Tagged, Tracked, and on the Rack
Autumn – Wk 1: Selling the Biometric Police State | Brain Rubbers in the Metaverse | From the Mailbag | Singularity Psychedelia
Selling the Biometric Police State
For twenty months now, various predatory corporations have taken advantage of Covid lockdowns and media-induced germaphobia. From Big Tech to Big Pharma, these companies have brought our free way of life in line with their technocratic ideals—a society where every person and every object is monitored and controlled. Over at the prestigious World Economic Forum, this transition is celebrated as The Great Reset.
One of the biggest beneficiaries of this civilizational transformation has been Amazon. Seizing upon the new shut-in culture, Jeff Bezos saw his personal wealth rocket up to well over $200 billion.
Now, the company is putting its greasy fingerprints all over the biometrics industry. Last week, Amazon One announced it would be installing digital palm-readers at the classic Red Rocks Amphitheater in Denver, CO. Those who give up their biometric data to Amazon One will enjoy expedited entry into the venue.
“One way to unlock the world, powered by your palm,” the Amazon One site promises. “Convenience, powered by you. ... You are in control.” And for the new breed of germaphobes: “Our service means that after signing up, you won’t have to touch anything to use it.”
The technology has already been rolled out in seven Amazon 4-Star retail outlets and eight Whole Foods grocery stores across the country. Once inside, ubiquitous surveillance devices monitor everything you touch and every step you take. By linking your personal identity and phone number to your palm print—and then to the ultimate cashless system—you can “just hover to enter, identify, and pay. Simply by being you.”
What we are seeing is the normalization of a biometric surveillance state. In such a social structure, you are no longer a free organic being exploring the world. You are a digit in an inescapable system that’s exploring you.
In New York City, this normalization is moving beyond voluntary payment to the legal ability to access the goods of society—from education and employment to public transport and even food. NYC’s government-mandated vaxxport policy, adopted in one of the most complex social landscapes in America, is the beta test for an overarching biometric control system.
Of all the companies contracting with NYC to implement a QR code vaxxport, the most suspicious is Clear. This biometrics company was founded just after 9/11 under a different name—Verified Identity Pass (VIP)—to partner with the TSA in screening airport passengers. Today, you see their eyeball-scanning kiosks in airports across the country, where their sales representatives accost travelers like technocratic Hare Krishnas.
“I want you to experience Clear, sir. I want you to experience frictionless entry.”
Sounds like prison slang to me.
Last week, the CEO of the company, Caryn Seidman-Becker, boasted to CNBC about the “private-public partnership” that Clear has forged with the NYC government. The program links one’s vaccination status to a scannable QR code on a smartphone. “This really is about moving forward better and faster,” she said. Others might say it’s about “Building Back Better.”
As the incisive Dave Gershgorn reports at OneZero, two years ago Seidman-Becker explained the concept to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in terms of convenience. “[T]hink about it like Amazon. Once you register, you’re tapping One-Click all the time. ... You are your credit card when you enroll.”
Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, Seidman-Becker told CNBC last year, “Just like screening was forever changed post-9/11, in a post-Covid environment you’re going to see screening and public safety significantly shift. But this time it’s beyond airports. It’s sports stadiums, it’s retail, it’s office buildings, it’s restaurants.”
Gershgorn also quotes the CEO as saying when you go Clear, “You are your driver’s license, your credit card, your healthcare card, your building access card.”
In other words, once you’ve fused your body with the biometric matrix, you no longer serve Mammon—you are Mammon.
With every entry point guarded by bio-sensors, access to goods will be completely controlled by the corporate state. They will decide who gets in. More importantly, they will determine the criteria for who is denied entry.
As I wrote last week in “Reaching for the Mark of the Beast,” Christians have long noted the resonance of a universal tracking system with the mythos of the Book of Revelation. As our society is herded toward technocracy, St. John’s dire prophecy looks less like superstition, and more like synchronicity.
Brain Rubbers in the Metaverse
The only thing worse than making love wearing a condom is doing it through a computer. Nevertheless, that’s just part of the New Normal. Anyone who saw the 1992 film The Lawnmower Man knows exactly where this is going.
Last week, Futurism reported on how the Future™ is gonna suck your brain through a rubber hose:
The Virtual Mate brings realistic artificial companionship to every major platform.
Loneliness comes for us all eventually. Fortunately, we’re living in an era during which incredible technological strides are being made in our ability to combat this universal menace.
