New Post at The Dragonfly: The Professional in the System

Actor Marlon Brando as a professional gone rogue: Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979). Image Source: Fandom.

I have a new post up at The Dragonfly about the evolution of public and private trust:

Character Development 2: The Professional in the System: What Price, Freedom?

Epstein's Island Temple Theatre

EXCLUSIVE: First-Ever Look Inside Epstein’s Private Island (28 October 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

The videos of the season are currently going viral on Youtube. They were posted three hours ago. Above, is We are Change's exclusive visit to Jeffrey Epstein's island of Little St. James in the Caribbean. Aside from drone footage from a channel run by an Anon under the name of 'Rusty Shackleford,' this is the first independent media footage of the island.

Not what it seemed. Image Source: Reddit.

The main discovery of alt-media interlopers Jeff Berwick and Luke Rudkowski is that the island is guarded by gargoyles, which are dotted everywhere. They bear shields with a star spanned by two crescent moons. Aside from that, they look like they come straight from a garden centre. For the most part, the place had been cleaned out and the house was unlocked. Berwick and Rudkowski did not have time to search the grounds for tunnels and underground structures, which had been the subject of widespread speculation.

However, Epstein's gaudy temple has a front door which is painted on; and the now-missing dome was not functional. This made the building look up close like a Hollywood movie set. You can see Rusty Shackleford's drone footage of the temple from 12 July 2019 here; the drone had trouble capturing and revealing this illusion.

These details raise the question: how much of the Epstein scandal was real, and how much of it was fake? It seems unlikely that the whole Epstein case was falsified to create a puppet show pantomime, which would deceive the conservative populists and crypto-anarchist part of the masses. It would not be the first time that a Potemkin Village was built to create a false impression of reality.

The possibility that Epstein's island was only theatre, and could have been a Potemkin Village den of child abuse is somehow more horrible than the possibility that it was a real site of torture, mind control, child rape and human trafficking. I do not mention this to play down the sufferings of potential victims. But the paranoia and world view that one would have to have in order to see the island as a Hollywood set for negative fake propaganda is somehow worse than seeing it as a real Island of Doctor Moreau.

The First Independent Media To Invade Epstein's Island [Share Before Taken Down] (28 October 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

Materialist Rhetoric: The Cosmic Indifference of Alien AI Gods

From Alan Moore's Lovecraftian comic, Providence. Image Source: Xataka.

This week, I am selecting vocabulary used by materialists to reveal their long game. Materialism here refers loosely to those who subscribe to secular and scientific values, that is, those who explore the world in the strictly physical sense.

I deconstruct some materialist values here, not to write an anti-scientific or technophobic screed, but to consider alternative approaches toward science and technology. I mean to show here that what we think of as 'rationalism,' 'secularism,' 'materialism,' 'science,' and 'technology' are social constructions, grounded in obsolete, 19th and 20th century modernist concepts of order and madness. I will discuss this historical background in future posts.

Can we build AI without losing control over it? | Sam Harris (19 October 2016). Video Source: Youtube.

In recent years, several tech leaders have come forward to predict the rise of artificial intelligence. The prediction rests on a definition of intelligence as 'information processing' and 'interactivity,' about which I have blogged here. Developers consider AI 'goal-setting' to be the same thing as human dreaming. The AI vocabulary projects machine processes onto human cognition, and removes the extra-sensory, the anti-materialistic, or any magical thinking that is otherwise undefined in physical terms.

If one adheres to this set of ideas, one removes emotional, moral and ethical concerns from intelligence. One ignores non-linear, lateral, interstitial, and other undefinable elements that are part of the purely human, non-mechanical experience. (Thanks to -D.)

Materialist Proposition 1: Progress is Worship, Expressed through Physical Augmentation of Natural Ability

Quantum Computers - An Altar To An 'Alien god'! Doorway To Other Dimensions And Image Of The Beast! (2 February 2017). Video Source: Youtube.

Tech leaders like Geordie Rose, father of marketed quantum computers, adhere to a 19th century vision of 'progress.' They believe that history is an upward story of human and scientific expansion. We must develop bodies, societies and systems which transcend the limits of biology.

ideacity 2019 - Geordie Rose - Synthetic Minds, Cooperation and the Future of Humanity (21 June 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

In this view, the brain is a machine, which we will decode, mechanize and develop with the help of artificial intelligence. Because of its independent functions and the symbiotic assistance it will provide during our brain upgrades, the AI will appear to us like an alien god. Technologists admit this god will destroy our humanity, but that is acceptable, because the god will help one nation get ahead of another in the geopolitical balance of power. That, or the god will cure cancer.

Despite their supposed adherence to logical explanations, these technologists justify themselves through glib asides. They never ask if there is an alternative to 19th century scientific progress. They do not reflect on whether their political biases pose problems for their planning. They never consider whether the nation-state is a dated idea. They never refer to the evolutionary purpose which cancer may serve, about which I have blogged, here and here. They certainly never ask (at least publicly) if there are extra-physical aspects of human cognition, which cannot be simulated. It does not matter if the consequences of technologists' blind spots will result in species-wide slavery. In fact, that is the expected result.

The real question, then, concerns the developers' ambitions. A very small number of humans aim to control the machines that will control the bulk of humankind. XPRIZE founder Peter Diamandis remarked:

"Today, a group of 20 individuals empowered by the exponential growing technologies of AI and robotics and computers and networks and eventually nanotechnology can do what only nation states could have done before."

These humans will act, based on their limited intelligence and values. If the story of the AI as alien god is really a story about the ambitions of a tiny group of tech moguls and billionaires, we should identify the real beliefs of this group.

Where Non-Fiction and Fiction Meet: New Post at The Dragonfly

Image Source: Fanpop.

I have a new post up at The Dragonfly:

Fiction and Truth Inside the Broken System

The post uses the Alien franchise of movies to begin to describe the anti-materialist perspective of technology.


See all posts in the What's Left Over? series on materialism and anti-materialism in technological advancement.