John Whitehead – The Rutherford Institute Dec 15, 2020
“You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.”—George Orwell, 1984
It had the potential for disaster.
Early in the morning of Monday, December 15, 2020, Google suffered a major worldwide outage in which all of its internet-connected services crashed, including Nest, Google Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Hangouts, Maps, Meet and YouTube.
The outage only lasted an hour, but it was a chilling reminder of how reliant the world has become on internet-connected technologies to do everything from unlocking doors and turning up the heat to accessing work files, sending emails and making phone calls.
A year earlier, a Google outage resulted in Nest users being unable to access their Nest thermostats, Nest smart locks, and Nest cameras. As Fast Company reports, “This essentially meant that because of a cloud storage outage, people were prevented from getting inside their homes, using their AC, and monitoring their babies.”
Welcome to the Matrix.
Twenty-some years after the Wachowskis’ iconic film, The Matrix, introduced us to a futuristic world in which humans exist in a computer-simulated non-reality powered by authoritarian machines—a world where the choice between existing in a denial-ridden virtual dream-state or facing up to the harsh, difficult realities of life comes down to a blue pill or a red pill—we stand at the precipice of a technologically-dominated matrix of our own making.
We are living the prequel to The Matrix with each passing day, falling further under the spell of technologically-driven virtual communities, virtual realities and virtual conveniences managed by artificially intelligent machines that are on a fast track to replacing human beings and eventually dominating every aspect of our lives.
Science fiction has become fact.
In The Matrix, computer programmer Thomas Anderson a.k.a. hacker Neo is wakened from a virtual slumber by Morpheus, a freedom fighter seeking to liberate humanity from a lifelong hibernation state imposed by hyper-advanced artificial intelligence machines that rely on humans as an organic power source. With their minds plugged into a perfectly crafted virtual reality, few humans ever realize they are living in an artificial dream world.
Neo is given a choice: to take the red pill, wake up and join the resistance, or take the blue pill, remain asleep and serve as fodder for the powers-that-be.
Most people opt for the blue pill.
In our case, the blue pill—a one-way ticket to a life sentence in an electronic concentration camp—has been honey-coated to hide the bitter aftertaste, sold to us in the name of expediency and delivered by way of blazingly fast Internet, cell phone signals that never drop a call, thermostats that keep us at the perfect temperature without our having to raise a finger, and entertainment that can be simultaneously streamed to our TVs, tablets and cell phones.
Yet we are not merely in thrall with these technologies that were intended to make our lives easier. We have become enslaved by them.
Look around you. Everywhere you turn, people are so addicted to their internet-connected screen devices—smart phones, tablets, computers, televisions—that they can go for hours at a time submerged in a virtual world where human interaction is filtered through the medium of technology.
This is not freedom.
This is not even progress.
This is technological tyranny and iron-fisted control delivered by way of the surveillance state, corporate giants such as Google and Facebook, and government spy agencies such as the National Security Agency.
So consumed are we with availing ourselves of all the latest technologies that we have spared barely a thought for the ramifications of our heedless, headlong stumble towards a world in which our abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos is grooming us for a future in which freedom is an illusion.
Yet it’s not just freedom that hangs in the balance. Humanity itself is on the line.
If ever Americans find themselves in bondage to technological tyrants, we will have only ourselves to blame for having forged the chains through our own lassitude, laziness and abject reliance on internet-connected gadgets and gizmos that render us wholly irrelevant.
Indeed, we’re fast approaching Philip K. Dick’s vision of the future as depicted in the film Minority Report. There, police agencies apprehend criminals before they can commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.
Cue the dawning of the Age of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which internet-connected “things” monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free.
The key word here, however, is control.
In the not-too-distant future, “just about every device you have — and even products like chairs, that you don’t normally expect to see technology in — will be connected and talking to each other.”
By the end of 2018, “there were an estimated 22 billion internet of things connected devices in use around the world… Forecasts suggest that by 2030 around 50 billion of these IoT devices will be in use around the world, creating a massive web of interconnected devices spanning everything from smartphones to kitchen appliances.”
As the technologies powering these devices have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become increasingly widespread, encompassing everything from toothbrushes and lightbulbs to cars, smart meters and medical equipment.
