November 25, 2021

Late Stage Globalism’s ‘Hail Mary’

How do they get our souls?

Soul traps. The lures are the lusts and hungers of this life. The [soul], exploring the newfound freedom of the energetic world, finds himself able to visit his friends and enemies, to see their innermost being and thoughts, even to converse with them in ways that their elemental selves cannot perceive. He is in danger, but he does not know it, for he has not ascended. He is still ensnared by his lust. Soon he will be shown something that perfectly fulfills his most en and cherished desires, desires he has never fulfilled. Unable to resist the chance to do it at last, he enters by a golden door into eternal captivity.

The passage is from Whitley Strieber’s “The Key”, a purportedly true account as related by Streiber of an encounter with a mysterious humanoid being who simply knocked on the door of his Toronto hotel room at 3am on June 6, 1998, entered his suite and told him about mankind’s place in the cosmos and his inescapable fate.

Strieber’s account may be a synthesis: partly “true” (in that he believes it occurred as he relates it), part visioning, part somnambulistic dream state. Whatever emanates from the mind of Whitley Strieber, it originates from some realm outside of our Cartesian,  materialist notion of consensus reality.

He reminds me of that other prophetic visionary of yesteryear: Rudolf Steiner, whom as I wrote previously, spent much of his life in a hypnogognic state, possibly without even realizing it.

Steiner and Strieber. Odd that. They are both talking about the same thing. The idea that the souls of humanity could be captured in a technological machine, where they would wander forever, believing they have omniscience, even Godhood.

“At that point the longevity of one’s mind file will not depend on the continued viability of any particular hardware medium (for example, the survival of a biological body and brain). Ultimately software-based humans will be vastly extended  beyond the severe limitations of humans as we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they need or want them, including virtual bodies, foglet projected bodies, and physical bodies comprising nanobot swarms and other forms of nanotechnology”.
— Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering @ Google and author of The Singularity is Near.

Steiner called it The Eighth Sphere and warned that sometime in the late 20th century, Arhiman would incarnate in the west and drive a global process of harvesting human souls into it. The zeitgeist of radical material reductionism would dampen, deaden and dumb down humanity to its coarsest, most basic layers: meat. Our minds, what we think is our own consciousness, our souls, self-awareness even our freewill, it’s all just an illusion. Our experts say. It’s just something that happens when our brains gas off certain neurochemicals.

However…

We can take that illusion, what we call our consciousness, and pretty soon now (just as soon as The Singularity happens), we’ll be able to upload that illusion “into the cloud”, into The Metaverse and we’ll be able to experience anything we want, for as long as we want, forever.

Who is the incarnation of Arhiman? Zuckerberg with his Metaverse ticks the boxes…

This isn’t some phantasmagorical utopian afterlife promised by Bible-banging evangelists or bomb-toting Jihadists – this is serious Scientism. Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, even Jeffrey Epstein were espousing that the era of Tranhumanism was arriving. We are on the cusp of becoming Post-Biological, and when that happens, all our problems will be solved.

“We will spend increasing portions of our time in virtual environments and will be able to have any type of desired experience with anyone, real or simulated, in virtual reality…. Lingering problems from our waning industrial age will be overcome”
— Ray Kurzweil

People worry that only the rich will have access to the trappings of emergent technologies, and the masses will be left out in the cold…

That isn’t what’s happening here.

What’s happening is we’re being herded into The Matrix. As I’ve written previously, in The Crypto Capitalist Manifesto, and here, that the core rationalization of the “You’ll Own Nothing And Be Happy” Great Narrative (as it is now being called) is that the rabble has to ratchet down its standard of living. The reason why isn’t about climate change or COVID.

It’s because we’re in late stage Globalism and the world’s financial and economic system is on the verge of imploding.

The people in charge, the people who’ve been doubling down on failed policies for decades, the people who brought us here with Quantitative Easing, ZIRP/NIRP, debt, Big Government and The Forever Wars, they want to stay in charge.

So they’re going to use COVID, Climate, Collectivism and Wokeness to herd the knuckle-dragging plebians into The Metaverse. That way they’ll be easier to control, they’ll be placated, and they won’t take up so much space in the real world.

In the real world, the insular, inbred elites will be zipping around in their private jets. They’ll be reimagining everybody else’s lives. Deciding how much “real world time” and resources to apportion to the rabble. Uploading intellectual Muzak directly into their brains telling them that it’s all for their own good.

