Mr Z's Virtual World, Or Prison

Online "safety" legislation will damn the metaverse

Steve Jurvetson CC

Oct 31, 2021

It’s a strange world in which we are not allowed to think for ourselves. In this mental boulevard our minds take a walk but are jostled by fact checkers, influencers and debunkers who all want our attention, time and money. It’s as if you are surrounded by thugs and con artists in a bazaar.

Their accomplices block certain streets and direct us: go this way, avoid that rabbit hole and certainly don’t think critically, “I’ve already done that for you.”

Oh, thank you so much, sir. I’ll do exactly what you recommend. Take your hand out of my pocket. Here, I’ll give you the money.

This is the world that will become Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse — a digital universe accessed through virtual reality. He even changed his company’s name to reflect his ambition.

Wearing an augmented reality visor you will ask the holograms round for a barbecue or travel to an imaginary land. “When you play a game with your friends, you’ll feel like you’re right there together in a different world, not just on your computer by yourself,” Zuckerberg said.

People would be able to use hand gestures to “say a few words or even just make things happen by thinking about them.”

I have a message for Mr Z: all actions proceed from thought. People have communicated with hand gestures for millennia. And, yes, you will still be on your computer by yourself.

I hate to be a killjoy but that’s not the worst thing. A virtual world should make you more free and aspire to concepts that previously you could not reach— it should be an extension of reality.

Search police

Google doesn’t want you searching for anything. Just certain things. Put in the words and the answer comes “back at you.”

But that’s not what I asked?

That’s what you get.

I actually inquired of a Google employee why it changes your search terms. It’s an advertising company. It lures you with an idea, in order to sell you: you’re the product. What you think is irrelevant.

The World Economic Forum has a promotional video that suggests by hooking ourselves up to a computer we will be able to think more freely.

Then I listened again to what Nita Farahany of Duke University actually says:

“Once we can access people’s thoughts and access people’s emotion, we have to create a space that enables people to think freely, to think divergent thoughts, to think creative thoughts and, in a society where people fear having those thoughts, the likelikood being able to enjoy progress is significantly diminished.”

Now I'm going to ask you to read that again, twice, and tell me what she's saying… … …

It's not "you'll get to think more freely." She's saying once we put you in a zone, WE create space for PEOPLE LIKE US to think the unthinkable — because unless we can think the unthinkable we can't impose “progress”. That's dark stuff.

If you think I am being unfair, listen to the World Economic Forum’s 2016 video, What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution? [1]

While it rabbits on about fusing the physical, digital and biological, the language from the various contributors reinforces one perspective:

• “The technology exists but how do we implement it at a scale we need, at a price that people can afford.”

• “Even though we have everyday problems that we have to solve, we have to find a way to lay the foundations for the innovations of tomorrow.”

This is pure WEF: it is about changing society so that corporations are free to implement — and people are led to accept — the technology that the Stakeholders want. The price they mention is not money. It is the value of a life... the price we can persuade the victim to accept and society to bear.

Why so cynical? The WEF is not a “bring your ideas” pot luck party for free thinkers. It is an invitation-only group of those “have already assumed a leadership position or are highly likely to do so in the future.” It is a diffusion mechanism which looks for reliable corporate footsoldiers to go out and spread the message.

See my article, Naming The Names, for how the WEF uses its Young Global Leaders and Shapers organisations.

At this late stage in the day it would take less time to identify those who are not interconnected and participating in this crisis. For example, the WEF is on the board of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine while the closely-tied Global Preparedness Monitoring Board is merely a front for the World Bank and WHO.

Prominent WEF alumni include premiers Jacinda Ardern and Dan Andrews, Emmanuel Macron, Sebastian Kurtz and Angela Merkel. Its members in the digital sector include Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel; in finance Larry Fink of BlackRock and Kristalina Georgieva of the IMF, former Bank of England chief Mark Carney. In health, they include Scotland’s health adviser Devi Sridhar.

Thought police

We’ll be able to think more freely at least until the thought police arrive. Legislation to determine “online safety” has been passed in Australia. In Britain it’s in Parliament’s committee stage, and is being considered in the U.S. and Canada. Over recent weeks Facebook insiders (they don’t meet the definition of whistleblowers) popped up, one in testimony to Congress and a second before British MPs to demand stricter controls on "hate" (undefined). Oh, and we saw how an MP's Voice Is Silenced By Murder.

Are these insiders doing Facebook’s bidding in calling for regulation? When a government regulates an industry it gets harder for new companies to enter the market: the complexities and costs of compliance are often prohibitive. So a regulated internet could strengthen Facebook’s monopoly. But those calling for regulation might also come from government or the many military brigades whose desk soldiers now monitor the internet for compliance with the government views of the day.

So what if the Internet gets more restrictive?

It might not matter if was truly a communal endeavour of the people, managed by the people, for the people. But that’s not what it is.

Microsoft bought Skype, LinkedIn, Swype (which records what you type), tried to launch the Windows phone as a corrollary to Google’s Android. It is one of the biggest Cloud operators, which gives access to everything you upload. It bought Minecraft, which is a trove of communication and a vector of influence. Microsoft has recently barged into the Linux space of those who opt out of Windows. It even tried to buy Discord. Kudos to them for not selling out.

Once you acknowledge that Bill Gates’ mom was friends with the head of IBM and that in those far-off days of the 1970s the regulators would have blocked IBM from dominating both the mainframe and PC markets, you can see why they invented Bill Gates. By the way, IBM, like Silicon Valley, like LifeLog-Facebook, is the Pentagon.

