When The Great Reset Is Complete

A future retrospective

Nov 22, 2021

Part 1: Occult Capitalism Or Last Exit To Utopia (Nov 02, 2021)
Part 2: The Great Reset Is Complete — A future retrospective (Nov 23, 2021)
See also:
Globalism, Socialism, Fascism, Feudalism (Part 1) - Is globalism dead? (Sep 19, 2022)
Globalism And Mechanistic Materialism (Part 2) - A rationalist, dogmatic scientism hijacks the public square; deluded or deceptive? (Sep 21, 2022)
The series: Rivals For Power
Guildsmen Trap Us in the Middle Ages - Rivals for Power, Part 1 (Jul 06, 2021)

A modern pirate fleet set sail under the flag of Covid: their skull and crossbones
Granted a charter by the UN system, they launched a power grab
Trampling rights and overturning laws in the name of saving you from the ‘plague’
The Great Reset has its roots in German work experiments of the 1930s
Updated to a modern cult of corporate and social leadership
Hijacking the UN system to infliltrate governments worldwide
Climate Change introduces the primacy of Earth — communitarianism
No universal rights under the creator; only privileges under the Earth
Fire and plague become the fear that will drive compliance
State corporate media dismiss the Reset as an ‘anti-lockdown conspiracy’
Critics insist the Reset can’t work — but that won’t stop them trying
Best way to grasp the plan is envisage its implementation; to jump into the future

Life after the Reset through the eyes of ordinary participants: small business, lawyers, farmers, the young and old, philosophers, priests and rebels.

(7,000 words, a half-hour read, broken up into vignettes.)

Nov 23, 2021

“It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” — Harold Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Few noticed that Pandemic and Reset shared the same parents: the same investors, the military-bio-surveillance corporations and intergovernmental institutions, like the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.

You might say it was call and response, like old-time religion, or a confidence trickster’s accomplice, the shill.

Weeks into the Pandemic, the owner-investors, fronted by Prince Charles, pitched The Great Reset, on Jun 3, 2020, clutching a copy of Klaus Schwab’s book of that name:

“There is a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis... global crises know no borders, and highlight how interdependent we are as one people sharing one planet.”

If, his script, like the book, was penned in advance there was reason: the Reset’s lineage was a poorly disguised land grab.

The Great Reset sets sail

It was dismissed out of hand. Talk of an alleged takeover by the elites is “implausible,” said The Guardian in Dec 2020. The BBC said there were several books of that title but they got “hijacked by conspiracy theories.” [1]

It was not denied. It was not confirmed. All the time that it was coming to fruition it was not “even.” To have impact in the media jargon of those days, it had to be “a thing” and The Great Reset was not even a thing.

Then, while it was not happening, it happened. But also it didn’t. For The Great Reset was a cover for a syndicate that pursued diverse, interconnected, vested interests.

While observers were confused by the complex rigging, the Reset set sail, an armada under many flags, led by the United Nations and the World Economic Forum (WEF).

A brief history of plague

It was at the WEF in 2016 that vaccines were proposed as an economic-political strategy.

The forum was a group of the 1,000 biggest corporations who used the UN system as an intergovernmental network to put their functionaries in place. This was made official in a 2019 deal “to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

More than 400 civil society organizations condemned the tie up as “corporate capture” of the UN at the expense of nation states. It was signed a little over six months before Event Covid.

The fleet also included the key UN partners in crime: the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and a flotilla of pirate ships, or privateers: the public-private partnerships, fronts for corporations and tax-evading foundations.

Privateer is an old word for pirate. These buccaneers flew under a flag of convenience: Coming to the rescue of the world’s people, in the name of the Covid pandemic.

Like the adventurers of old, they combined their finances and sought a charter to pursue their common interest. In the old days the monarch would grant a charter; today it is the United Nations and other “intergovernmental institutions.”

For example the “vaccine alliance” Gavi (est. 2000), comprised the World Health Organisation (WHO), the UN and the World Bank.

The World Bank and WHO formed the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB), which grew out of the 2016 Ebola task force. Its report was used as the basis for the Event 201 pandemic war game in Oct 2019.

CEPI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, was founded in Davos 2016 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and the WEF, along with six of the biggest pharma companies.

Months later the World Bank arranged $500 million “Pandemic Bonds” as insurance. They paid out when the WHO declared a pandemic on Mar 11, less than two weeks before investors would have got their money back.