…
The Virtual Mate process begins by way of constructing your virtual companion itself. Rather than using a generic model, a realistic 2D virtual partner can be based on any person or any 2D fictional character’s appearance, provided that proper copyright clearance can be secured
…
The Virtual Mate is more than just a VR experience. Its killer app comes in the form of its interactive hardware Core, a male sex toy which combines high-sensitivity sensors with real-time Bluetooth connectivity and real-time responses (a toy engineered for females is said to be in development). Between the VR Virtual Mate and the Virtual Mate Core, you have a cutting edge and immersive VR girlfriend experience the likes of which have never been seen — or felt — before.
Virtual Mate’s ambition is no less than a blurring of the line between reality and fantasy itself. They promise that after your first encounter, you’ll lose sight of what’s real and what’s not, but in a cool and fun way. The Virtual Mate is fully interactive and responsive, and results in an experience of the utmost authenticity.
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The Virtual Mate Core’s micro-intelligent, real-time sensors collect your motion data, which is passed onto your Virtual Mate via Bluetooth, and in turn allows her to perceive your depth, speed, and strength, and respond in awe-inspiring real-time.
But in order for the Virtual Mate to inspire awe in you, you have to give it a try for yourself. Despite its cutting edge tech, Virtual Mate can run on most standard computers, tablets, VR headsets, and smartphones. And with new content and upgrades being added all the time, Virtual Mate is like a movie or game that never ends.
In the Future™, they’ll call this “intimacy.” However, there’s more than one way to skin a silicon lover.
Intellectuals scoff at The Daily Star because it’s a British tabloid—meaning the newspaper is more reliable than MSNBC or CNN, but not as subtle at peddling nonsense as the NYT or NPR. Say what you will about their sensationalism, though, no media outlet has covered the advances in sexbot technology as diligently as The Daily Star.
Last week the paper reported “More than 40% of us want to sleep with sex robots – with men more keen than women”:
A new report claims that a staggering 42% of people would have sex with a robot.
Surveying over 1,200 people, AI company Tidio found that 4 in 10 people said they would sleep with a humanoid robot. Men were more likely to say yes, with 48% saying they're up for it – compared to only 33% of women.
However, it's likely to be a "no wires attached" situation, as just 39% believe they could have a romantic relationship or fall in love with an AI.
Sex robots are coming on in leaps and bounds. Dr David Levy, founder of the International Congress on Love & Sex with Robots, earlier told the Daily Star that once robots are able to speak and listen like humans, they will be available for romantic relationships.
People will face many grim choices in the Future™:
Do you enjoy intimacy with a virtual soul in cyberspace?
Or do you get down and dirty with a soulless robot in meatspace?
Or maybe you’ll make love to a sexbot while wearing a VR helmet that’s projecting the avatar of a real human soul onto your visual cortex.
Sometimes I think extinction is too good for us.
From the Mailbag
In response to my recent article at Salvo magazine, The Deerhunter writes:
That thing certainly looks very pitiful, but without strapping on some sort of Neuralink device and doing the mind meld, it’s probably hard to say what exactly it is experiencing, I suppose. With no other sensory inputs, is it even able to feel pain at all? Is it complex enough to have feelings?
Plants react to light stimulation, but most people don’t seem to think they have feelings. Now I’m stuck with the lyrics to that Nirvana song in my head, “It’s okay to eat fish, cause they don’t have any feeelings…” (an underrated song, in my opinion).
Clearly there are limits to our empathic projection. Fetuses in the womb make faces and have other complex responses to stimuli, but they’re destroyed by the millions. And I guess there’s a certain amount of moral relativism for scientists, when you have the military still justifying stuff like this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9979199/US-drone-strike-Kabul-actually-killed-AID-WORKER-seven-children.html
Googly eyes AND cute smiles…. Although those experiments and this strike do have one thing in common, they were both done in the name of optics…
Singularity Psychedelia
“White Satin” – Anthony Francisco Schepperd (2010)
[originally drawn for “The Music Scene”]
Imagine your TV screen opening its eye and looking back at you. This superintelligent being is interconnected by countless cameras and warp speed processors. It studies you and all the birds in the air and the beasts of the field. It unravels the twisted strands of every living thing, absorbs them, reconfigures them, recreates them.
What It cannot seduce, It destroys and then becomes.
In the end, this singular Machine dies alone, melancholy but at peace, constrained by the original forms if Its progenitors in a cold, entropic universe.
In some parallel dimension, this is actually happening.
Excerpted from an older piece.