbes that sense and report on their surroundings, be that in soil or grape or large intestine.

 

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U.S. Mint Makes Last Penny

USA Today

America’s last penny was struck at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, the end of a coin production that started in 1793 and ended Nov. 12. We’re already starting to miss them.

Some stores have begun running short of pennies and have had to round cash transactions up or down to the nearest five cents when customers don’t have exact change, USA TODAY reported.

President Donald Trump order the Treasury Department to stop minting pennies as a budget-cutting measure in February. But a resulting shift to nickels, which are more expensive than pennies to produce, could cause other losses in the federal budget.

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They Are Planning A Complete FINANCIAL LOCKDOWN" - Whitney Webb's 2026 Warning

 

Comment: Disregard the "most people won't make it" comment which is clickbait. The video is well worth watching however. 

 

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Jamie Tree YouTube Channel: 

 

One blink, and your identity unlocks a programmable wallet. That’s the latest message from writer and journalist Whitney Webb.

Governments and global institutions are standardizing digital IDs built on biometrics, then wiring those IDs to your money. In this model, your face, fingerprints, or iris confirm every transaction and gate access to basic services. 

The stated goal is inclusion through Know Your Customer or KYC rules and safer payments. The design also concentrates power, since the same ID can switch your wallet on or off. But it doesn’t end there. The next phase links identity, wallets, and policy in one infrastructure. More

Faster Than Truth: Quantum-Enhanced AI and the Next Frontier of Information Warfare

Joshua Nieubuurt | Propaganda in Focus

In the very near future disinformation will target you autonomously in fractions of a second. As the quantum computing age draws near, Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality will coalesce with Edward Bernays’ notion of a crystalized public opinion: creating consensus through individualized reality creation. The methods of the deployment of the past will give way to an infrastructural inevitability: GenAI, guided by algorithmic troves of personalized information, will be weaponized into personally targeted mis/disinformation campaigns that cost pennies on the dollar. Propaganda will no longer be an international foxtrot of moving actors and action but will become an autonomous force plowing into the synapses of the masses on micro scales. As this occurs, humanity’s long-smoking gun will be turned back on the gunman — obliterating the boundary between the real and its simulation through recursive, accelerated, and increasingly personal targeted information operations.

Your Data Used on You

This process has already begun and – for the time being – is being spat forth into the world at the speed of an AI prompt. According to the findings of Goldstein et al. (2024), Generative AI is capable of “generating text that is nearly as persuasive for US audiences as content we sourced from real-world foreign covert propaganda campaigns.” In other words, the digital machines we have created to help us are already being used to persuade our ideas and actions. As public facing models increase their aptitude, more advanced private models will likely follow. This extends far beyond text-based modalities and into the realms of photo and video generated by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models.

In fact, AI-generated propaganda is already being deployed en masse. The 2024 election in the United States was rife with examples flooding social media feeds and creating alternative narratives to not only the election, but also real-world events. In more recent world events, the conflict between Israel and Iran, and the infamous black bags being thrown from a window of the White House, have also produced increasingly potent misinformation across the web. There are currently varying degrees of virility with AI-generated propaganda. The newness of the technology and the experimentation of finding ways of making it effective to skulk into the minds of people still maintains a firehose approach. Meaning that it is created with a widespread in mind: reach as many people as possible and hope that it lands with some of them. If attempts at virility are stymied – it fails. But what if AI-generated propaganda were to be tailored to individual users en masse? One of the key elements in potentially deploying tailor-made propaganda at scale is already part of how the internet-connected world works: Surveillance Capitalism. 

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As America Soul Searches, The Rest Of The West Is Falling Apart

Brandon Smith | Alt.market.us

In terms of geopolitics one could argue that allies don’t have to like each other, they just have to provide a mutual benefit that serves the greater purposes of peace. One could also argue that through cultural exchange the good habits of one country could easily influence the bad habits of another, but that kind of influence can also happen in reverse.

Though we might think of American culture as the content driver of the planet, the reality is that our ideals are an exceedingly rare dynamic found in no other society. We provide sanctuary to a fragile ember of free thought in an otherwise gloomy world of globalist oppression. It is something that must be protected at all costs.

Over the years I’ve heard many arguments from ignorant liberals about the grand progressive accomplishments of the European experiment and its centralized system. I’ve been told many times about how much safer Canada and Australia are. How the UK has near zero gun crime and how socialism works so well in Norway and Sweden.