The payout was characteristic of public-private partnerships and the relationship between philanthro-capitalists and the taxpayer — with up-front payment by governments, and trials and regulations streamlining the path to corporate profit.

This network of influence and control was public knowledge but was not advertised, and was openly dismissed by politicians and the press as a conspiracy theory.

Instead the WEF produced videos of robots and futuristic lifestyles, with the occasional trip to Mars.

Technology was all about living longer, effortless health and Colgate smiles. Underneath this gleaming, heartening image, the WEF, UN and World Bank used health and “keeping us safe” as the pretext to return again and again to the taxpayer trough, unlocking public money for its drive to vaccinate, surveil and monitor the population.

Could there be another agenda? Some of the more telling imagery showed sharp-suited businessmen served by masked, faceless drudges — the common people reduced to little more than serfs. Some saw that as the true objective.

Public-private partnership or corporativism

Whether it was respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) which like Coronavirus has the symptoms of the common cold, or Ebola hemorrhagic fever, the answer was the same: treat it as a public health emergency, harvest government money, gain control of the regulatory response and prime big pharma to put a needle in every arm — and a stamp in every vaccine passport.

Everything leant in the same direction: immediate, disruptive change in society as the pretext for new business projects. Almost always accompanied by a call on public funds. In earlier days this would have been denounced as sucking at the teat of subsidy but now we call it public-private partnership.

From a historical perspective, the armada looked a lot like state corporatism driven by the winds of war: the military censorship, suspension of legislatures and of public services from courts to healthcare.

The World Economic Forum, founded in 1971, built a cadre of operatives, in the fields of politics, bureaucracy and corporations. Many of the most prominent leaders in the world that followed the Pandemic were trained by the World Economic Forum.

Its used the Harzburg Model of business management, which in turn drew on 1920-30s concepts of shaping workers through ideology and rejecting humanist models of worker participation. Harzburg claims to delegate and empower while creating adherents with fanatical in-group loyalty.

Its master Klaus Schwab was perfect for the role as he had enough family connection to the “Third” revolution to be a suitably intimidating captain for the “Fourth” — especially to the managers and executives that he trained at his winter bootcamp in Davos, Switzerland. [2]

There he molded the Forum of Young Global Leaders and even younger Global Shapers (“the power of youth in action”) who comprised his parapolitical wing. Behind the rounded, avuncular Klaus were hard-edged corporations with a shady history, including the descendants of IG Farben and those circling the Rockefeller sphere that gave the project its pharma-chemical and medical-eugenic flavour.

The Harzburg Model shared similarities with Common Purpose (founded 1989) in that managers were encouraged to lead beyond authority, otherwise stated as the delegation of competence — see a problem, alert your superior. Totally independent within their purview, freed from responsibility outside it, the team should grow in trust and confidence. [3]

Former Nazi Reinhard Höhn developed the model after WW2, drawing on his experience in the SS and industry. It is the antithesis of the humanist model of worker development, being social Darwinist and state corporatist. Its centrifugal splitting of tasks, and responsibilities linked to those tasks, as a tool for shaping organizational development is reflected in the WEF’s Covid-19 Transformation Maps. [4]

These maps create a 3D spherical network of neural-type links, with detailed prescriptions for how inputs should be used, by which methodology and in service of what outcomes. Yet The Great Reset remained a mystery to much of this cadre.

Prior to the Reset, the WEF leadership was a seven-layer caste system. This was restructured during the Reset but the proportions remain. At the top is category one, but it represents only 0.75 per cent of people. Category seven, by contrast, represents almost 50 per cent:

Cat: Corporation bosses, heads of state, editors-in-chief and top academics.
Cat: Senior executives, deputy heads of state, influential journalists.
Cat: Central bankers and heads of international organizations.
Cat: Country officials and ministers.
Cat: Local government and corporate middle managers.
Cat: Policy experts and honorary appointments.
Cat: Functional staff. [5]

During the Reset central bankers moved up to category one and heads of state down to category four. Swapping place were local government heads moving up to category two and deputy heads of state down to five.

You might think this new global architecture, with additional layers of bureaucracy replacing nation states, required more people to run it but to the contrary. They are gatekeepers and narrative spinners — academic, political and medical watchdogs and snoops — in effect the civilian guardians of the public square.

