Countless Conspiracies

New World Orders are a dime a dozen

It’s easy to imagine a One World Conspiracy to control the entire planet. This idea slides right into the “Evil” slot in the human mind. When your cognitive evil-detector goes off, an imagined human cabal—perhaps wearing black robes—is liable to appear in your mind’s eye. These shadowy Bad Guys either merge with the demons in your head, creating a satanic cabal; or else the human element shoves the supernatural entities aside, bringing the “demons” down to earth as a One World old-boys’ network.

You either get a conspiracy of devil-worshipers or a conspiracy of devilish humans. As with peas and mashed potatoes, it all ends up the same place. If ye ain’t careful, thar bound to get’che.

I’m as prone to imagine a unified front as any other paranoiac. But that doesn’t make it true. After careful consideration, I think it’s much worse than that. A single conspiracy is an easy problem to solve—you just neutralize the conspirators. Badda bing, badda boom! Humanity is saved.

On the other hand, if it’s a dizzying array of overlapping conspiracies—all the way down to ego-driven “conspiracy theorists” who conspire against each other for clout—the real global monster will be harder to decapitate than a GMO hydra spawned in an off-shore lab. That, dear friends, is where I believe we’re at.

Global Homogeneity

Let’s take the Mega Conspiracy perspective for a moment. In such a world, Elon Musk is a prime candidate for the role of controlled “antithesis” against a World Economic Forum-esque “thesis.” We’re just watching a stage production with “Elon” playing a Luciferian rebel against the Global Googlish God.

At the conclusion of this “Hegelian dialectic,” both sides will converge on a One World Technetronic “synthesis”—a sort of engineered Omega Point. Musk may be talking about “free speech” now, the theory goes, but he’s just putting up a front for secret globalist masters.

I understand why one would imagine that, especially in the aftermath of the lockstep Covid response. In 2020, we saw unprecedented global coordination to clamp down on humanity. On dark days, a single world controller seemed like a decent hypothesis. Those of us who didn’t buy into the accepted narratives began looking for a true culprit behind these crimes.

Was it China? Globalist NGOs? U.S. healthcare orgs or our military-industrial complex? Intel agencies? Silicon Valley? Israel? Britain? Bill Gates? Jeffrey Epstein? Satan himself???

Turns out it was a bit of each, plus a few more.

To a greater or lesser extent, most nations followed the directives of the World Health Organization and adopted the policy proposals coming out of the World Economic Forum. They injected their citizens with experimental vaxx technologies spearheaded by US pharma companies, who partnered with our National Institutes of Health and the Gates Foundation. U.S. tech companies colluded with governments to censor any criticism of this insane science experiment.

The Latin root of “conspiracy” is conspirare—“to breathe together”—and all of the above were breathing in unison like New Age yuppies at a meditation retreat. The hypodermic needle became a symbol of totalitarian control.

At the time, Musk played a role with his CureVac partnership to produce mRNA jabs. Trump may have left pandemic restrictions and vaxx mandates up to the states, but he also initiated Operation Warp Speed to fast-track a reckless jab roll out—and amended the PREP Act to shield pharma corps from liability—which Trump has yet to accept responsibility for. Even so, this elite coalition would only hold together for so long. Choking on all that unified breath, high-profile dissidents got tired of the rank halitosis.

Eventually, there was massive pushback across the planet. Both Musk and Trump changed course to join a fairly cohesive “conspiracy” of public figures who advocated for personal freedom. Populist movements in the U.S. and Europe were re-energized. Russia declared war on Ukraine and the Western hegemony as a whole—and incidentally, Putin imposed no national vaxx mandate, with just under half of all Russians taking the jab. Argentina and El Salvador elected presidents who are now defying the global status quo on multiple fronts.

As usual, unity collapsed into competing factions.

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Unshakable Heterodoxy

Steve Bannon’s War Room became a hub for American dissent. In spring of 2021, I was brought on to cover tech in general and transhumanism in particular. As a media newbie, I used my anti-tech hammer to hit every nail in sight, banging away from Silicon Valley and Oxford to Davos and Shenzhen. Over the years, I’ve only grown to despise the transhuman vision more. It’s a technological mirage luring souls into a spiritual desert. But I’ve also learned to distinguish the many unique paths out to that “thinking sand.”

For instance, liberty-oriented transhumanists such as Max More, Nell Watson, and Zoltan Istvan were opposed to vaccine mandates. Of course, some of their hypochondriac colleagues, like Anders Sandberg, were willing to consider a more forceful approach.

On a broader ideological level, there’s a split between effective altruists, who preach hard safety legislation on the way to technotopia, and effective accelerationists (e/acc), who want to see tech deregulation and full-bore advancement. This spat is not a question of whether we should follow a transhuman path, but rather how fast we should run up that exponential curve. In practical terms, such choices will make a huge difference—especially for those of us probing for cracks in the system.

On a corporate level, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Larry Page are creating a bland, politically correct AI borg. In direct opposition, the self-described autist Peter Thiel and Marc “Little Tech” Andreessen are aiming for robotic showdowns in an AI wild west. All of these camps are “conspiring” against each other.

There is no One World Conspiracy any more than one unified “humanity.” Tribalism is too innate and politics is messy business, full of shifting alliances and betrayal. Life is more complicated than “Pure Heroes” and “Evil Villains.” I don’t see “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys.” I see better guys and worse guys. Besides, thus far the most rabid global ambitions have just ended in collapsed empires, wasteful wars, and an emerging multipolar world. The game is still on.

