Retrofuturism 26: A Look Back at the 2010s

 

I have a long-running series on this blog which relates past styles to future sensibilities. It is interesting to see what survives these days for the sake of stylistic nostalgia, past any functional or practical requirements.

Sometimes, the historical stylistic element refers to an old technology, indicating a mental and emotional human lag in the face of exponential innovation.

Today's superb example came from Substack: the 981 Retro Express Wireless, Mechanical Gaming Vintage Typewriter Keyboard (hat tip: Ozarklore). On embarking upon the writing of this post, I was shocked to find that the 'Retrofuturism' series proper hasn't been updated here since 2013. Looking back, I see that the best posts relating to this topic confirm that retro-futurism was a 2010s' trend. It appears that the period from the late 2010s through 2022 dampened historical curiosity in relation to technology. This could be due to intensified political debates and the global pandemic, which dominated popular attention for seven years.

Here are some of my old posts highlighting retro-futuristic 2010s' projects which either did not survive into the 2020s, or may have borne fruit, but their signals got lost in the noise from the early part of this decade. For example, the incredible video game, Gorgoa, demonstrates that even in accelerated environments, real human accomplishments still take years to complete. Perhaps we can take heart in that:

•  The Next Tetris: Gorgoa (13 January 2013): an amazing-looking retro-futuristic game that won several awards in 2018 after its 2017 launch.
• Retrofuturism 23: Baby Boomers and Alien Astronauts (10 January 2013): a retrospective on 1960s' and 1970s' spiritual esoteric spiritualism as projected upon space exploration. With Gigi Young's series on Mars Mysteries on Youtube, we see that interest in this topic is still going strong. My work on my new novel serial, Vampire Daddy, falls in the same category (shameless plug). Vampire Daddy not only draws on my earlier discussions of how space exploration relates to religious, spiritual and esoteric topics, but it also refers to other retro-futuristic themes I discussed, such as the Slavonic Gothic, Russian Space Art, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars books from the first decade of the 20th century. 

 

The Warlords of Mars (1914). Source: JW Knott Books. 

• Shameless plug, continued: as a tribute to Burroughs, I recently did an AI rendering of my characters, Lexi and Primeva, in the style of John Carter and Dejah Thorus, echoing the classic Barsoom renderings of  the 1910s, with hints of later 1960s' and 1970s' interpretations, now reworked again in the 2010s and 2020s. Of course, many others have paid homage to Burroughs. Marv Wolfman - whose work I have covered extensively here - wrote a Marvel comic from 1977 to 1979 which expanded on Burroughs' work. There were also a couple of series from Dark Horse and notable Warlord of Mars series from Dynamite, which sparked a lawsuit from the Burroughs' estate. Disney released a troubled adaptation, John Carter, in 2012. Comic Book Treasury put it best, that Burroughs' Barsoom series is "one of the most influential science fiction and fantasy tales of the 20th Century." You can read Burroughs' Mars books here. Librivox recordings are here and here. The Encyclopedia Barsoomia Wiki is here.

 

Lexi and Primeva. Source: My own prompting, on Dall-e. 

Other highlights from my 'Retrofuturism' series (I clearly had trouble deciding on whether or not to hyphenate the term): 

• Retrofuturism 19: Last Master of a Martial Art Reborn (16 November 2011): the 17th century Sikh martial art of Shastar Vidya (ਸ਼ਸਤਰ-ਵਿੱਦਿਆ), which frightened the British imperial authorities so much that they banned it, survives in akharas (training gymnasiums) and the tradition is still discussed on the Web.
• Five Fabulous Web Comics You Shouldn't Miss (28 October 2010): sadly, all of these great Web comics are no longer running. These projects all died before or during covid. Web comics evidently were enterprises of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which peaked by the 2010s: Bill Walko's The Hero Busine$$ (ended 2023); Jon Rosenberg's Scenes from a Metaverse (ended 2021); Kit Roebuck's (aka Adam Reed's) Nine Planets without Intelligent Life (ended 2025); Larry Latham's Lovecraft is Missing (ended 2014); Jesse Recklaw's Slow Wave (ended 2012). And we definitely should never forget the fantastic Tozo - The Public Servant, from David O'Connell (since 2018, the main website has belonged to a gambling site, but there are vestiges of O'Connell's work at that URL on the subpages).

In 2023, Chris Yeh predicted on Linked In that AI would lead to a "Cambrian explosion" of online comics and graphic novels. Instead, artistic and literary communities launched into painful debates over how and when to justify AI usage in the creative arts. As a result, the Cambrian explosion didn't happen.

The appetite for the past is still there as we collide with the future. But is it legitimate to ape the past with a technology that radically erases that past? My friend C. recently told me that 'Throwback Thursdays' was created by AI developers to encourage people to post photographs from the pre-Internet era to train artificial intelligences. We are on the other side of a watershed moment.

