Dispatch From New Normal 'Merica

Spring – Wk 8: The QR Code Conspiracy | Harpies Want You Vaxxed to the Max | Patrick Wood Talks Technocracy | Book Review: The Tyranny of Big Tech | When Digital Gods Rule the Earth

The QR Code Conspiracy

At this point, smartphones are basically mandatory. Back in the before times, you'd walk into a restaurant and they'd hand you a nice menu to browse. It was all part of the social interaction.

These days, they just point to a stupid QR code on the table and tell you to scan it—“due to Covid.” If you have nothing but a flip phone, they treat you like a grimy hobo coming in from the alley.

“You don't have a smartphone?!”

It won't be long before waiters plug a jack into your skull and let you make your selection without ever saying a word.

Or maybe they'll pop a magnetic helmet on your dome, put a few scented swatches under your nose, scan your brain waves, and let AI algorithms make your decision based on the resulting neural activity. According to The Science, that's what you really wanted all along.

Not long ago, if you asked someone on the street for directions, they'd tell you where to go. It might be totally wrong, but at least it was a human interaction. You might even chat about the area. Now they just say, “Don't you have a smartphone?”

When you show them your flip phone, they eye you with suspicion. Same goes for potential employers or new school chicks. They accuse you of being a drug dealer!

Just try to get food delivered, or catch a cab, or buy a train ticket without a smartphone. You might as well try to pay with cash.

“Don't you have a smartphone?!”

To paraphrase the ol’ drunk in A Clockwork Orange, “It's a filthy stinking world because it lets the technophiles get onto the Old Normals. It's no world for a flip phone, and it's no world for me!”

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Harpies Want You Vaxxed to the Max

Every scientific experiment should have a control group that’s not exposed to the independent variable.

Given the experimental nature of these new, basically untested mRNA vaccines that slip bits of genetic code into your cells—which produce reams of alien proteins that may or may not turn you into a drooling compliant citizen—you'd think scientists would want a few of us to hang back as a control group, just in case society needs some non-GMO humanoids to vibe with Nature's Way.

Nope. Turn on your TV, and there's a doddering old tard-face demanding that you either take the vaxx or wear the masksks. If you show the slightest vaxx hesitancy, they threaten you with second-class citizenship, permanent face-diapers, and segregated seating.

The authorities warn you that you'll face de facto unemployment, that you'll never travel abroad, that you'll suffer shunning and quasi-sodomite Chinese anal schwabs to the end of your days.

They deputize pudgy, self-righteous harpies who've never had a healthy moment in their lives to nag and goad and shame you into take the jab—not for your sake, but so they feel better about your presence in society.

I don't know who designed this global experiment, but they really do need a control group. Otherwise, there's no reason to “trust The Science.” I mean, solid scientific experiments always have a control group.

On the bright side, this vaxx hysteria has given me a great idea for a porno called Take the Jab.

Imagine this on the big screen:

A pasty citizen in a polo shirt shows up to the clinic to get his vaxx. He's greeted by two super hot nurses in fishnet stockings—who turn out to be trannies. One says in a husky baritone:

“We're gonna need both cheeks to stick you with this one, sir.”

TAKE THE JAB!

It only stings a little.

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Patrick Wood Talks Technocracy

Latest article: “How To Stop Technocrats From Turning The United States Into China” — in The Federalist

In many respects, technology has eroded personal autonomy. This insidious trend has only accelerated due to the governmental response to the global pandemic. The average citizen is left disoriented by rapid changes brought on by automation, mass surveillance, dizzying propaganda, and the proliferation of invasive technologies.

Patrick Wood has been making sense of the technocratic movement for over a decade. His 2015 book “Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation” tracks the persistence of an arrogant idea from its inception at Columbia University in the 1930s, through the Trilateral Commission in the 1970s, and beyond.

In “Technocracy: The Hard Road to World Order” (2018), Wood surveys the current implementation of technological central planning: mass surveillance, financial technology, smart cities, tech spirituality, and other manifestations.

Focusing on the economic powers that drive politics, Wood takes the highly unorthodox position that technocratic ambition represents a graver threat than communism, fascism, or any other totalitarian regime. He also argues that populist movements are a critical point of resistance to global technocracy. At its core, Wood’s work is an earnest defense of our constitutional republic.

JOE ALLEN: What is “technocracy”?

PATRICK WOOD: I always go back to the definition that was authored by the technocracy movement itself. They had a magazine in the 30's called The Technocrat. In 1938, they defined their own movement :

“Technocracy is the science of social engineering, the scientific operation of the entire social mechanism, to produce and distribute services to the entire population.”

Read the whole thing here

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Book Review: The Tyranny of Big Tech

Latest article: “Josh Hawley Takes On The Tyranny Of Big Tech” — in The Federalist

The American Dream is made possible through free enterprise, representative government, and individual liberty. That balance was upended when a handful of tech companies seduced the populace into giving up their right to privacy. Their schemes produced so much capital, Big Tech just bought off any resistance and repackaged these stooges as the #Resistance.

While we were distracted by buzzing smartphones, global corporations intruded into every aspect of our lives. As a result, Sen. Josh Hawley writes in his new book The Tyranny of Big Tech: “Our republic has never been more hierarchical, more riven by class, more managed by an elite than it is today. That is corporate liberalism’s legacy. But it need not be our future.”

The Tyranny of Big Tech unfolds in three parts. In the first, Hawley sketches a brief history of Gilded Age monopolies. In the second, he details the 21st century’s techno-capitalist takeover. I never thought I’d read a Republican author who’s grasped the work of tech-futurist Jaron Lanier, but Hawley’s full of surprises. The final section lays out the senator’s ambitious plan for antitrust legislation.

Read the whole thing here

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When Digital Gods Rule the Earth

Recent article at The Federalist:

Scientism is steadily replacing traditional religion as the basis for understanding the world and our place in it. A recent essay by Noelle Garnier at The National Pulse entitled “A New American Divinity” argues persuasively that the global pandemic catalyzed a mass conversion to that secular faith.

Over a single year, millions came to “believe the Science” without question. Garnier writes: “The COVID-19 outbreak raised the authority of medical scientists … to quasi-religious dimensions.” She concludes with three critical questions: “Who is doing the science? What are their aims for the future of mankind? And what expression will scientism find when COVID-19 recedes into the past?”

A ready answer is found in the work of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the 2017 best-seller Homo Deus: A Brief History of the Future. He certainly has the ear of Silicon Valley and the Davos crowd, if that has any bearing on civilization’s direction.

As Harari explores various possible worlds in which cybernetic humans use tech to elevate themselves to godhood given our current trajectory, he theorizes that a tiny technocratic elite will dominate the primitive masses. Furthermore, if artificial intelligence produces superior algorithms, computers will come to know people better than they can know themselves.

If Scientism is the new religion of science and technology, and Transhumanism is the path to apotheosis, then Harari’s “Dataism” is the sect that worships Big Data as the highest earthly power. Whether wielded by human owners or self-aware computers, this mystical information will be used to control the world.

In line with Garnier’s concept of a mass conversion, the 2020 global lockdown appears to be Dataism’s “Great Awakening.” Across the planet, governments, corporations, and universities forced their citizens and employees to move their lives online. Aside from the smartphone’s invention, no event in history has generated more useful data than the pandemic response.

According to Harari’s mythos, the various entities holding that data — from Google to the Chinese Communist Party — are poised to become an overt global priesthood.

Read the whole thing here