It is estimated that 127 new IoT devices are connected to the web every second.
This “connected” industry has become the next big societal transformation, right up there with the Industrial Revolution, a watershed moment in technology and culture.
Between driverless cars that completely lacking a steering wheel, accelerator, or brake pedal, and smart pills embedded with computer chips, sensors, cameras and robots, we are poised to outpace the imaginations of science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. (By the way, there is no such thing as a driverless car. Someone or something will be driving, but it won’t be you.)
These Internet-connected techno gadgets include smart light bulbs that discourage burglars by making your house look occupied, smart thermostats that regulate the temperature of your home based on your activities, and smart doorbells that let you see who is at your front door without leaving the comfort of your couch.
Nest, Google’s suite of smart home products, has been at the forefront of the “connected” industry, with such technologically savvy conveniences as a smart lock that tells your thermostat who is home, what temperatures they like, and when your home is unoccupied; a home phone service system that interacts with your connected devices to “learn when you come and go” and alert you if your kids don’t come home; and a sleep system that will monitor when you fall asleep, when you wake up, and keep the house noises and temperature in a sleep-conducive state.
The aim of these internet-connected devices, as Nest proclaims, is to make “your house a more thoughtful and conscious home.” For example, your car can signal ahead that you’re on your way home, while Hue lights can flash on and off to get your attention if Nest Protect senses something’s wrong. Your coffeemaker, relying on data from fitness and sleep sensors, will brew a stronger pot of coffee for you if you’ve had a restless night.
Yet given the speed and trajectory at which these technologies are developing, it won’t be long before these devices are operating entirely independent of their human creators, which poses a whole new set of worries. As technology expert Nicholas Carr notes, “As soon as you allow robots, or software programs, to act freely in the world, they’re going to run up against ethically fraught situations and face hard choices that can’t be resolved through statistical models. That will be true of self-driving cars, self-flying drones, and battlefield robots, just as it’s already true, on a lesser scale, with automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.”
For instance, just as the robotic vacuum, Roomba, “makes no distinction between a dust bunny and an insect,” weaponized drones—poised to take to the skies en masse this year—will be incapable of distinguishing between a fleeing criminal and someone merely jogging down a street. For that matter, how do you defend yourself against a robotic cop—such as the Atlas android being developed by the Pentagon—that has been programmed to respond to any perceived threat with violence?
Moreover, it’s not just our homes and personal devices that are being reordered and reimagined in this connected age: it’s our workplaces, our health systems, our government, our bodies and our innermost thoughts that are being plugged into a matrix over which we have no real control.
Indeed, it is expected that by 2030, we will all experience The Internet of Senses (IoS), enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 5G, and automation. The Internet of Senses relies on connected technology interacting with our senses of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch by way of the brain as the user interface. As journalist Susan Fourtane explains:
Many predict that by 2030, the lines between thinking and doing will blur. Fifty-nine percent of consumers believe that we will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination… By 2030, technology is set to respond to our thoughts, and even share them with others… Using the brain as an interface could mean the end of keyboards, mice, game controllers, and ultimately user interfaces for any digital device. The user needs to only think about the commands, and they will just happen. Smartphones could even function without touch screens.
In other words, the IoS will rely on technology being able to access and act on your thoughts.
Fourtane outlines several trends related to the IoS that are expected to become a reality by 2030:
1: Thoughts become action: using the brain as the interface, for example, users will be able to see map routes on VR glasses by simply thinking of a destination.
2: Sounds will become an extension of the devised virtual reality: users could mimic anyone’s voice realistically enough to fool even family members.
3: Real food will become secondary to imagined tastes. A sensory device for your mouth could digitally enhance anything you eat, so that any food can taste like your favorite treat.
4: Smells will become a projection of this virtual reality so that virtual visits, to forests or the countryside for instance, would include experiencing all the natural smells of those places.
5: Total touch: Smartphones with screens will convey the shape and texture of the digital icons and buttons they are pressing.
6: Merged reality: VR game worlds will become indistinguishable from physical reality by 2030.
Unfortunately, in our race to the future, we have failed to consider what such dependence on technology might mean for our humanity, not to mention our freedoms.