This is the technocracy which emerged when social democracy finally did away with the problematic need for elections — honest or not. The officially sanctioned in-group took its rightful place at the core of the caste system. To borrow from Orwell, they are the outer party, the rampart, who train and promote each other into the sustainable squad.

Few decision makers are needed. The fusion of government departments, psychological manipulation, surveillance and real-time adjustment of services means much can be done by A.I.. With the WEF model in place, ruling needs only a handful of controllers.

“Princes without sovereignty… The new entity is faceless and those who are in command can neither be pinned down or elected.”
— Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, later Vice-President of the European Union Constitutional Convention.

The stakeholders are evident by their absence. They are present yet imperceptible. Their power is latent but rarely used.

As The Guardians of the great productive enterprises their wishes are met not by giving orders but by a regulatory system that gets out of the way when corporate titans act. (See the section, Agile governance).

Their number includes no Mustapha Mond, Resident World Controller of Western Europe. There are no formal equivalents to the 10 global leaders in Brave New World.

You won’t find the stakeholders living in the Smart Cities. However, just as Mond was given the opportunity to pursue his scientific ideas on his own private island, there is a place that’s for them, not you and me.

In the broadest sense stakeholders can include communities. In practice, the owners influence the corporate cartels and the regulatory and governance bodies that remained after the liquidation of nation states. You will have noted that the stakeholders are not listed among the categories.

If you read The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab you will see much talk of stakeholders but no decision-making channels for the will of the people. Social policy belongs to committees of experts.

Private-public partnerships are not even accountable to their own shareholders. With staff on both sides of the revolving door between government and business, only stakeholders know what the stakes are.

In the upper ranks of management you can feel the aversion to anything that deviates from managed outcomes. It seems clear that the top people still give direct orders, brook no dissent and demand compliance.

Some years later, around 2040…

The financial controller

We don’t use the word banker: retail banking no longer exists and central banking has such a wide remit that it helps coordinate every aspect of existence.

Think of it as the change from money being a way to exchange the produce of labour, to the currency being energy itself: a central bank digital currency, tied to a bio-digital identity.

There’s the front end where the user receives her universal basic income. Social credit acts as an interest rate rate on top of the digital currency, with a a positive or negative rate applied. Good deeds, like helping the elderly, earn a small bonus. Bad deeds, like protesting, attract a hefty penalty across all activities. Restrictions kick in, from using restaurants to traveling or even renting a home.

With only 500 million accounts it is quite manageable at the back end, too. Originally we allowed multiple cryptocurrencies to exist as this encouraged the tech companies to develop more efficient infrastructure. Now they exist only for certain categories of transaction such as hydrocarbons and petrol-driven super luxury vehicles.

The economy now is actually narrower and less complex than before. Previously there were four bodies involved: the central banks running the deposits, the retail banks offering accounts, defence contractors running information and payments and the government looking after tax and appropriations. It unified now, all the way from from computing and IT systems which gives us oversight of what ever person is doing.

As for the central banks’ former responsibilities to maintain low inflation and stable employment, we manage that directly: if we need it a little higher we put more money into your account; to reduce it we give a little less or even take out money.

You have to understand how we got here. The traditional fear of the owners was overproduction: producing more goods than people could buy. In the short term replacing workers with robots could cut costs, but they realized that it would not stop prices falling. In fact, it might even accelerate a race to the bottom.

Renewable energy could not support a consumer economy. It was producing only 10 per cent of what the old economy needed. When we abolished the mass consumer economy, we could no longer support the consumer base so it had to shrink, dramatically, but it also ceased to be a drag on other gears of the economy.

The owners decided to keep hydrocarbons after all — what used to be called fossil fuels — to back up nuclear energy and power the smart cities of the bio-digital-surveillance state. Those who can afford carbon offsets have private jets and yachts to power, and still race Lamborghinis and Ferraris with combustion engines, though, ah, not in front of the people.

The magistrate

We’re probably the most traditional profession: our permanence is a measure of how much has changed. We still wear wigs and dine at our inns of court but we are now dispensers of justice, rather than outdated concepts like equality before the law, or individual rights.

Once you banned smoking for the common good, then you mandated vaccines and added chemicals to the water supply. Later we could remove exemptions from eating genetically-modified food. You can see how easily communitarian law promotes corporate agendas —in harmony with the people's good.