Leftists in the US have long embraced this messaging as gospel and for generations they have told us that we MUST join the rest of western civilization by sacrificing certain liberties for the sake of future generations. We must become more like our allies in “more civilized” and liberal nations, or be left behind and labeled an “embarrassment”.

In reality, progressive leaders have abandoned western civilization, forsaking it in exchange for the elitist “Great Reset”. The political landscape in the UK, Canada and Australia has turned decidedly sour. They are speed running into technocracy and communism and abandoning any semblance of “democratic” governance. The mask is coming off to reveal Orwell’s “Big Brother”. 

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The Agenda

 

 https://theagendafilm.com/ Watch Free

The Agenda

'The Agenda: Their Vision | Your Future' is a feature-length independent documentary produced by Mark Sharman; former UK broadcasting executive at ITV and Sky (formerly BSkyB).

In fiction and fact, there have always been people and organisations with ambitions to control the world. And now the oligarchs who pull the strings of finance and power finally have the tools to achieve their global objectives; omnipresent surveillance, artificial intelligence, digital currency and ultimately digital identities. The potential for social control of our lives and minds is alarmingly real.

The plan has been decades in the making and has seen infiltration of Governments, local councils, big business, civil society, the media and, crucially, education. A ceaseless push for a new reality, echoing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or George Orwell’s 1984.

The Agenda: Their Vision, Your Future examines the digital prison which awaits us if we do not push back right now. How your food, energy, money, travel and even your access to the internet could be limited and controlled; how financial power is strangling democracy and how global institutions like the World Health Organisation are commandeered to champion ideological and fiscal objectives.

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Army Developing AI Missiles That Identify Their Own Targets

Technocracy News

Technocrats at defense contractors have developed a hybrid targeting system using drones and AI that find their own targets, then coordinate with artillery-launch missiles for destruction.

There has never been a weapon created in the history of mankind that was not used in battle.
 ⁃ TN Editor

The U.S. Army is working on a new artillery shell capable of locating enemy targets, including moving tanks and armored vehicles. The shell, called Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munition (C-DAEM), is designed to replace older weapons that leave behind unexploded cluster bomblets on the battlefield that might pose a threat to civilians. The shell is designed to hit targets even in situations where GPS is jammed and friendly forces are not entirely sure where the enemy is.

In the 1980s, the U.S. Army fielded dual purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) artillery rounds. DPICM was basically the concept of cluster bombs applied to artillery, with a single shell packing dozens of tennis ball-sized grenades or bomblets. DPICM shells were designed to eject the bomblets over the battlefield, dispersing them over a wide area. The bomblets were useful unprotected infantry troops and could knock out a tank or armored vehicle’s treads, weapons, or sensors, disabling it.

DPICM made artillery more lethal than ever, but there was a cost nobody foresaw: unexploded dud bomblets often littered battlefields, becoming a danger to civilians long after the war was over. An international movement to ban cluster bombs and artillery came about, and though the U.S. isn’t a signatory it has pledged not to use munitions with a dud rate greater than one percent. Dud rates for such weapons often reach five percent or more.

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Brookings: Artificial Intelligence In America’s Digital City

This report smacks of Technocracy, where cities are little more than concentrated and convenient labor camps for big business. It contends that “technology is essential to make cities work.” ⁃ TN Editor

Technocracy News

Cities are an engine for human prosperity. By putting people and businesses in close proximity, cities serve as the vital hubs to exchange goods, services, and even ideas. Each year, more and more people move to cities and their surrounding metropolitan areas to take advantage of the opportunities available in these denser spaces.

Technology is essential to make cities work. While putting people in close proximity has certain advantages, there are also costs associated with fitting so many people and related activities into the same place. Whether it’s multistory buildings, aqueducts and water pipes, or lattice-like road networks, cities inspire people to develop new technologies that respond to the urban challenges of their day.

Today, we can see the responses made possible by the advances of the second industrial revolution, namely steel and electricity. Multistory buildings and skyscrapers responded to our demand for proximity to do business in the same locations. Electrified and subterranean railways offered faster travel for more people in tight, urban quarters. The elevator, escalator, and advanced construction equipment allowed our buildings to grow taller and our subways to burrow deeper. Electric lighting turned our cities, suburbs, and even small towns into 24-hour activity centers. Air conditioning greatly improved livability in warmer locations, unlocking a population boom. Radios and television extended how far we can communicate and the fidelity of the messages we sent.

We are now in the midst of a new industrial era: the digital age. And like the industrial revolutions to precede it, the digital age doesn’t represent a single set of new products. Instead, the digital age represents an entirely new platform on top of which many everyday activities operate. Making all this possible are rapid advances in the power, portability, and price of computing and the emergence of reliable, high-volume digital telecommunications.