There’s only one problem.

This would all be well and good, in fact large swaths of the masses may even prefer a synthetic life in The Metaverse than having to deal with the vicissitudes and tribulations of reality.


 

However, the very construct of a Metaverse, one where:

The straightfoward brain-porting scenario involves scanning a human brain (most likely from within), capturing all of the salient details, and reinstantiating the brain’s state in a different — most likely much more powerful — computational substrate. This will be a feasible procedure and will happen most likely around the late 2030’s”
— The Singularity is Near

The Algorithmic Imitation (“AI”) that would be required to facilitate this and have it operate along the lines proselytized by the Kurzweil’s et al is not attainable. The reason it isn’t attainable is because of the internal contradictions of what I call “techno-utopianism”.

Two of those contradictions are these:

Firstly: If the mind is a byproduct of physical processes then consciousness is really an illusion and free-will doesn’t actually exist, because all phenomenon are simply linear outcomes of biochemistry and physics. If so then there is nothing to upload into the cloud. Nor is there any real point in doing so. If we really do live in a billiard ball universe, who cares if we can make a shot bounce around the table forever? There is nobody to care and nothing to care about.

More importantly, “AI” at the level pontificated to solve all our problems, “by late in this century nonbiological intelligence on the Earth will be many trillions of times more powerful than biological intelligence” (Kurzweil, of course) is not attainable because our conception of what causes mind and thus intelligence is completely inverted.

Mind, consciousness and intelligence will never emerge from material reality because it’s the other way around.

Belief that mind emerges from matter is this era’s geocentrism. As was the case with the now antiquated idea that the Earth was the center of the universe. The heliocentric cosmos was probably understood by certain civilizations thousands of years before Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for saying as much in the 17th century. So too, did the ancients understand that “All is mental”. The universe is vibration, probability, information, energy and conciousness first. Out of that comes what we recognize as sub-atomic particles and atoms. The quantum physicists reconnected with this truth about a century ago, the rest of society, including the priests of the Temple of Scientism and Expert Management haven’t gotten the memo, yet. If they did, they wouldn’t be trying to shoehorn our minds into a computer. They’d be trying to build computers that tap into the conscious base layer of quantum reality (note, this is not to be confused with what so-called ‘Quantum Computing’ endeavours to do).

Because of this, everything premised upon the idea of super-intelligent, top down, centralized control of the affairs of humanity, of the economy, of The Great Reset, The Great Narrative and The New Normal, all of it is doomed to failure. It simply won’t work.

The problem, however, is that in betting the farm on having an expert class of managers deploying super-intelligent AI’s to solve all of our problems, manage the rabble and control all the outcomes, means we’re headed for a Tower of Babel 2.0 moment. More on that in the next edition.

In the meantime, if you’re a plebeian, the work of the day is The Great Opt-Out, a Great Reject. Decentralize your affairs.  Take sovereignty over your own life and your own economics. Link up with others doing the same. The counter-revolutionary impulse against late stage Globalism is, in addition to spirituality, meditation and contemplative practices, embracing decentralization and public key cryptography.

I cover macro tensions between Late Stage Globalism and the rise of the sovereign-individual extensively in The Crypto Capitalist Letter, along with a tactical focus on publicly traded crypto stocks. Get the overall investment / macro thesis free when you subscribe to the Bombthrower mailing list, or try the premium service for a month with our fully refundable trial offer.

About the author 

Mark E. Jeftovic

Mark E. Jeftovic is the founder of Bombthrower Media and CEO of easyDNS.com, a company he co-founded in 1998 which has been operating along the lines described within these pages.

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  1. I think it might actually be the other way around. Yes, there is no free will, yada yada yada. But freedom is something that takes you to a growing edge of possibility of a universe that is (least, if Doppler didn't mistake the meaning of spectral shifts) always expanding (and the further we look, the expansion does not abate before the capacity to resolve an image). So whatever is 'settled' today, inherently can't be quite so settled everywhere as the totality is growing and the 'unstable' edges are increasing in proportion.

    I'm a computer programmer, so I know of numerous models of how data moves around, many topologies and patterns. I remember my physics classes, where I was introduced to several 'theoretical' things that are assumed by physicists that lead to the possibility of having a model to predict things based on their preconditions and impulse and vectors and whatnot. "theoretical smooth" "strings" and "surfaces" (the latter is preferred because it is not specifying dimensions, some say 'manifold', I think).