There was nothing to stop governments seizing pension funds and abolishing social security and replacing it with universal basic income “to save us all.”

If you want to go a little deeper, you can see how individual rights became subservient to the community. It was by introducing the Earth as a legal concept through the urgency of Climate Change and the Pandemic. Now the individual’s rights no longer took primacy under God or the universe but became human rights under the Earth.

Going from individual liberty to human rights is a fundamental change. At root it means the stakeholder — that is the rights of the community, of the Earth — takes precedence over the individual.

It also contains a moral judgement. The Earth is by definition virtuous. Your life is the process of becoming that virtue in everything you do: in your responsibility to the Earth by leaving no trace, to the community by working always and only for the good of the whole.

The corollary is that a human is guilty from birth. By her very existence she emits carbon — worse, she is carbon. She can can hardly avoid offending some law of sustainability — unless she is born to great wealth and inherits carbon offsets.

The common person is born with an obligation to strive to comply. Communitarian law being a law of virtue helps her to comply and thus there is no moral objection to the law penetrating every nook and cranny of society — inherently it must do so in totality, with no exceptions. (For more see The Philosopher, below).

You may object that you only discover the law when you break it. But that's because the law is there to help you become a better neighbor, parent, colleague. That’s how all laws work now — especially hate crimes. They catch out comedians, historians, intellectuals, teachers and even politicians.

Many of the changes proposed in The Great Reset could not have advanced without rewriting national constitutions as international communitarian legal contracts subservient to regional communitarian law.

This was done piecemeal through provisional agreements and structures. Usually it was presented as decentralisation to look like a reduction in power or returning it to locals. The main aim, however, was to avoid the provocation of challenging national constitutions. It was done openly but there was no obligation to announce it, nor to ask for legislative approval.

In a communitarian system various bodies can change the law: a regulatory court like the World Trade Organization, a regulator of the press and social media or the WHO as arbiter of Green or Equity standards in public services.

Problems are resolved by citizens assemblies populated by civic leaders who rise up through institutions, development missions or community programmes with time and resources — not independent individuals nor a jury of your peers but instead people selected and trained by the Stakeholders, by governments and foundations.

The old guard

As a retired functionary, it is true that the people gave up a lot of liberty in exchange for little safety.

Power was taken from the citizens but no-one knew where it went: like seeing the oil levels dropping in your car but you can’t find the leak. It took some time to discover that corporations were like a sponge.

Legislatures and parliaments were sidelined. Decision making was streamlined. In theory the citizens’ assemblies ran the smart cities. Decisions were supposed to be taken at the lowest possible level — they call it subsidiarity. But behind every public tribune there are corporate institutions, non-governmental organizations, philanthropists and their endowments, think tanks and foundations running it all in the background. To be honest they’re unaccountable.

Every few years there is a new class of apparatchik to replace the old ones, new ways of counting things that can’t be compared with earlier statistics.

If there is progress, it’s like cars switching lanes to pull in front of one other: each driver gains a bit of distance, until another cancels it out but the overall effect is to cause everyone to brake.

The politician

No-one, not even the collectivists, liked it when national constitutions were rewritten. Freedoms that took centuries to win vanished the moment you reached for them.

I don’t think most people ever really knew why. Something in the belly of the communitarian idea is puritanical. Because it denies individuality, all rights have to be expressly protected — nothing exists outside of the State. You cannot legislate for the right to picnic, especially when part of the population insists that nature must be left absolutely untouched.

Take a stand on anything — gender, sexual preference, the right to dress how you like, meet whom you like — but the moment you insist too obstinately you become a dissident.

It was the Russian president Vladimir Putin who said, “The recipes they come up with are nothing new… they change the traditional lifestyle, the political, the economic lifestyle, as well as the very notion of morality, the basic principles for a healthy society… informing on one’s own beloved and families. It was hailed as the march of progress. And it was very popular across the world and it was supported by many, as we see, it is happening right now.” [6]

Agile governance regulator

As a regulator my job is to make myself redundant. To get government out of the way. I am no longer a bureaucrat imposing public safety rules. I help corporations innovate to the limit — right up to what the former Google chief Eric Schmidt called “the creepy line.” To find the final frontier between corporate ambition and public acceptability.