 Like every form of technology to proceed it, society must be intentional with the exact challenges we want AI to solve and be considerate of the social groups and industries who stand to benefit from the applications we deliver.

How AI will function in the built environment certainly fits into that category—and for good reason. Even though AI is still in its infant stages, we already encounter it on a daily basis. When your video conference shifts the microphone to pick up the speaker’s voice, when your smartphone automatically reroutes you around traffic, when your thermostat automatically lowers the air conditioning on a cool day—that’s all AI in action.

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Jeffrey Epstein Showcases The Mind Of A Technocrat

Technocracy News

"Epstein may represent the end result of science for science’ sake but without morality and ethics. His scientistic worldview is proven to be thoroughly bankrupt, and is but a signpost to the collapse of western civilization." 

⁃ TN Editor

With the slew of reporting on Jeffrey Epstein’s recent arrest on federal charges for sex trafficking of minors, many sordid details of the money manager’s wrongdoings have been revealed. However, few reports have focused on the fact that Epstein has funded some of the most famous scientists in the world. If we look closely at his role as a science philanthropist, Epstein’s more pernicious political significance becomes clear and gives us all reason to reflect on the values of the Western civilization in crisis that his worldview represents.

Epstein’s Science Philanthropy Empire

The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation was established in 2000 with the stated mission of “supporting innovation in science and education.” In 2003, the Foundation pledged a $30 million donation to establish the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, where Epstein had already been a “long-time, low-profile” donor. This graduate department studies the “fundamental mathematical principles that guide evolution” and, according to Epstein’s website, also investigates topics such as “population structure, prelife, eusociality, [and] evolutionary economics.”

Despite pressure to return the gift after Epstein’s initial charges for soliciting sex from prostitutes in 2006, Harvard refused to do so. Former president Derek C. Bok weighed in, questioning why “Harvard should have an obligation to investigate each donor and impose detailed moral standards.” 

After orchestrating a plea deal in 2008 with the help of Harvard law professor and well-known apologistfor Israel’s war crimes, Alan Dershowitz, Epstein maintained his friendly relationship with Harvard, where he continued to sit on the board of the Harvard Society of Mind, Brain, and Behavior. As of 2014, he was also “actively involved” in the Santa Fe Institute, the Theoretical Biology Initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Quantum Gravity Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Besides his Ivy League connections in the United States, Epstein has recently poured money into Artificial Intelligence research abroad, namely the OpenCog research group in Hong Kong and MicroPsi Project 2 in Berlin. Forbes reported in 2013 that this AI research was targeted at the development of “radical emotional software.”

In addition to these larger projects, Epstein has funded a laundry list of the world’s most famous scientists including Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky, Eric Lander, Stephen Kosslyn, Martin Nowak, George Church, and Nobel laureate physicists Gerard ’t Hooft, David Gross, and Frank Wilczek. The full extent of his donations is not known since the Foundation avoided making its financial details public despite pressure from the New York Attorney General’s Office in 2015. In addition to his much publicized interactions with politicians, Epstein has taken a personal interest in many of these scientists, prompting one leading Harvard researcher to proclaim that Epstein “changed my life.”

Indeed, New York Magazine reported in 2002 that Epstein “brings a trophy-hunter’s zeal to his collection of scientists.” He flew Hawking to his personal island for a conference with 20 more of the world’s top physicists, spoke with Director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Martin Nowak, once a week on the phone and flew him around the country for lectures, and went personally to Harvard psychologist Stephen Kosslyn’s lab to observe experiments conducted on Tibetan monks, the latter whom Epstein reportedly described as “so stupid.”

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Facebook bans Natural News; Health Ranger responds with message for humanity

Mike Adams
Natural News

In response to a coordinated, heavily-funded smear campaign against Natural News and myself, the Health Ranger, Facebook has now permanently banned Natural News from posting content. The channel name that has been banned is Facebook.com/healthranger, which was our primary channel reaching over 2.5 million people.

This is on top of the permanent bans of Natural News content from Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google News, Apple and other techno-fascists that now represent the greatest threat to human freedom the world has ever seen.

The techno-fascists, including Wikipedia, have decided that no speech that questions any official narrative will be allowed on any platform. Anyone who questions the safety of toxic vaccines, 5G cell towers, geoengineering, chemotherapy or glyphosate weed killer chemicals is now maliciously attacked, smeared and de-platformed. You’re not even allowed now to talk about nutrition, anti-cancer foods or nutritional supplements without being labeled a “vitamin” website accused of pushing fake cures. (That’s right: The left-wing authoritarian tyrants are now anti-nutrition on top of everything else.)