Ingestible or implantable chips are a good example of how unprepared we are, morally and otherwise, to navigate this uncharted terrain. Hailed as revolutionary for their ability to access, analyze and manipulate your body from the inside, these smart pills can remind you to take your medication, search for cancer, and even send an alert to your doctor warning of an impending heart attack.
Sure, the technology could save lives, but is that all we need to know?
Have we done our due diligence in asking all the questions that need to be asked before unleashing such awesome technology on an unsuspecting populace?
For example, asks Washington Post reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha:
What kind of warnings should users receive about the risks of implanting chip technology inside a body, for instance? How will patients be assured that the technology won’t be used to compel them to take medications they don’t really want to take? Could law enforcement obtain data that would reveal which individuals abuse drugs or sell them on the black market? Could what started as a voluntary experiment be turned into a compulsory government identification program that could erode civil liberties?
Let me put it another way.
If you were shocked by Edward Snowden’s revelations about how NSA agents have used surveillance to spy on Americans’ phone calls, emails and text messages, can you imagine what unscrupulous government agents could do with access to your internet-connected car, home and medications? Imagine what a SWAT team could do with the ability to access, monitor and control your internet-connected home—locking you in, turning off the lights, activating alarms, etc.
While President Trump signed the Internet of Things Cybersecurity Improvement Act into law on Dec. 4, 2020, in order to establish a baseline for security protection for the billions of IoT devices flooding homes and businesses, the law does little to protect the American people against corporate and governmental surveillance.
In fact, the public response to concerns about government surveillance has amounted to a collective shrug.
After all, who cares if the government can track your whereabouts on your GPS-enabled device so long as it helps you find the fastest route from Point A to Point B? Who cares if the NSA is listening in on your phone calls and downloading your emails so long as you can get your phone calls and emails on the go and get lightning fast Internet on the fly? Who cares if the government can monitor your activities in your home by tapping into your internet-connected devices—thermostat, water, lights—so long as you can control those things with the flick of a finger, whether you’re across the house or across the country?
Control is the key here.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, total control over every aspect of our lives, right down to our inner thoughts, is the objective of any totalitarian regime.
George Orwell understood this.
Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or “Party,” is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: “Big Brother is watching you.”
Make no mistake: the Internet of Things and its twin, the Internet of Senses, is just Big Brother in disguise.
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ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org
I think there’s every chance the economic collapse will foil this totalitarian plan, especially so in America, and if it dies there it dies everywhere. There will be just too many millions of people hurting. Some will see the unrest as a civil war between Republicans and Democrats, others will march in hunger riots, while others march on the streets because they live on the streets and nowhere’s open for them to go to.
A total collapse of society looks like it will happen before the Great Reset is in place, after which the 1% and their soldiers and policemen will never control it. Things will unfold in ways they can’t predict.
A friend’s Roomba fell down his basement steps. He told me it committed suicide. Always remember, you CAN own things, if they don’t own you.
Stand in the plain!!!
Let us just cover a few of the basics. You know when bank systems fail or the ATMs go down, these outages are planned. All the banks, all the internet providers & certainly the big players all have duel systems. Not only do they have duel systems that are totally independent, but these system’s key infrastructures are also in totally different locations. These locations never have the bank’s name on the building. It will be some large fairly high-security warehouse on a discrete industrial estate… not on some high-end business park. They are running in the background all the time, so the chances of a complete system failure are slim to nothing. One large investment bank based in Canary Wharf has a warehouse facility out near LHR. So we are talking about a direct nuke strike to take out this particular investment bank in the UK. Admittedly, some cheapskates will have their duel systems in the same site/building, but they will have backup generators. Google pulls the plug for an hour or so, so what, they learn a lot from stunts like this.
Laws to protect the sheeple are pointless. If the US needs info, they just ask the UK to do it and vice versa.
This “drama” to come is only for those who live allready in their fantasy world. You must be stupid to get so dependant on your gadgets. If you are in a log cabin whats the problem? I do keep in mind that the internet will get affected(disrupted cables)but there might be some of it left. Sooner or later we all(thats left of us) will live like our grand parents
Welcome to your Talmudic Technocommunist Tyranny. Millions of white gentile idiots from the UK/Europe/USA/USSR fought & died for Judeo-Communism in WWII, & now you’re getting it. Enjoy your victory. What Orwell didn’t tell you, is that Big Brother is Jewish.