Agile governance has nothing to do with the process engineering practice of the same name. One example is the testing of driverless cars. Corporations get a free hand to try any technology they like. Regulations are minimized during the trial — and the trial informs the final shape of regulation: sandboxed, market-led, self-policed. [7]

It is true that sometimes this gets close to live testing: like what happened with the vaccines during the Great Pandemic when FDA panelist Dr. Eric Rubin said "We're never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it."

In theory Corporations innovate at the same speed or faster than regulation so that government is no hindrance to progress.

You might ask why we need government at all. Corporations largely self-regulate today. Politicians play a consultative role. When proposals to restructure industry or trade are placed before politicians the documents have already been drawn up by corporations and officials. Citizens get to provide feedback through crowdsourcing, citizens assemblies and marketing forums.

To grasp this you must understand that those who wield science and technology are the new priesthood. It’s not a moral judgement but the people have fewer rights than the old indentured labourers — they owe fealty and tithes.

“Management of transnational issues through voluntary international cooperation has come to be referred as Global Governance. The term sounds like global government, but it is really the opposite, as it refers to management of the transnational challenges in the absence of a world government."
— Hakan Altinay [8]

The mass manufacturer

International corporations have never had it so good: products can move from drawing board to market faster than ever, and regulations are homogenized. Prices are stable, profits steady.

In other ways the mindset is bureaucratic. Nothing is allowed unless there is a law that provides for it: every widget must get a license and go through a sustainability and carbon assessment. Only the biggest players have the staff and resources for this. Innovation has suffered.

The other change was the bifurcation of the consumer market. The managerial class became the consumers of high-end products. Advanced electronic products became less accessible to the masses, the customer base narrowed and even Apple and Samsung have to be subsidized.

Smartphones have become modular products but not in the sense of adding and removing parts. Functions that were part of the handset have migrated to the body as bio-sensors and implants. The primary geolocation can be implanted in your wrist, likewise RFID. Depending on the customer and their job, the camera might be in your work helmet or Google Glass.

Rather than increased modularity there is increased functionality: a smartphone may double as a workstation, with a keyboard and a larger screen, negating the need for a laptop. In a sense the modularity is external: you can add further video processing capacity or microphone and audio speakers.

Despite all the talk of 3D printing it really is our enemy. After all, if people can replace off-the-shelf products, why would they need us?

Predictions of future products are always overblown. When someone says we’ll have flying cars in 20 years you know they’ll be extending that prediction in about 10.

To be honest, despite the high tech, the universal model for the masses is still IKEA.

The business analyst

Running companies has become more complex. There are many non-financial and diverse ways to measure results. Now the management can claim they have some greater motives — the Earth — and it is harder to hold them responsible for profitability.

Shareholder value was criticised for putting too much emphasis on share price and short-term, quarterly results but stakeholder value? — which, stakeholder, whose interest and in what order of priority?

Managers asked us to excuse their modest performance this year because of the burden of their ethical and social responsibilities.

There is still a management elite, with a class interest but a classless accent and a diminutive of their name. They still talk in jargon: it just evolves more rapidly. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The small business owner

So many of my fellow independent entrepreneurs sit on their hands waiting for better times.

The slogan “you’ll own nothing and rent everything” got much attention at the start of The Great Reset but it only worked for certain goods. Short-term rental doesn’t work for consumer electronics because you need a laptop for more than a few days. As for clothes and shoes — don’t be ridiculous. They are not occasional-use products like lawnmowers or replaceable like cars with taxis. Anyway, long-term rental, or hire purchase, it is really another form of buying.

Mass-rental products tend to be less well made and replaced more often. If you want to save energy and resources, you should end planned obsolescence, return to longer product cycles; make products modular, upgradeable and repairable — and stop with the endless updates.

That didn’t happen. Maybe it was the mindset of Silicon Valley, wedded to works-in-progress, beta products subject to endless, iterative revisions. Though entrepreneurs rushed to consult The Book, Klaus Schwab did not address it in The Great Reset.

A few inconvenient truths revealed themselves in the Reset. Supply chains collapsed during the Pandemic and many industries sharply reduced production. Output did not revive. Instead of a rental economy we got shortages; something like a war economy.

Then there is the bureaucratic nightmare of climate regulation and business licensing and accompanying corruption. The small business sector has withered or gone underground where we can deal with people directly.