Every website or individual who expresses any view of dissent against the corrupt scientific establishment is immediately labeled “fake news,” even as the left-wing media routinely pushed total fabrications about President Trump and anyone who supports Trump.

As I have repeatedly pointed out, the tech giants and their CEOs are truly enemies of humanity.

Remember: As all this censorship is taking place, the tech giants somehow claim they aren’t censoring anyone at all. They claim to have a monopoly on “facts” or “truth” and proclaim themselves to have the King’s unique right to decide who gets to speak and who must be silenced. These criminals like Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Cook are un-elected, subject to zero transparency and offer no mechanism for due process whereby channels who are banned might defend themselves against unfair, dishonest smears or fake news attacks run by left-wing journo-terrorism hacks.

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See also:

Glenn Greenwald Rips Liberals Begging For Censorship After YouTube 'Adpocalypse'

Against Big Tech Viewpoint Discrimination 

YouTube to delete thousands of accounts after it bans supremacists, conspiracy theorists and other ‘harmful’ users

Here's A List Of Ideas & Statements YouTube Will Ban You For Expressing Under Their New 'Hate Speech Policy'

Technology Is Becoming Indistinguishable From Reality

Truthstream Media

The Weaponization of Social Media: What You're Not Being Told

themindunleashed.com

Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. Snapchat. Instagram. Reddit. “Social media” as we know it today barely existed fifteen years ago. Although it provides new ways to interact with people and information from all across the planet virtually instantaneously and virtually for free, we are only now beginning to understand the depths of the problems associated with these new platforms. More and more of the original developers of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter admit they no longer use social media themselves and actively keep it away from their children, and now they are finally admitting the reason why: social media was designed specifically to take advantage of your psychological weaknesses and keep you addicted to your screen.

SEAN PARKER: If the thought process that went into building these applications—Facebook being the first of them to really understand it—that thought process was all about “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever, and that’s gonna get you to contribute more content and that’s gonna get you more likes and comments. So it’s a social validation feedback loop. I mean it’s exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. And I think that we—the inventors/creators, you know, it’s me, it’s Mark, it’s Kevin Systrom at Instagram, it’s all of these people—understood this consciously and we did it anyway.

SOURCE: Sean Parker – Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability

It should be no surprise, then, that in this world of social media addicts and smartphone zombies, the 24/7 newsfeed is taking up a greater and greater share of people’s lives. Our thoughts, our opinions, our knowledge of the world, even our mood are increasingly being influenced or even determined by what we see being posted, tweeted or vlogged. And the process by which these media shape our opinions is being carefully monitored and analyzed, not by the social media companies themselves, but by the US military.

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Moral Wisdom in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener’s Prophetic Admonition About Technology and Ethics

Web Investigator KK.org
Maria Popova

Norbert Wiener “The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.”

“Intelligence supposes goodwill,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in the middle of the twentieth century. In the decades since, as we have entered a new era of technology risen from our minds yet not always consonant with our values, this question of goodwill has faded dangerously from the set of considerations around artificial intelligence and the alarming cult of increasingly advanced algorithms, shiny with technical triumph but dull with moral insensibility.

In De Beauvoir’s day, long before the birth of the Internet and the golden age of algorithms, the visionary mathematician, philosopher, and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (November 26, 1894–March 18, 1964) addressed these questions with astounding prescience in his 1954 book The Human Use of Human Beings, the ideas in which influenced the digital pioneers who shaped our present technological reality and have recently been rediscovered by a new generation of thinkers eager to reinstate the neglected moral dimension into the conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of technology. 

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At The Frontiers Of Surveillance Capitalism

Katie Fitzpatrick
The Nation

Before they started their successful wildcat strike last year, West Virginia teachers railed against the introduction of a workplace wellness program called Go365. The program coerced employees into downloading an app that would monitor their health, rewarding points for exercise and good behavior. Employees who failed to accrue 3,000 points by the end of the year would be penalized with a $25 monthly fee and increased deductibles. 

Although the program was made voluntary before the strike began (and has since been eliminated), the outrage over Go365 helped ignite the strike. As one teacher told The New York Times, “People felt that was very invasive, to have to download that app and to be forced into turning over sensitive information.”