    If the universe is deterministic, but ultimately, eventually infinite, then you know where the free will and liberty is coming from. Not an illusion, it's something you can definitely actively seek towards. Just as the edge of a Mandelbrot Set is the boundary where the formula is in the process of escaping to infinity. It's something that is entering our universe progressively in proportion with everything else that is leading to the expansion of space between the things that we can observe.

    Nothing about this deterministic universe is predictable to us. Even if you could somehow digitise even a cubic millimetre of this universe, you would know nothing a second later when it diverges from your model at the speed of light.

    You may have read this excellent book called "Human Action" by Ludwig von Mises. In it there is a section where he talks about the logical contradiction of omniscience and omnipotence. I think he also leans towards omniscient (and thus powerless, as in, not personally influencing) God rather than an omnipotent one, as he points out, that an omnipotent God can change the rules at any moment, rewrite the history at any moment, and thus the ongoing seeming stability of the universe suggests that God does either not want to change it, or can't.

    I personally point out the 'God does not make mistakes'. This does not comport with 'God can change anything'. If he made a mistake, he would have to change everything. So does he not make mistakes or can he change everything?

    1. Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it. Ideals are not absolutes and treating them as such only empowers the close minded and confuses the open minded. The philosophers should have been all over that centuries ago.
      To the Ancients, gods were like Plato's ideal forms, animated. The ideas and public concepts giving form to society, of which there are many, some more powerful. As a social and political construct, monotheism meant monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they represented multiculturalism. The many working together. Rome adopted and co-opted gnostic Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic faded. Basically it was a political branding and validation of top down rule. Vestiges of pantheism remained, with the Trinity, which came from the Greek year god cycle, of the son reborn in the spring, of the sky god and earth mother. As this was the reason the story of Jesus took on so much meaning, it couldn't be eliminated, but had to be obscured, as the Catholic Church was to be viewed as the eternal institution. At least until Martin Luther tried what Jesus tried with Judaism, push the reset button. When the West went back to less centralized political models, it required the separation of church and state, culture and civics. Though the long shadow of monism remains, as only one side of any issue must be right and the other side must be evil. Rather than they are two sides of the same coin. More yin and yang, than God Almighty.

  2. These are not new ideas. The realization that there's a conflict between the idea of an all powerful and and a perfectly good god goes back to the Gnostics of the 2nd century and probably well before. Three things cannot be true at the same time: God is all powerful, God is perfectly good, and evil exists. We don't know about the first two, but we're dead certain about the third.

    I like the idea that the realms of mind and consciousness come first, and I've always felt this to be true. This idea is clearly laid out in some of the religion, including Buddhism, Gnosticism, and elements of Hinduism, among others. I don't feel like a robot, and I don't think you do, either. If we somehow manage to prove that the universe is a a stale, deterministic things and out lives and consciousness are just an illusion, then we should just go ahead and have at it with the nukes. It won't matter, the dead won't care, you won't care and any thoughts that you did care were just electrons pointlessly bouncing into each other in a temporarily ordered pattern.

    Don't be too sure the monstrosity of the super AI is going to end in a Tower of Babel event. That's what happens if we WIN. But evil prevails as often as it is defeated. All the world's most evil and power hungry organizations are working on it like a conjurer trying to call up the Devil, or Sauron making the ring:

    "In the land of Mordor, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Dark Lord Sauron forged in secret a master Ring, to control all others. And into this Ring he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One Ring to rule them all."

    That's what we've got here. And if you'll recall he did succeed in that story, at least for a time.

    1. Perhaps he is all loving and created his children, mankind, in love. His children from their own free will,immaturity, and ignorance created evil thus seperating themselves from God. God told them not to do it, but they did it anyways. Evil ultimately is a corruption of love, which is the driving force of the universe. God chooses not to correct evil because if he reacts to it, it makes evil a co-creator of his universe. God works to overcome evil, but only thru the principles by which he created. Ultimately it is up to mankind to become enlightened and overcome evil. Seen from the viewpoint of Man it has been a long, suffering and tortuous process. From God's viewpoint it is also suffering and tortuous, but perhaps not so long from the viewpoint of the Universe and its time scale.

  3. > If the mind is a byproduct of physical processes then consciousness is really an illusion and free-will doesn’t actually exist, because all phenomenon are simply linear outcomes of biochemistry and physics. If so then there is nothing to upload into the cloud.