Readers of this newsletter probably know that Google was incubated by In-Q-Tel which is the CIA. Increasingly your choice is Pentagon (IBM, Microsoft, Amazon) or the CIA (Oracle, Google).

Conspiracy theory!

Well, isn’t it just the same managed opposition, the same tyranny of choice as the reds and the blues, Labour vs Conservative/Liberal, left-right, up|down.

You put your right foot in
You put your right foot out
You put your right foot in
And you shake it all about
You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around
That's what it's all about!

I'll do the Hokey Pokey
I'll do the Hokey Pokey
That's what it's all about!

[Repeat, six times]

Each half of the population behaves as if the other half’s gone insane. And probably it has. Just which half?

Mass hypnotism

Professor Mattias Desmet began examining statistics to explain the rapid ascent of Event Covid but he discovered the numbers were wrong. Then he wondered why people kept following forecasts when they were so obviously wrong: narratives that did not reflect reality. He discovered mass formation of the popular mind. It needs four precursors: [2]

• isolated people without social bonds

• a lack of sense-making in life

• free floating anxiety that is undefined

• psychological discontent that is not connected to anything

These conditions existed before Event Covid. Examples include widespread burnout, 40-60 per cent of people saying they do “Bullshit Jobs” (David Graeber), and massive abuse of anti-depressants.

Free-floating anxiety is the most painful phenomenon, says Prof Desmet. People just want it to end and will latch onto anything that provides a release or a scapegoat. The media provides the narrative and the object of anxiety. Job done.

Step two, the people engage in a battle with the object of anxiety, with the scapegoat. The whole of society forms a connection, a new social bond. Switching from no friends to an entire crowd of like-thinkers, it becomes a mental intoxication. That is what makes mass formation exactly equal to hypnosis. It no longer matters, says Desmet, if a narrative is right or wrong. It attracts if it leads to mental intoxication.

He offers some thoughts on how to counter mass formation or hypnosis. Victims don’t want to go back to the painful anxiety of lack of social bond, free-floating anxiety or psychological discontent. We cannot wean them off the object of their discontent. We have to tell them we can find other ways to solve this psychological problem: we don’t need Coronavirus.

Chasing narrative

Any consumer of news must become a researcher — looking for the motives behind what is presented as news. You would not trust a gossip: you would ask why he or she was saying it. Why not with media: the media is gossip.

My afternoon thoughts turned back to the Deagel forecasts that were an Internet theme at the start of Event Covid. Those were the depopulation forecasts for 2025 provided by a Stratfor type of consultancy providing commercial and military intelligence. They predicted a massive fall in some western populations. Remember, we knew nothing about the mRNA injection at that time — or the catastrophic side effects that are only beginning to emerge.

Debunkers had a debunk festival, as boring as that is. What strikes me now is that depopulation got all the attention rather than the relative increase or decrease between countries. Look what’s happening now and the analysis seems to have been much deeper than the debunkers noticed.

For example the populations of the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom decline quite sharply in the forecasts while those of India and China remain either unchanged or slightly increase. Revisiting the numbers in late 2021, the countries that are most heavily vaxxed yet seeing the largest casualties: are the Anglosphere.

From another perspective — if you must, ignore the questions around untested gene jabs — consider our vulnerable occupancy of this third rock from the sun: what if…

What if our existence is more tenuous than we admit? Or to say the same thing from a religious perspective, what if we live by God’s mercy? And if any aspect of Event Covid is, to the slightest degree, coordinated, then what narrative is dominant, who chose it and why?

Climate apocalypse? Peak oil? Population crunch? UFO disclosure? Attack of the zombies? Contagion? — look at your TV Guide and it’s all of them, isn’t it?

Why this matters is that all great social changes, industrial transitions, have always had a death toll.

Think of the Enclosures, the seizure of land by aristocrats that ended the owning of land in Common, and the depopulation of the countryside to feed the factories. History books don't mention the deaths. In fact, they laugh at the Luddites. Look into the story of Ned Ludd and it was far more nuanced. He was talking about the human cost. And he was right. Malthus is telling the same story from the owners’ point of view.

Think of the aboriginals of any land. Think of the great climactic changes and catastrophes. Here is a clue: the anthropologist Graham Hancock says academics cling to universalism, which sounds like a secular religion because it is. [3]

They do not like one-off, random catastrophic events that disrupt their theories. They are psychologically averse, discomfited by fear of death on a personal level, given to neat simplicities on a professional level... so they are mentally programmed to present everything as gradual when history, archaeology, anthropology, geology — and religion — suggest it’s not.

See every school textbook you ever read and there is Pollyanna on the page. Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.

Graham Hancock says academics are plain frightened to admit humans have suffered repeated catastrophic events, even if religious texts around the world, written thousands of years ago, record the same events.

Broader society is scared. We thought you had to be willing in order to be hypnotized. Now it seems that mass hypnosis is really a consequence of psychosis — a loss of touch with reality. We are far more like children than we admit. Monsters under the bed scare us. Maybe this is society dealing with something it dare not face.

And at this very vulnerable moment, the devotees of the World Economic Forum emerge from the dark corners of our psyche, with their inhumane, technocratic message:

“The very idea of humans being some kind of a natural concept is really going to change. Our bodies will be so high tech we won’t be able to distinguish between what’s natural and what's artificial.”

[1] World Economic Forum, 2016 — What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

[2] Prof Mattias Desmet, 2921 — Presentation on hypnotism during Event Covid, channel of Dr Reiner Fuellmich.

[3] Graham Hancock Lecture on Ancient Civilizations, 2010.