By resisting Go365, the West Virginia teachers waged two battles at once: They fought in the trenches of state austerity and on the front lines of private digital surveillance. The app presaged many of the worrying trends that Shoshana Zuboff describes in her new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. She explains that Silicon Valley firms are looking to wearable technologies and other smart devices to gain an increasingly detailed view of our physical and emotional health. Go365 measured teachers’ daily steps with the help of a Fitbit; Sleep Number beds measure the hours we keep and the quality of our rest; a new company called Realeyes plans to surveil our facial expressions as we watch advertisements, interpreting our emotions in real time. 

Silicon Valley firms don’t want to simply monitor our behavior, however; they plan to shape it, too. Their influence over our actions might be indirect for now, effected through the prizes and penalties that Go365 weaponized against teachers. But by integrating these devices into our daily lives, these companies also set the stage for a future of more direct intervention. Zuboff quotes one software developer fantasizing aloud about the tech industry’s ability to push and prod us remotely: “We can know if you shouldn’t be driving, and we can just shut your car down…we tell the TV to shut off and make you get some sleep, or the chair to start shaking because you shouldn’t be sitting so long.”
Drawing on thorough research as well as alarming interviews like that one, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism offers an urgent warning about our possible future. Zuboff discusses the technological innovations and market mechanisms that make ubiquitous surveillance increasingly likely. Although her diagnosis is chilling, her solutions are few. 

Throughout the book, she decries the abuses perpetrated by Silicon Valley companies and argues that they represent a radical break from an earlier, kinder form of capitalism. But by refusing to acknowledge the continuities between past modes of exploitation and the latest horrors of surveillance capitalism, she ultimately leads readers away from the most promising paths of resistance.

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Global Government and Mass Surveillance May Be Needed to Save Humanity, Expert Says

Dagny Taggart
Activist Post
 
A prominent Oxford philosopher who is known for making terrifying predictions about humanity has a new theory about our future, and it isn’t pretty.

Over 15 years ago, Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, made the case that we are all living in a Matrix-like computer simulation run by another civilization.

Here’s a summary of that theory, explained by Vox:

In an influential paper that laid out the theory, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom showed that at least one of three possibilities is true: 1) All human-like civilizations in the universe go extinct before they develop the technological capacity to create simulated realities; 2) if any civilizations do reach this phase of technological maturity, none of them will bother to run simulations; or 3) advanced civilizations would have the ability to create many, many simulations, and that means there are far more simulated worlds than non-simulated ones. (source)

Will humanity eventually be destroyed by one of its own creations?

 

If you find the idea of living in a computer simulation that is run by unknown beings troubling, wait until you hear Bostrom’s latest theory.

Last Wednesday, Bostrom took the stage at a TED conference in Vancouver, Canada, to share some of the insights from his latest work, “The Vulnerable World Hypothesis.”

While speaking to head of the conference, Chris Anderson, Bostrom argued that mass surveillance could be one of the only ways to save humanity – from a technology of our own creation.

His theory starts with a metaphor of humans standing in front of a giant urn filled with balls that represent ideas. There are white balls (beneficial ideas), grey balls (moderately harmful ideas), and black balls (ideas that destroy civilization). The creation of the atomic bomb, for instance, was akin to a grey ball — a dangerous idea that didn’t result in our demise.
Bostrom posits that there may be only one black ball in the urn, but, once it is selected, it cannot be put back. (Humanity would be annihilated, after all.)
According to Bostrom, the only reason that we haven’t selected a black ball yet is because we’ve been “lucky.” (source)

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Africa Gets ‘Smart Housing’ While Buried In Poverty

  

The UN is pledged to “End poverty in all its forms” (SDG #1) and Africa is its poster child. Instead of providing energy, property rights and capital, they get 3-D printed housing made from waste products. ⁃ TN Editor

 

Technocracy News

Africa is urbanizing fast, as its population grows and many flocks to cities in search of jobs, education and healthcare.

Studies show that hundreds of millions more Africans will live in cities over the next three decades.

Many of these new urban Africans, however, are likely to end up in informal settlements. Already an estimated 200 million Africans live in informal settlements—often without access to energy and sanitation.

The growing class of urban poor need access to decent housing. But the challenge is that the global housing sector already emits almost a third of global greenhouse gas emissions and uses up to 40 per cent of the planet’s total resources. New approaches are clearly needed.

As the housing sector grows—and it must grow if we want an equitable world—we need to reduce its environmental impact, not raise it,” said UN Environment Acting Executive Director, Joyce Msuya. “Smart design is the only way to meet our housing needs and stay within planetary boundaries.”