    I’d disagree with this take on a few levels.

    Even if the mind is a byproduct of physical processes, all phenomena are not linear outcomes, even though people may approximate them as such. Varying initial conditions can give vastly different outcomes even if passed through the same model of minds.

    Degrees of freedom at some levels may not extend through out the entire topology of any given system (i.e. most humans today have a higher degree of freedom when it come to being able to physically travel to different places on earth, even more so than the wealthy of centuries past, but that degree of freedom doesn’t extend past our gravity well so we can make accurate predictions that state stuff like “most people in their lifetime will never leave earths gravity well” and perhaps some will confuse that with “people will never leave earths gravity well” and even more so, there’s plenty of people who have an interest of convincing people one way or another, however those who try to convince one of the latter often stand in the way of those convinced that there is a difference from the former).

    What people will be uploading is their “take” based on their models of those phenomena (in the context of electro sensors that may be impedance measurements of the places they are attached to). The thing is though, not all these models will be created equally and different uploaded states in combination with the models will have various forms of success of enabling things or not.

    I think this “metaverse” stuff might be interest for gaming, but i’ll say hell no to zuck and friends systems and would prefer to use open source software/hardware systems.

    Who is to say someone cant apply tdcs or some other novel application of tech to generate brain activity that someone (or many someones) may perceive to be knowledge of some kind?

    All the stuff about “God”… i’ll stay away from that, i don’t think productive discussion can come from it.

  4. Where is the soul created and from what? The oldest information says in Genesis that God is eternal. He takes a eternal piece of himself and makes each soul which is the same but different like a snowflake. So the current search for being eternal has been settled but on on the Woke playing field .

    There are two destinies the soul can obtain when in a human frame. One is with almighty God who is its creator and who designed it for his fellowship.

    the other one is apart from God as the human rejects in his free will God's eternal grace for eternity with Him. The only know place for eternal life is hell. it is a very unhappy place where God is not found at all. A godless existence of punishment for rejection of God's perfection and reliance on mans meager capacity to manage even his own destiny and soul . His sin is still on his back and that is his condemnation . He does it to himself.
    As heaven is forever so is hell. No second chance there.

    Heaven is a paradise in the light of eternal God, hell is eternal darkness in total rejection of eternal God. YOU PICK YOUR FUTURE. To do nothing you get hell, to get heaven you just believe in Christ paying for all sin in dHis death on the cross.. If you do that God grants forgiveness of sin and eternal life in heaven.

    1. Hell can be misunderstood, it's the process of our divine mother purifying the ego from our soul if we are no able to do it with our free will (Heracles freeing Prometheus) and we start fresh essentially as a new soul, the fire purifies. It's only painful if you tether your consciousness to your ego which is an aggregate of desires and the karmic debt from those desires. Satan is the greatest magistrate of god and stands at the gate of the manifest world as matter is illusion (entropy). He holds the sword and scale to weigh our deeds and punish those who fall short of gods commandments, love god with all your being, love thyself as god and thy neighbor as thyself.

  5. This is all fine and good, but it ignores the obvious 600,000 pound rabid gorilla in the room….

    Those who seek to impose this horror on humanity must be rooted out and mercilessly, publicly killed. What other punishment/deterrence could possibly be more appropriate for the single gravest threat humanity has ever faced at the hands of humans?? Such a reaction has been meted out for far less evil, insidious threats.

    For example…
    Once Native Americans fully understood the impending doom their civilizations faced behaved in precisely this manner. But for them it was too little, too late, and their thousands of years of isolation from the rest of humanity ultimately sealed their fate as they were not wiped out by superior technology and strength, but rather by infectious disease which crippled them by decimating their numbers in their most direst of hours.

    Western civilization simply has devolved to the point that we are incapable of doing what must be done, **should the hypothesis posed in this article be true**. Incredibly, it took less than a couple hundred of years to make this complete 180 degree change of course.

    Only within islamic civilization has anyone in any significant numbers demonstrated the will and resolve to ensure self-preservation at any cost. For all their flaws, these people appear to be the largest collection of us to still possess this virtue (as a matter of doctrine, no less). The evolutionary aspect of it cannot be ignored either. It is the ultimate statement of re-affirmation of Darwinism to-date. Is it not?