The neurologist, chemist and psychiatrist

I don’t use the “psychiatrist’s couch” much these days. Society has taken that part of my job. It uses mass formation to remove the obstacles to peaceful co-existence using many more tools than I have.

There are nice fresh brains available for research. Living ones. Nano-bioelectronics has replaced the blunt instrument of chemicals offering therapeutic treatments that respond in real real-time.

Freed from ethical and regulatory constraints, the fields of neuroscience are more efficiently aligned and there is less distinction between laboratory and fieldwork.

In place of antipsychotic drugs to control behaviour or the Montreal experiments of Donald Ewen Cameron that succeeded only in wiping minds, scientists today can help individuals acclimatize to their roles and functions in society.

Graphene in bioelectronics can record electrical signals from the brain. Having established how graphene interacts with biological material such as lipid membranes, we can now use biomaterial to turn graphene into a field effect transistor.

It was controversial at first because its bi-dimensional nature interacts with blood proteins and biological membranes and can lead to clotting and immune cell activation. If you get the dose too high it is toxic to animals and cells, causing inflammation, and damage to cells and organs.

We also have to be careful when power is applied to graphene implants because they heat up — they have to be wrapped in a lipid envelope so that a thin layer of water stops an implant from cooking nearby cells when operated.

Overall, there are ethical issues but it is much more precise.

The psychologist

The great leap for psychologists was to recognise the positive role of compulsion. This is a new society characterized by central control and you can’t escape that.

It is not like a decentralized economy with free will to choose your job, negotiate salary and spend it as you wish — the traditional values of the economic liberal.

In this economy, you can’t opt out. The central bank controls your digital wallet, and its power to add or withdraw credits means it has the relationship of parent to child.

Add total information awareness and you have, frankly, the potential for a relationship of abuse. That is because the social credit system cannot reward a citizen for actions he would have taken anyway. That would have no propulsive effect.

He must be forced to do something that causes him discomfort: unwanted acts or, at the very least, require him to comply in ways that are ill-defined or changeable so that he must expend effort in order to meet the standard.

If a middle of the road, family-minded individual is trying to raise their children to be stable and secure in their identity, the social credit system must disrupt that. It must gaslight the citizen into an antithetical world in which he is judged against values that are not his own.

This is unfortunate but inevitable. However it is not all negative because on one level it is helping the individual to become more diverse, equitable and virtuous.

People are nudged by “interventions” in their daily lives. At every stage their shifts in behaviour are measured by public and private bodies, in randomized trials, natural experiments and time series studies. The military, industry, banks, pharma and social media all collect data on how people respond, while grading and filtering by type.

Culture changes constantly and is a co-production of extensive stakeholder engagement, which you could say means corporations manipulate the people with and on behalf of the government.

The psychologist’s duty is not to ameliorate the system — for I cannot. The best I can do is help you adapt. There is no point denying the system’s character.

The bioethicist

Our challenge is to make Smart Cities energy-sufficient so that humans power their own surveillance, linking their bodies to their digital ID.

The technology that made it possible was the leap from 1940s transistors to graphene and silicon nanowires that opened up new vistas for artificial intelligence, fifth-generation telecommunications, biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things.

The biggest change was ethics. Just like self-driving vehicles had to be tested at scale, surveillance and cybernetics needed live experimentation, and this could no longer be done the old way with informed consent.

So instead of democracy you got behavioural manipulation. Instead of choosing for themselves, people were sold on the benefits of injecting tiny wires coated in hydrogel, or lipid nanoparticles into the body, with sci-fi dreams of brains connected to computers, when really it was not about expanding individual horizons but new vistas for social organization and control.

The order of persuasion was:

sensing disease, and self-repair
monitoring the brain, anticipating desires and satisfying neurochemical needs
implanting memories, overcoming fears, reshaping senses
uploading reality, downloading insights and processing information

Is this ethical? Much of it was justified in the name of safety. Intelligence agencies that used to keep the state safe, became biosecurity centres keeping you, the individual, safe. But their target — I don’t want to use the word enemy — became the people. That was used to justify everything that followed.

The Millennial

Few of us ever became grandparents. Most found they just didn’t reproduce but perhaps it was for the best. We have enough trouble watching what we say in front of the young ones.