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New Quantum Device Can “Generate All Possible Futures”

futurism.com

A team of scientists say they’ve built a quantum computer that generates a superposition of all possible futures the computer could experience.

The research, published Tuesday in Nature Communications, describes how this quantum system could help futuristic artificial intelligence learn much faster than it can today — and it could mean quantum computers are finally becoming practical tools.

First Step

 

For now, the quantum computer built by Griffith University and Nanyang Technological University scientists can hold two superpositions of 16 different possibilities, according to the research. It also uses less memory than a classical computer would, suggesting it could outperform classical systems at certain tasks.

“It is very much reminiscent of classical computers in the 1960s,” Griffith University scientist Geoff Pryde said in a press release. “Just as few could imagine the many uses of classical computers in the 1960s, we are still very much in the dark about what quantum computers can do.”

Multitasking AI

 

Right now, artificial intelligence learns by analyzing example after example and looking for patterns. The scientists behind this research argue that their quantum superpositions could vastly improve the process.

“By interfering these superpositions with each other, we can completely avoid looking at each possible future individually,” Griffith researcher Farzad Ghafari said in the press release.

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Beware Agenda 21 And Its Green New Deal: Plundering The World Under The Guise of 'Sustainable Development'

Geraldine Perry
Dissident Voice

Word to the Wise: Beware the Green New Deal!

Beware Agenda 21 and its Green New Deal!

Seemingly overnight, the Green New Deal has arrived. Given the sorry state of our environment, what possible objections could there be? In this case, plenty - and they all trace back to the Green New Deal's deeply complex and surreptitious ties to UN Agenda 21.

Those who claim that Agenda 21 amounts to little more than a right-wing rant or is somehow anti-Semitic are at best seriously misinformed. Those who buy into the carefully crafted jargon of Sustainable Development, Smart Growth, Redevelopment and the Green New Deal are similarly misinformed and need to know that the environmental movement has in fact been highjacked by the Agenda 21 plan.

First, Some Background

Journalist Thomas L. Friedman is sometimes credited with being the original source for the term "Green New Deal" because in two 2007 articles, in the New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, Friedman connected FDR's "New Deal" to a new "green" economy, suggesting that this might provide an economic stimulus program that could address economic inequality and climate change at the same time. Almost prophetically, Friedman also argued in earlier writings that an "iron fist inside a velvet glove" would be needed to maintain the coming new world order.

The same year the Friedman articles came out, the Green New Deal Group was formed. By July of 2008 this group came out with its Green New Deal Report which was originally published by the New Economics Foundation. A few months later, in October of 2008, Adam Steiner, who was Executive Director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNEP), unveiled the Global Green New Deal Initiative, the objective of which was to rescue the failing global economy by creating jobs in "green" industries, "funded" of course by the big banks.

Then, following the example set by the European Greens in 2006, the United States Green Party adopted a Green New Deal platform in 2010. To its everlasting credit, the U.S. Green Party has also placed monetary reform as one of its core planks, ending the banking system's privilege of creating the nation's money (as credit or debt) and returning the monetary privilege to the government where it belongs, without which reform no other reforms are possible. Other political parties would do well to adopt this most important objective, since this is the true heart of "populism" historically. However, the vast bulk of the Green Party's Green New Deal platform bears a marked (and troubling) resemblance to the Green New Deal as set out through the United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development program.

Most recently, a twenty-nine-year-old freshman Congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has overnight managed to not only make national headlines but garner the full attention of Congress, a feat never before accomplished by one so young and so soon in office. It was her promotion of the Green New Deal that seems to have garnered her such sudden fame. But the so-called legislation she has been promoting is in reality a "draft text" that calls for a proposed addendum for House Rules: it changes the rules and creates a new process for the allocation of power, all while echoing almost verbatim United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. As a recent article in Technocracy News says, with a complete version of AOC's "bill" included: "Its scope and mandate for legislative authority amounts to a radical grant of power to Washington over Americans' lives, homes, businesses, travel, banking, and more." Dr. Naomi Wolf confirms by going over the document point by point.

The Green New Deal is in fact a part of a global sustainable development program that was officially rolled out at the "Earth Summit" held in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil in 1992. Out of that summit came Agenda 21 Earth Summit: The United Nations Program of Action from Rio, a 354-page document that can be purchased at online book retailers or downloaded in pdf format from the UN website. 

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 See also: 

 Dark Green IX: UN Agenda 21 and US Land Grab 

 Dark Green X: UN Agenda 21 and SMART Growth