Retro-futurism in the last decade recalled craftsmanship, popular tastes, cultural memories, and artistic traditions like long-form content writing, print graphics and illustration. The trend was part of a brief flowering of purely- or mainly-human creative activities, ironically expressed through technologically-enabled media. That could only really be done in the 2010s, when human creative practices overlapped nearly exactly with forms of technology which were just advanced enough to channel human outputs globally. But technology at that point did not yet surpass, erase, overwhelm or supersede the human. Now it potentially does.

The retro-futuristic trend was part of the 2010s' last gasp of purely human creativity in the pre-AI age. Will AI revive retro-futurism above its 2010s' heights? Or will this peculiar form of techno-cultural nostalgia become a badge of anti-AI sentiment? Perhaps AI will bring us to some state of compromise between the purely human and pure machine. Only time will tell.

See all my posts on Retro-Futurism. Also here.

The Lingering Malaise of an Uncertain Present

Source: Youtube.

 

I've recently embarked on writing a new novel serial, Vampire Daddy, which, despite its Martian Gothic futuristic trappings, reflects our current sense of unease about ... everything. One facet of this distress is the characters' pervasive amnesia. The protagonist is constantly trying to remember his past. While I seek to represent this misery in fiction, I've rarely heard the phenomenon described so well as was done so today on the channel, The Functional Melancholic.

Patreon Exclusive Series: A Retrospective on the Rise of the Information Age, 1926-2026

I have started a new Patreon series, including videos and written essays, which will trace the history of the rise of high technology, starting in the mid-1920s. It is hard to believe that the 1920s are now a century in the past, but as such, they deserve review as the original source of trends now associated with the Information Age and the Technological Revolution.

Check out the new series on Patreon.

Humanoid Robot Gigaparty 3

  

Source.

Figure AI dropped its robot, Figure 03, today. The robot uses a proprietary vision-language-action AI model called Helix to inform its actions. The robot's function is to act as a domestic servant, taking care of the laundry and the dishes. Beyond AI and robotics, the historical ethical questions are obvious: why is domestic slavery the first port of call for enlightened people who are wealthy enough to afford a robot? It is a philosophical and moral issue that persists beyond the tool that supports the issue. If you build a robot and the first thing you make is a house slave, you need to ask yourself whether the issue of slavery has been fully addressed in society. The non-human class of slaves will eventually develop a type of consciousness and we will face the same historical challenges as we did with slavery in previous times and places. You might want a robot as a house slave. But will you still want it folding your laundry when it evolves into an android?

 

 

Source. 

In July 2025, an Ultimate Fighting Bots (UFB) robot, DeREK, malfunctioned in a lab and struggled with its tether. It is hard not to see it as something akin to an animal in a trap, suddenly thrashing around due to a "software misconfiguration."

 

 

Source.

 

 

Source.

I have to wonder if this was some kind of guerilla marketing, because the malfunction video went viral across mainstream social media. The company in this case is known as Robot Kombat aka REK, a cutting edge San Francisco warehouse where robots are being designed for a mechanical Fight Club. Like a scene from Stanley Kubrick's final film, Artificial Intelligence (2001), the robots are remotely managed by real human fighters. The CEO, Cix Liv [his real name], came out of UCLA Computer Science and the fitness for gamers industry. He presides over this new party scene, evident in the poster below from 26 September 2025. It doesn't really smack of higher values. Technology is a luminous mirror that shines a light upon our own souls. If we treat our machines with inhumanity, it will dehumanize us, not them.

Source.

Lincoln Park after Dark

Opi nail polish colour: Lincoln Park after Dark. Source: Opi.

Revealed: if you believe the claims of underground whistleblowers like Fiona Barnett or Cathy O'Brien, you would have heard that one of the legacies of the Second World War was a rash of human rights abuses inside the so-called 'Cathedral' of western civilization.

You can watch three documentaries below about the barely-acknowledged Cold War history of MKUltra mind control experiments. In Canada, the exploitation of mental patients has a confirmed paper trail, to the eternal shame of McGill University. This was a moment when medicine morphed into  'technology' and horrendous attempts to control the brain as a programmable system, or wetware.

 

These and similar secret Cold War programs raise questions about how many Nazi officials and staff integrated into post-war institutions in the west and brought with them their science, culture and politics. Operation Paperclip was the means by which Nazi policies seamlessly continued. Nazism became a fifth column in western institutions and the western establishment after 1945. You can see a list of Nazi scientists who moved to the USA, here. 