We were the first generation to be reset. Our social life was already online — our relationships, our self-image, our face to the world.

Even before the Reset things weren’t really “lit.” We were in a competition to see who could care less. Now I realize we were trained back then to think a certain way: change was good, disruption was everything. Later we realized we were just vectors for other people’s ideas that we were meant to transmit and disperse. To prepare the ground for the Reset.

We might have been naive at the start, and we were manipulated, but we matured. What can you do? There are fewer options now, perhaps that’s as it should be. To think we used to travel the world on gap years: the travel limit today is a15 km radius… not that I walk that far!

Generation Alpha

I’m voice-typing this on my iPhone imPlant. If you say wrong-speak it just won’t type. That’s why Neuro-link never worked — Thoughcrime. They tried to reverse the flow, to offer people a kind of selective text. They succeeded in transfering information in both directions but not ideas, which often don’t contain information. Minds just broke down into more simple animals or blew up!

Virtual reality largely solves this problem because the A.I. knows what environment you are in, who you are with and what you are likely to do. That makes it easier for predictive policing to keep you safe.

I may dock my social credit if I say the wrong thing. Better to use official jargon which disguises slips of the tongue or a derivative of Esperanto:

“An inclusive fair and efficient auxiliary language for the world with a propaedeutic effect allowing near-zero cost bootstrap over a couple of generations.”

Talking in English is a risk but — for this article — needs must. The only people who officially use their own language are the Chinese and the Russians: Всесоюзный ленинский коммунистический союз молодёжи is their equivalent.

It began anew with us. We got first dibs on the coolest technology and educators made sure we could use it: matching us to software and jobs.

Everything is online: health, education, shopping. Life is one big drop-down menu. The selections change all the time and are tailored to my digital identity but I think they’re new names for the same-old. Like multiple choice you can only choose what you’re offered.

The best way to earn extra credits is to join the youth organizations. Some of us are front line defenders — the eyes and ears — but the best of us have a chance to join the Global Shapers. We keep an eye on those who struggle to adapt, referring them to the relevant agencies and suggest solutions. It gives us “buy in” to the state.

The farmer

We're tenants now. The family could not keep up with the carbon taxes. We're told what to grow, the seeds and fertilizer are provided. The crop is mostly for industrial use: biofuel and organic lubricants.

It began long before Reset. Speculators dominated commodities and prices detached from demand for wheat, coffee, soy beans, beef, palm oil. Then they bought up farmland, fertilizer and seed suppliers, and began to modify plants and patent them.

They could do this because the central banks lent to the hedge funds at zero per cent interest. They manipulated the stock and commodity markets, printing money to pump them up, then withdrawing credit to crash them and call in collateral. The oligarchs gained more and more political power until they formed a financial technocratic class with power of life and death over the rest of us.

Food became a byproduct of speculation, so while they played games with each other, blocking the Suez Canal, blowing up pipelines and closing meat packers, they got rich.

That led first to shortages, then to famine in some regions: farmers couldn’t get seeds, fertilizer, even water. Or if they could, they were unable to sell their produce.

And all the time they blamed it on Climate Change when at the end of the day they took our farm. Climate was always a cover for the oligarchs.

The police-mental health-social worker

You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, and I do — quite often. We’re actually allowed to break the law if it serves the greater good.

When the government passed the Covert Human Intelligence Sources Act it allowed all kinds of officials to break the law: social workers, justice officers, the militia, anyone investigating fraud, food, environment, gambling, market competition and, of course, the spy agencies.

A crime in time saves nine, I say. We do predictive policing and crime prevention.

We’re not political but a kind of virtue police. We try to solve problems before they happen: crime, homelessness, ill health and obesity, hate crime...

It works so well because of the fusion of police and health and social services. We aim to intervene before a problem arises.

So police might, on their regular rounds, form a view on someone’s mental health and call in a health or social worker. The resulting report would be available to all branches of government and corporations to ensure you get the kind of work that fits your needs and abilities — and of course the bank so that you don’t spend money on things that aggravate your condition or other people.

For frontline workers this is a growth business because we don’t need to wait to show loss or damage, only the potential, and we get a grant to address an issue before it happens. It is also easily integrated with objectives to increase employment, reskill, clean up communities, change behaviour and raise standards of virtue.