Yet there are certain facts that shouldn’t be ignored—even if I’m so tired of writing about “Elon,” I’d rather jam rusty wires under my fingernails than type another word. Dude may be better than the worst guys, but he’s also worse than the best guys.

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The Musk Bot Army

Most of Musk’s companies are aimed toward transhuman ambitions: xAI is trying to create AGI (artificial godlike intelligence); Neuralink is billed as a way for early adopters to merge with friendly AIs and keep up with the god bots; Grok is being trained on X-users’ data, growing in the fertile soil of a “cybernetic superintelligence”; and as an “everything app,” X will flow with digital currency.

In Musk’s Future™, Optimus humanoid robots are to be our household slaves; Starlink satellites that now dominate low earth orbit will provide the comms grid; U.S. Department of Defense contracts ensure the entire system will remain secure; and according to his mythos, SpaceX will ferry a new cyborg subspecies to Mars, where they’ll plant an Edenic biodome on the lifeless red soil.

When Musk talks about “Team Humanity,” he means “Humanity 2.0.” When he positions himself against the “extinctionists,” he means radical environmentalists and Skynet-worshippers—most of whom loathe each other, too.

Whether or not any of Musk’s projects arrive on schedule—or come to fruition at all—his vision will guide millions of fanboys as they step into the future. What galls me are the conservatives who shrug these schemes off as sci-fi dreaming, yet they take Musk seriously when it comes to preserving the republic. People have every right to believe what they like, and most will, but I’ll do what I can to convince them otherwise.

Wide is the path to destruction, fellas.

These conservatives have their reasons, though. It’s true that Musk uses X to amplify certain strategic facts and counter-narratives. The platform boosts a limited set of influencers who criticize election fraud, open borders, DEI policies, medical tyranny, child gender transformers, and so on. The X algorithm is also quite friendly to Trump and pro-Trump memes—many of which are now Grok-generated by conservative-AI symbiotes. This brand of digital politics has been so effective, the midget leftoid Robert Reich wrote an op-ed for the Guardian calling for Musk to be arrested for spreading “disinformation.”

But the bias goes both ways. Seeing how Musk applauds Bibi Netanyahu—and relies on the Israeli company Au10tix to verify X users—it should come as no surprise that pro-Palestinian accounts complain they’re being throttled, as do many leftists. And those of us who criticize Musk seem to be isolated in our own social media ghettos. It’s his turf after all.

If this algorithmic bias is as it appears, X is designed to promote “free speech” in the same way any political rag does. Useful narratives are privileged over others. Computerized as we may be, that’s just human nature.

For now, I’ll take the good with the bad. Paper ballots are better than election machines. Secure borders are better than immigrant floods. Meritocracy is better than diversity hires. Bodily autonomy is better than medical mandates. Any healthy society should want safe, healthy children.

If patriots lose the country, there’s nothing to argue over. So I’ll hold my nose and vote my abused conscience. You should, too.

Just remember that politics is all about tradeoffs. In a world where technology bestows power and relevance, most victories will be at the behest of tech overlords with competing visions of the Future™.

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Coloring the Gray Goo

Two main camps have emerged since Musk’s rise as a culture war hero. On the one side are people who used to wag an accusing finger at “evil transhumanism.” Now that they taste the sweet end of the tech lollipop, they praise the exact same ambitions as embracing “good American technology.” Branding is one helluva drug.

On the other side, people see Musk as a puppet of global conspirators. For them, the public rivalries amount to pro-wrestling kayfabe. The investigative journalist Johnny Vedmore leans toward this viewpoint. “If Elon Musk was created to be the antithesis of the coming Technocratic Establishment,” he writes, “then his entire life would look exactly as it does now.” (Vedmore and I will discuss our conflicting theories on his TNT show this Thursday.)

My own third position is bleak in the mid-term, at least for traditionalists and full-blown Luddites. Transhuman tech is rising around us like gray goo coming up from the sewers. Across the planet, we find ourselves slogging through an ooze of artificial intelligence, robotics, brain-computer interfaces, and genetic engineering. Various factions are developing and deploying these technologies, each with their own goals.

Lefty Americans want this gray goo to be streaked with rainbow hues, whereas conservative Americans want it colored red, white, and blue. European bureaucrats are trying to wash it out with bland blue and white. China would have it stained red.

Let’s say you abolished the WEF tomorrow. That would only strengthen the more nationalist tech “broligarchs.” Or maybe you crush all the communists one by one—both real and imagined. Okay, fine. Nice job. But techno-capitalists would just push forward with one less headache. Alternatively, if gangs of Luddites were to destroy Google and Microsoft, they’d just clear a path for xAI or Meta to dominate. And yes, I know, it’s fun to imagine a total revolution where every Western tech firm is destroyed—especially if you’re a Chinese techno-commie.

Personally, I’d like to see a critical mass of humanity come to its senses and reject all but the most essential technologies. We would turn away from the promise of digital gods and return to traditional symbols that direct our souls toward a truly transcendent divinity. I suppose every man is free to dream.

What I see instead are pundits who plug into machines to criticize the Machine—myself among them. I watch preachers whip out their smartphones to read dire passages from the book of Revelation that warn of a speaking “image of the Beast” who will place a mark on each hand. Out on the weirdest wings, I find digitized rebels selling cures for imaginary nanobots—for the low, low price of $66.60 a bottle!

There are better trajectories. We shouldn’t focus on building better machines. We should focus on cultivating finer humans. But such a course, dear friends, will not be for the masses.

For now, we’re left on our own, wandering across a desert of “thinking sand.” Each of us must choose our own steps carefully. It’s a long, meandering path, slithering with vipers—but don’t despair. Enough of us will make it.

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ICYMI

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