    1. I agreed until paragraphs 4 & 5… As we are **not** at the end of the play, we thus do not yet know if "we are incapable of doing what must be done."

      As to Muslims being the only "civilization … in any significant numbers [who have] demonstrated the will & resolve to ensure self-preservation at any cost"… Again, we're **not** at the end of the play, and thus we do not yet know if this is absolutely true. Yes, over the centuries, Muslims have demonstrated a very strong self-preservation instinct, but if you examine **all** groups, you will find the same. Perhaps they've **maintained** demonstrating that strong self-preservation instinct longer than other groups, but even the American Indian tribes – an example you used – demonstrated such, but were overcome by forces they could not defeat. They have since adopted a new strategy of self-preservation – go along to get along. This is ultimately **not** a strong long-term approach, and they will have to adapt/change yet again, or continue to dwindle away.

      Time will tell.

  6. Mark, I've been reading your stuff for a while now so I'm quite familiar with your "take" on what I will call "the meaning of it all". Interestingly, I started reading a book the other day – another "take" on the meaning of it all (though I didn't know that was what it was when I started) – that as I read, I kept thinking "Mark could have written most of this". The more I read though – I'm a little over half way through now – the more I realized that here are the answers, the gap filling chunks of knowledge that I've been missing. I haven't seen these anywhere – not in your writings either.

    So anyway, I'm excited, and thought I'd better let you know about what I found.

    The book is called Fallen Angels Among Us: What You Need To Know by Elizabeth Clare Prophet

    Can't wait to get back to reading. Along with exposing the causes behind the effects we're experiencing – this seemingly crazy upside down/inside out world – she is promising to detail the cure for all this in the last section – but I haven't gotten that far yet.

    1. Carefree, I'm not sure who has the answers,- I thought I was close many times. This author gives the Freedom Convoy a little too much credit, and the a** hats hiding out drinking baby blood in the metaverse not enough. I agree with the tower of Bable 2.0 idea though- a terrible reckoning is coming, and I feel sorry for the retired and disabled!

    2. She sounds aweful familiar. another Project Blue Beam reptilian drone seller? I feel like I've been searching forever, & I am so tired of false prophets. No offense.

  7. first time dropping in…love the energy of this…but if i may…comment:

    "Belief that mind emerges from matter is this era’s geocentrism. As was the case with the now antiquated idea that the Earth was the center of the universe."

    Its is antiquated (anything over 20 years is legally defined as ancient) yet it is the key to unlocking the quantum entanglement to the actual mettaverse contained within this singular universe – we are at the center of it all – after all, its all consciousness – the four elements of it are well noted in the article but consciousness is what sprung forth from the void which animated itself using four forces with the fifth holding them all in place – space aka ether.

    the western priests rejected a key principle we now know in science, that of conservatism – recycling consciousness aka reincarnation – a key feature of the order we call life…building's one's consciousness to withstand that recycling system is what some call Buddha consciousness, enlightenment, everlasting life et al…

    speaking of life, if we want true sovereignty in it then that means managing one's affairs in the law realm, one we have abandoned to forked tongue devils who speak a language of deceit – we must remember the real law, the one buried in our bones, if we want to stand our ground in the most peaceful way possible…we must come together and stand in these courts and speak truth with true statements lacking double meanings and coded scripts few truly comprehend…unless one studies their foe…

    if this is all consciousness then the more one raises their own, the more it affects those around them to come into order with the higher vibration – keep working on that no matter what…this realm works in ways beyond comprehension, but not beyond understanding…understand…and be thankful and let the good vibes flow 🙂

  8. >> Mind, consciousness and intelligence will never emerge from material reality because it’s the other way around.

    This is indeed the crux of the issue. The materialist conceits of the dominant paradigm — like the geocentric error of centuries past — condemn its proponents to failure. Regrettably, that will not spare the world's population from the costs of those errors. We are almost certainly headed into a new Dark Age.

    For those with a less religious bent, I recommend the works of the various exponents of "ontological mathematics," which propose a purely mathematical basis of mind as the "conscious base layer." While these authors tend (unsurprisingly) to overly-zealous conclusions regarding the implications of their theory, the discriminating reader can disregard this chaff, and find extraordinarily insightful 'wheat' in the idea that reality is mathematical, and that the math can be understood.

