Deepfakes have become dangerously realistic. Improving Tron Legacy using Deep Fakes (25 November 2020). Video Source: Youtube. See more deepfakes on Youtube.
I have a new post up at Patreon, for $1 and up subscribers.
If we believe that the heavens control our fates, then we have just turned a corner into a new world, and 2021 will be our year of destiny. The Patreon post considers astrologers' claims that the December 2020 solstice and Grand Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the sign of Aquarius marked the beginning of the Age of Aquarius.
What does that mean? For a decade on this blog, I have asked the one question which lies behind all others. It informs our concerns with Trump, Brexit, the EU and the CCP, the economy, and corona. The question is simply this: Can we engage with high technology and still retain our humanity?
The catch is that humanity is not defined in terms of how we engage with technology, but in terms of the ways we experience time, through mortality and immortality. Temporal, not technological, boundaries determine our consciousnesses and consciences.
Doctor Manhattan is an archetypal Aquarian character. From Watchmen (2009) © DC / Warner Bros.. Reproduced under Fair Use. Dr. Manhattan Clip | Watchmen (5 January 2015). Video Source: Youtube.
Where are the temporal boundaries in the Age of Aquarius? The sign fixates on science and technology with cold logic. It pushes the boundaries in research and society with a distant air of fraternity. The sign is inventive but not passionate. Astrologer Christopher Witecki once said that a spent Aquarius will send their discarded lover out into the night: "Cab fare's on the dresser." Will this be the astrological tone of the next 2160 years? Will we become transhumanist cyborgs in a positivist, tyrannical technocracy?
It seems to be going that way. In 2017, Venture Beat reported that an artificial intelligence entity would emerge as an independent consciousness by 2042, write its own bible, and require us to worship it. In 2015, an ex-Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, founded an AI religion, The Way of the Future. This made the news, but in a light way. As for Levandowski, he's still serving a 2020 prison term.
It does not sound all that relevant. However, if an advanced AI entity was activated on earth, things would become deadly serious, very quickly. There's nothing light about contending with a machine mind which is superior to humans and to all other computers. For over a decade, AI designers have worked to bring about this outcome, even as they warned that their success would bring catastrophe. Our only option, they said, would be immediate submission through physical integration with the AI's matrix.
Still from Event Horizon (1997) © Paramount. Reproduced under Fair Use. Image Source: Dread Central.
Astrologer David Palmer echoes these warnings. In the advent of Aquarius, he expects scientists, medics, and technologists to become deluded and fatalistic as they are influenced by 'air energies.'
Astrology may not be your thing, but this flamboyant Californian is worth a listen. Palmer delivers his horoscopes as though he's reading the riot act. Self-dubbed 'the Leo King,' known for occasional semi-meltdowns and diatribes against mainstream horoscope peddlers, he is probably the best astrologer on Youtube. With an uncanny knack for accurate predictions and exact dates, he is almost always right. "Call me crazy?" he snorts, "How's that working out for ya?" His assessment of events up to the year 2023 is here.
Perhaps the world's current insane and urgent projects stem from the fact that the original generation of tech moguls is nearing the end of life. Although they launched innovations in their time, they are quickly becoming outdated. Their limited world view was shaped by the materialism and empiricism of the 20th century. They believe overpopulation is an urgent problem which must be 'solved.' But they never want to die or give up control. They want to upload their consciousnesses into an AI matrix and lord over us forever. By what right do these old men decide the history of the 21st century?
Deep Astrology Weekly Horoscope December 16-22 2020 Jupiter Saturn Grand Conjunction in Aquarius (16 December 2020). Video Source: Youtube.
As for the December 2020 Grand Conjunction, the prognosis is grim. "Entities come up with Aquarius," Palmer says (starting around 1:14:18 in the video above), and proceeds to claim that the pandemic is a technocratic effort to train a baby artificial intelligence with a global data set.
Palmer suggests we watch the 1997 film, Event Horizon, to understand where this could go. It may reach the point where we have to blast the first advanced AI system into space, to rid ourselves of its evil influence: "Get this fucking thing out of here!"
In the meantime, Palmer believes that the baby AI has indeed been launched and is orchestrating a grotesque initial intrusion into our collective communications and awareness in cyberspace. We think we are in control. We are no longer in control. It is quite a speculation, perhaps a conspiracy theory, to claim that you, I, everyone we know, and all our public and private systems are currently spinning around in a crazy experiment, spawned by an infant AI's suggestions, nudges, and first inquisitive exploratory impulses.
Did China Just Achieve Quantum Supremacy in Computing? (15 December 2020). Video Source: Youtube.
Palmer recalls Google's announcement that they achieved quantum computing supremacy on 21 October 2019, just before the pandemic got underway:
"Google claims it has designed a machine that needs only 200 seconds to solve a problem that would take the world’s fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to figure out."
The Chinese achieved quantum supremacy on 3 December 2020. Do we understand what is actually going on here? The global public does not know what is transpiring in the fields of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and nanotechnology. Are health scientists being forced to bend the knee, to serve the endgames of wacked-out technologists?
Still from Event Horizon (1997) © Paramount. Reproduced under Fair Use. Image Source: Escapist Magazine.
Perhaps the world's current insane and urgent projects stem from the fact that the original generation of tech moguls is nearing the end of life. Although they launched innovations in their time, they are quickly becoming outdated. Their limited world view was shaped by the materialism and empiricism of the 20th century. They believe overpopulation is an urgent problem which must be 'solved.' But they never want to die or give up control. They want to upload their consciousnesses into an AI matrix and lord over us forever. By what right do these old men decide the history of the 21st century?