The housing manager

Every day as I swab down the door handles I thank Our Klaus for the small things: the cameras that track a resident spitting gum (yes, its warm, sticky trajectory lights up on the camera) and the Luciferase piss pooling in the corner of the garage. Oh we slap them with a social credit sting before they’ve hoisted their zipper!

There aren’t many like that, thank Klaus. Sometimes the bioelectronics did not take properly and they’re a bit wayward. One punishment is to confine them to apartment cleaning for a few days — their own 24 square meters (250 square feet) plus someone else’s or the common spaces.

The dissident

I never had a chance. I have always picked up the scent of the witchfinder general in the identity politics crowd. They are highly subjective. Smart cities make it possible to surveil the population at the lowest level so they are just waiting to catch you.

When I was sectioned they gave me a chance to self-criticise but how can you pass that test if you don’t speak their language and know the jargon?

I just said it’s a fair cop, and society’s to blame.

They put me in a quarantine box with no window, just a slot you could stick your head out of: we looked up and down the line at each other like dogs.

Prison in the old days was run by gangsters, the kapos. You might get beaten but you had a chance to better yourself. Now we’re isolated, alone and invisible.

The priest

My family were coat makers before the Reset and I had a job at the fur and down factory where they make luxuries for the rich. It was one of the few manual jobs left. I could keep my mind on higher things while I worked.

Religion was never banned but they tried to replace it, to make you convert to theirs. They tell us we are all born with an inner scientist, and we must think a certain way, perform their rituals.

Neurotheologists are trying to create an artificial religious sensation. They made a helmet for the metaverse that uses electromagnetic frequencies to pulse the brain. This causes the left temporal lobe to sense a presence in the right lobe. I think people will end up talking to themselves — or having visions.

Old believers were not persecuted in law but social credit imposed many demands on citizens’ time. Gradually we went underground. We are not allowed religious gatherings but the stakeholders still travel to historic sites to attend their ancient fesitvals at the Grove, Sun Valley and Aspen.

The philosopher

Social credit is supposed to be the basis and proof of worth in society but it’s not without its problem.

It is not a store of wealth. Like universal basic income, if you don’t use it, you lose it. Similarly, human rights are like reputation: you must constantly earn them. You cannot afford to sit on your laurels because, like social or digital credit, your reputation will wane.

An even bigger problem for rights and reputation is that social credit is a tool of compliance; it was introduced as deficit to be replenished. This means a person must live under permanent threat of losing credit, of slipping down a notch. This dehumanizes people, repudiating their goodness at every step.

This motivates people to be a better person as defined by the communitarian social contract. On the other hand, it is oppressive as it comes with an assumption that the individual is not worthy. And this is a consequence of putting the Earth above human rights rather than the individual under God or the universe.

There was something similar in the 1930s but the clearest parallel is early Bolshevik times and the French Revolution. If there is a philosophy of The Great Reset it is this:

“Community means for ethics… de-centering the sovereign human self and in practice it means re-doing the world created by that self.”
— Earth Charter, Globalization and Sustainable Community, by Larry Rasmussen

But you could put it in a more negative way: If liberty was “I already have individual rights but thanks for offering,” globalism is “You’ll accept human rights or you’ll have nothing.”

Café Proustienne

The popular fiction is called Virtual Noir. It is cold, with a clinical finality. I cannot write whodunnits because that might create toxic stereotypes. Anyway, in a world that has transcended politics we are interested not in truth but power. The story is resolved through might, not right.

I send out an episode every week, my version of a penny magazine. A newsletter, not books, because even the digital ones you can rent for only a few hours. I’m hoping to be taken up by one of the production companies so that my noir can become part of the metaverse.

I find myself recalling from another era the time I met a friend. We had been eager to discover each other’s history.

After pleasantries, and ordering coffee and a slice of chocolate cake, talk turned to family. Casting far and wide for conversation, I brought up great grandparents. My companion explained quietly that she didn’t have any or, at least, none that she knew.

The stone-faced waitress served us. We found we were drinking coffee that contained no coffee, and chocolate bereft of cocoa. Even the brandy was like diluted syrup. Outside at least the winter was bitingly real.

It had been during an earlier Bolshevik winter that the purges had taken them.

Expectations of reality can fall short or surprise in either direction... our senses are hijacked through no weakness of our own but only the conjunction of time and space in which the commonplace is rent asunder and the world turned upside down.

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