Watch a film called Logans run
My grand parents had central heating.
Varm water tap.
Electric light bulbs, old style.
Telephone and radio.
Small town full of shops.
A four cylinder car 60 horses.
Grandma was at home, and took a job only late in life.
Sounds great, Erik!
Thats right Neo!
But Gilad Atzmon did!
Seems like the global cabal are pushing their agenda for total global depopulation and gmo 5G mind control of the 5% who can take the virus and survive,no matter what.Are they in the grips and perhaps posesed by a deadly and highly intelligent virus themselves… I think so.This virus is 666.You will not enter upon their New Order of Global reset unless you too take this virus into your body and soul, may the strongest survive and inherit hell on Earth.As the aim is population reduction doctors are no longer needed in fact they will be recruiting hard core criminals soon to take over the police and armed forces globally which would be called the UN special task force for Global law enforcement.
UNSTF.Doctors,scientist,law abiding police and millitary personel will be rouned up and exterminated first which then leaves the greater population to be grounded up into manure in there forced labour camps.
People are not really connecting all of the dots here. The economic collapse of the freer, and harder-to-control West was foreseen and nurtured way back when the elites were planning what steps would be necessary to launch UN Agenda 21. That planning was not just a dream or something in their heads. They had to make “all” of the planned, revolutionary changes seem “necessary” to bring us more and more under their new-world-order control. Most of us had a very hard time before June of this year thinking that the Covid scam was cover for anything greater than the 5G rollouts, but at least we knew it was for some reason other than making us “safe” based on all of the government deceptions with the numbers and the empty ER’s and hospital wards set aside.
It was not only the announcement of the launching of the Great Reset in June by Schwab and the global elites of the WEF but all of the hard evidence of the actual Coronavirus-Agenda 21 planning going back at least 10 years which emerged at the same time. Things started to quickly fall into place and the uniformity of government lockstep methods all over the world, despite large discrepancies in all of the data, was not just a suspicion. It was confirmation of our worst suspicions. The pandemic was a global engineered crisis on a massive scale and the only organization which could command such compliance was the international banking cartel which controls up to an estimated $400 trillion in global assets. No other organization could demand such universal compliance from all of our puppet governments, many of which are adversarial to one another. Then with the evidence of the IMF and the World Bank, two globalist tentacles of that cartel monster, which are bankrolling our central banks with fiat for the pandemic, and which also tried to bribe the government of Belarus to impose the lockdown restrictions, there ought to have been no doubt in any real truth seekers mind as to who was really behind the entire scam.
This entire terrorist Clovid operation and scam has been hatched by this same transnational banking cartel, and backed by the Davos global elites with trillions in offshore accounts, Royalty, the Vatican, and many major monopolist corporations which have been anointed by the cartel as “essential” in their new-world order plans. These are the people and groups who make up the World Economic Forum headed by techno puppet Klaus Schwab. It is being carried out with the total complicity and cooperation of all of our governments, all major political leaders & parties in international coordination. Once again, they have used all of whores in the mainstream media as their main weapon to mount and maintain the scare, together with every government agency they have mustered, including our mercenary military to coordinate and enforce all of the restrictions.
The 1992 Agenda 21 blueprint is so sweeping, so revolutionary, so top-down, so autocratic, so anti-democratic, so gigantic, that it is difficult to comprehend and to believer we could have been duped for so long. This so-called first stage with the specific, announced goals of the 2015 Agenda to be reached by 2030, did not begin to be ushered in this year or even in 2015. It began far back even before 1992 when they obtained approval of our governments at the UN World Summit in Reo, officially setting in motion Agenda 21. To have the necessary and sufficient control over us, it was always the case that the people of particularly the West must be made dependent, not on ourselves but on our governments, which had to become increasingly dependent on the money moguls of the banking cartel.