    1. Math is descriptive, not explanatory. Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
      Consider that as mobile organisms, our sentience coalesces as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present moving past to future. Though the obvious reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. There is no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect. energy is conserved, because it is the physical present. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude. So the energy, as dynamic process and present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall. In a factory, the product goes start to finish, being in the future to being in the past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Toward the future. As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation, shedding the old. Now consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information. signals from the noise. Thus the tendency to think of reality in terms of order and chaos, rather than energy and form. Consequently math is our current god. Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.

  9. Are you sure it means metaverse? I would assume it means metastatic. We are talking facebook, right?

    I would like to add another idea to pushing back against the blob. That there be a campaign to make Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning the write-in candidacy of 2024.
    Think of the slogans; They looked the Beast in the eye and didn't blink.
    They can drink the hemlock, get nailed to the cross, burned at the stake, tortured, shot, thrown in jail for life, but history doesn't forget who is right.
    Pictures of Trump, Assange and Biden; Who would you trust with your children's future?
    Pictures of Assange and Pompeo; Who is the Jedi and who is the storm trooper?

    If people start to suddenly get all legal, like Assange isn't an American citizen or born here, the fallback option would be Rand Paul and Tulsi Gabbard as a third party ticket, but only after the entire country becomes aware of the Assange/Manning ticket. Or they get released.

  10. This hyper-materialist perspective culminated with the conclusion that consciousness manifests from matter has a false premise resulting from the rationalistic enlightenment stating that with full development of the intellect humanity can qualify as creator beings, lacking any spiritual understanding. By enticing humanity with soul trap that is the hamster wheel of pleasure (e.g. metaverse) and the duality that brings (avoiding pain, real world) is not what qualifies as creator beings, which is transcending duality. Satan tempts the soul with the pleasure of the senses = eating the apple in Eden. This is no different Illustrating these types are far down the ascension ladder.

  11. Great essay Mark. We are now living in a world of scams, that make the scams of a former time look like the gossip of a Nineteenth century women's tea social.

  12. Communism and Capitalism are the two main organizing principles that were on offer during this most recent and final period of our expiring epoch. Presented as 'opposites, they are actually just two sides of the same *materialist* coin. Each of them is concerned strictly with 'stuff'–who gets it, how best to produce it, and who decides. Both options represented a form of extreme materialism, completely bereft of idealism. Man cannot live on bread alone, to quote some guy.

  13. Playing devil's advocate here, I believe the Metaverse (a term coined in 1992 cyberpunk classic "Snowcrash") has potential for both evil and good. If implemented "correctly" (some kind of p2p blockchain-y ad-hocracy) it could actually serve a function like (A.E. van Vogt) "Weapon Shops of Isher", empowering the downtrodden to defend themselves against tyranny.

    My wildly disabled girlfriend has often found refuge in Second Life, allowing her to temporarily free herself from the considerable restrictions of the harsh real life hand she was dealt. For some even a tech-free utopia would be a prison where they could only watch as others moved freely about.

    I also believe that those who are actively trying to imprison and control the rest of us with a metaverse *they* control may also fall victim to their own technology, much as the extinct race of super-beings depicted in the sci-fi classic "Forbidden Planet". While I share Mark's deep sense of alarm at events we are witnessing today, I am mindful that those who attempt to control us are trying to provoke anxiety and despair as a means of breaking us. The worst thing we could do to them is to remain upbeat and optimistic as we stubbornly refuse to comply with their edicts of fear.

    1. I approve comments manually, when I get around to it. I don’t have a team of interns standing by to approve comments from abusive wind-bags. Don’t leave any more comments here.

  14. The worry of AI overtaking the human race once concerned me until I remembered that our brains are like computers and AM radios,
    Consciousness does not emanate from the radio or our brain, we “Tune into” consciousness, one only needs to read a book such as Proof if Heaven or watch one of the many NDE documentaries on Netflix and hear while groups of scientists and medical professionals describing their own personal experiences in vivid detail…..they all mimic not just the NDE stories of average people all over the globe but describe what Shamans and Mystics have been telling us for many thousands of years.
    There is good news, you are not going to cease existing when your body finally rots off and you won’t be inside a computer either hahaha

  15. Public-key cryptography will be broken by quantum computers no later than 2035. I read enough papers every year, even accounting for p-hacking, to tell you this is in fact what will happen, along that timeline.

    If we're going to rely on cryptography we should be relying on somethign that is de-facto unbreakable:

    one time pads and hash-based chain signatures.

    Thats just my nickles worth.

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