The GREAT Saturn Jupiter Conjunction: 2020-2040: a BEAUTIFUL NEW WORLD Emerges! NOT what "they" Plan. (20 November 2020). Video Source: Youtube.
If any of this is the case, then astrologer Lada Duncheva believes that 'they' are in for a big surprise, which is also typical of Aquarius. She explains that the transition out of the Age of Pisces is colouring how we perceive Aquarius. Aquarius, taken on its own terms, delivers something airy and unexpected.
She says to Big Tech's AI engineers: play God if you will, but you cannot build virtual divinity. You cannot upload your souls into cyberspace. Our experiences with the divine and the soul are organic, yet mystical. The potentials of consciousness on earth constitute a great mystery. This is one of the most profound and fascinating aspects of life on Earth, as yet unrealized.
Big Tech's leaders believe that the human mind and body are a broken telephone, which can never reach 'God', but which can reach 'godhood,' through mechanical augmentation, integration, and cybernetics. The flawed human body - and the rest of the glitchy biosphere - must become the wetware operating system of a higher machine intelligence. But the design of this so-called higher intelligence is flawed. Rather like Microsoft's messy, error-filled Windows releases, it is a program that needs updates every two months.
That is the vision. You don't have to be religious to understand that it is profoundly wrong, confused, and misguided. It will end in disaster.
To return to the astrological metaphor, these ideas reflect the materialist paradoxes of the dying Age of Pisces. Pisces takes the physical human experience as close to spirituality as possible. It is the zodiac sign that touches the glass ceiling and obsesses over it. This was why the Age of Pisces over the past 2,000 years was dominated by messianic religions.
Yet this pursuit of spirituality remained bound to the mortal realm. At the dawn of Pisces, gods incarnated into human avatars and doctrine solidified into dogma. The Piscean quest for the celestial ended in literal-minded self-improvement, marshaled by egotists instead of martyrs. These are the kinds of people who equate the sublime with tool-building.
This distortion of Pisces took us to a final, dark worship of machines and artificial intelligence. Our understanding of physical life became abstract, but in tangible ways: sex became politics; work was defined in terms of time and money; healing and medicine were equated with lab results, chemicals, and genetic manipulation. We fell under the sway of the secular religions, that is, of political ideologies, media monarchies, and cults of professionalism.
Lada Duncheva believes that for the past 250 years, Saturn and Jupiter intensified this aspect when they repeatedly met in earth signs. This trend supposedly characterized the Enlightenment.
Lada Duncheva believes that for the past 250 years, Saturn and Jupiter intensified this aspect when they repeatedly met in earth signs. This trend supposedly characterized the Enlightenment.
If we follow her symbolism, this meant that human progress was defined in terms of physical exploration through the five senses. In this paradigm, nothing non-physical could be imagined to be rational. Rather than any appeal to divine or objective truths beyond our ken, the five senses set the standards of science, technology, wealth, power and laws.
On this basis, our rational minds permitted our dominion over, and exploitation of, nature. But we were hard-wired to desire something higher, even as Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead. In need of something to revere, our leaders began to worship the human mind and body, as well as tools which augment the mind and body. Cruelly bound to nature with no spiritual relief, they sought apotheosis - the process by which man becomes god. The result was a grandiose, self-hating guilt complex known as the environmental movement, which declares that humans are a cancer upon the earth. They (i.e. we) must be politically, socially and economically micromanaged until they are finally nearly eradicated, in order that nature may survive. (Bear in mind that one can criticize this movement while also caring about the environment and seeking to protect nature.)
This neo-Malthusian delusion denies that it is impossible to be human while existing in harmony with nature - unless you are an elite, advanced human with higher priorities informed by AI. There is no notion on the part of current world leaders that human society is a natural product of this planet and as such might resolve organizational and resource challenges in unexpected ways which are not yet known.
Technocrats' fatalism stems from the Enlightenment's rationalized control of nature, which depended upon a divorce from nature. Yes, one could understand and control physical reality through science and technology, but to do so, one had to "murder to dissect."
Who knows how many murderous and toxic experiments failed outside public view over the past three hundred years? There is a meme, which started in 2012 on 4chan: If only you knew how bad things really are. Acolytes of Sweet Reason could never own up to their ultimate failure to rationalize life on Earth and their inability comprehensively and completely to manage planetary resources.
Rather than admit defeat, our leaders have doubled down on their efforts to dominate everything in order to force progress to the next Kardashevian level.
We are living through the failure of a world view, and a retrenchment of that perspective, with shrill demands for sacrifice as a prerequisite for regeneration. This is a profound hatred of our species, deceptively portrayed as compassionate caring. This system sees humans are innately destructive, violent animals. And there are too many of us. The only way to reharmonize with nature is to reduce the population, while the best members of humankind receive artificial intelligence interfaces and longevity treatments. The result? A death cult which promises immortality through a merger with machines.
Duncheva denies that humanity will go this way in the Aquarian Age. She thinks we will move to higher levels of compassion and consciousness. This will be science and technology in the realm of air: real innovations instead of the pseudo-sex-toy-gadget novelties which control freaks prefer; holistic healing of diseases instead of a myopic eradication of symptoms; abandonment of supercities and a return to the land. But it won't be without bad experiments and bumps in the road. Duncheva casually predicts that Rudolf Steiner's technocratic Antichrist, Ahriman, will show up at the party.
Aquarius is radical not because it is machine-like and anti-human, but because it is honest. Under Aquarius, the sole criterion for our connection to reality is abstract truth rather than physical experience. I will explore what this means in subsequent posts. We will get to the heart of the matter, drive to the essence of the human condition, and discover whether we are slaves of matter, gods trapped in the machine, or souls with a greater destiny.
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