The very same methods which the cartel has always used to concentrate and consolidate more and more wealth and power into their hands they have used on us in their host nations. Since WWII they have used their debt-rigging methods with the help of our governments and major Western corporations to take over and exploit countless resource-rich, third-world nations – all documented by bankster whistleblower par excellence John Perkins. and they in turn in their control of our governments and the media have done the same with our nations. Their historical method has always been lending and debt-rigging for control, and that is what they have done with the entire West, turning us from creditor nations at the start of globalist free trade with China in 1979 to unsustainable debtor nations by 2000, and then by deliberately making economic matters hopeless, with continued free trade, and relaxing every bank lending restriction they deliberately engineered the growth of the enormous Western debt bubble which they clearly foresaw and which they have this year frequently tried to blame on the Covid crises which they also engineered.
They did not and could not rely just on one little virus to launch all of the monolithic Resets planned. The needed numerous crises of terror and dread to enable our governments to usurp more and more control over us, and most centrally and most importantly, they needed to bring the West to its knees economically. I have repeatedly mentioned in earlier comments the major crises which have been either totally engineered or deliberately exaggerated by the same hand behind Agenda 21, and inflicted upon us over the past 40 years to enable the globalist banking cartel vision of compete control. For example, the CO2 fake global warming crisis was a pretext for a global government and controls over all forms of production, including manufacturing, agriculture, and fuels. The the 9/11 terrorist crisis was the major pretext for the the surveillance state. The planning and structuring of the US DHS was long in the works before 2001. The deliberate displacement of third-world people to create a migration crisis and break down our borders and destroy national cultural solidarities, was engineered by the same cartel hand. However, their greatest engineering feat has been the alleged insurmountable Western debt bubble, for which in fact the same banking cartel controlling all of the purse strings of our governments and our elections is directly responsible. The very same people who created the problem with either total mismanagement and no long-rage planning (which is absurd for a group which plans 50 to 100 years in advance and is behind Agenda 21), the same group of financial potentates which messed up everything so bad economically for the West, it now announces their launching of their “new” world order, to cure all of the problems they are directly responsible, which Order of course they will entirely run by their global control over finances and trade. One giant, long-termed-planned, coup over “we the people”, on ring to control them all, by the same banking cartel behind every major crisis, including their sick, sick Covid pandemic.
This year they have announced their complete tyranny over us and what is to be our future, which is their “new normal” for their New Order to control controlling us with increased surveillance, crippling lockdowns, forced vaccinations, likely many more engineered pandemics to cull off more people deemed non-essential, more mass deceptions, fake science, fake history, fake politicians, media fakery, brainwashing, and government oppression. To them we are the enemy, who not only must be totally controlled but eventually totally culled to a convenient size to serve them, the elites, in their envisioned Utopia.
It is not just Christmas this year they want to kill. Most of all the want to kill Christ and to twist and distort any creed which instills in the hearts of people that we are all subject to the transcendent and spiritual Creator, to Whom each one of us are His children and have intrinsic worth according to his designs and our cooperation with His graces. That is the essential belief which enabled the trust and good will for the real basis of Western civilization. Once we became beguiled with the pseudo freedoms and the candy of the deceivers, we lost the only really unifying and intrinsic commonality we had for real solidarity and strength, which was based on that one transcendent Creator – Who can still be born in each one of us, provided we are repentant, open, humble and hunger for His love and the truth. That is the real Revolution, the real Reset which is needed which they are trying to suppress, for it will sweep away all of the deceptions, terror mongering, and corruption destroying our lives, our families, our religion, and our nation. Everything we do now is to defend and to preserve what is holy and true so that the divine light and love of God may shine and dwell in each one of us. This is what the devil is now snatching away from us everywhere we look, with people in lockstep compliance to his diabolical commands.
Outstanding essay, Fred B!
It was odd that jaw-jaw well gave Big Brother an Irish name and the fake rebel a Jewish name, reversing the roles to please the publisher and critics, presumably.
Great article this. And good commentary, exceptional from Fred B as usual.
Google could be down and out for weeks and I wouldn’t notice.
Humanity is doomed unless more people take a stand and fight, and I mean really fight, and soon. The central “banking” cartel and shamelessly lying mind-warping mainstream media propaganda ministry must be destroyed, which are both completely controlled by satanic Jews, of course. Then the criminal degenerates, subversives, traitors, and toxic parasites who have turned governments against the governed need to be driven out and publicly executed.