Moreover, this list only refers to the hard sciences. Less discussed are the ongoing influences of 1930s' and 1940s' era Germanic psychology and social and economic philosophies. Some of these leading thinkers were anti-Nazis. But the lines begin to blur if one pushes further back into the 1920s and 1930s. Consider Adam Curtis's 2002 classic documentary, The Century of the Self, which exhaustively revealed a line from the modern developed west straight back to Central Europe (see all my posts on Adam Curtis here). We need to ask how much of pre-Nazi, Nazi, and post-Nazi philosophies affected the whole west. Remember Leonard Cohen's immortal lines: 

"Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich"

There is a viewpoint which speculates that The Man in the High Castle was not fiction, rather an elaborate metaphor, implying that the Nazis covertly won the war by decoupling from the nation-state of Germany, hiding their overtly racist policies behind civilized window dressing, reconstituting as a liberal NGO in Switzerland, and integrating themselves into the post-war western establishment. Officially and superficially, we enjoyed a liberal consensus as the supposed standard of superior humanistic values and civil society, coupled with unprecedented legal rights and stable prosperity. Unofficially, there were (and are) signs all over the place that something had gone dreadfully wrong.

The Man in the High Castle (Season 3, 2018), adapted Philip K. Dick's 1962 novel. Not fiction? Source: Amazon Adviser.

As war dissolved into the Cold War's clandestine espionage, we see the promotion of the fictional UK spy, James Bond, who reveals to us in stories and films the architecture of mind control training. Bond receives his real orders from MKUltra agents with sexual programming. This is why he is always shown having a tryst with a random female who pops up before he starts his mission. The Bond films glamorize Bond as an ice cold, sex-addicted assassin. Really, he displays all the symptoms of a torture victim. This character raises questions about mainstream popular culture, if a brainwashed Tavistock slave, trained to the point of psychopathy to murder people, has been held up to us as a suave, fearless hero.

We know that the CIA authorized MKUltra on 13 April 1953, through its Office of Scientific Intelligence and the US Army Biological Warfare Laboratories. The Agency was still releasing files on this project as late as 2010, which explains why this historical information is still trickling into public awareness. In the CIA's online Reading Room, the Agency kept a copy of a CBS transcript dating from 23 December 1984 for a new show of 60 Minutes, which refers to the human mind control experiments in Canada and to James Bond in the same paragraph. This document at least proves that the CIA felt that a TV investigative report which associated the two issues - the real life case and the fictional spy - merited attention.

If you want to know more, check out a 2020 book by Timothy Shelley: Stories When Little: Growing Up under MK-ULTRA. You can read it here or here. The blurb states:

"This book is the first of a five-volume series regarding the author's abuse, from 1969 to 1986, under CIA PROJECT MONARCH, ARTICHOKE, SLEEPING BEAUTY, and MK-ULTRA in connection with world history. It describes mind control methods employed by the Tavistock Institute and the Central Intelligence Agency involving drugs, hypnosis, electroshock, and sexual abuse as well as the use by MI-7 of popular culture from Playboy to MAD, from The Banana Splits to Wonder Woman, and from James Bond to the Dukes of Hazzard."

Another conspiracists' example - well known in the underground - analyzes the use of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz as nefarious UK and US training texts.

Lincoln Park

Opi colour: Lincoln Park after Dark. Source: Pinterest.

When you look at the description of the Opi nail polish colour, Lincoln Park after Dark, the company writes: "This aubergine is as deep as evening shadows in Lincoln Park. A near-black purple, this color is ready for neighborhood night life." To which Lincoln Park does Opi refer? Is it Lincoln Park in Chicago? The former Lincoln Park in Santa Monica? Or is it Lincoln Park in Calgary, Alberta, Canada? Officially, in another nod, the band Linkin Park is named after the park in Santa Monica. But online rumours suggest that lead singer Chester Bennington (1976-2017) actually named the band after the military forces base in Calgary, to hint at what happened there.

By 2012, the old Canadian Forces Base in Calgary was "cleaned up" and resold as a business park and residential area. Today, Lincoln Park is an upscale suburb with McMansions and glossy condos. From Justin Havre Real Estate: "The name of the district is borrowed from a small area of military housing located between 54th Avenue S.W. and Glenmore Trail, which was reserved for United States Air Force members stationed at the airfield during World War II." 

What happened at CFB Calgary (Lincoln Park) prior to that has been swept under the rug, and only bits and pieces remain of abusive MKUltra Canadian programs from the Cold War period. Alternative sources maintain that covert Nazi experiments continued in Calgary, overseen by UK and US intelligence. There's this testimony from Saskatchewan. There is this underground text from a contentious researcher (viewer discretion advised, NSFW). There is this testimony from the spouse of a survivor of military medical experimentation from 1954 to 1984. Worst of all, and most harrowing, is this blog, which in 2007 and 2008 recounted earlier abuses in Canadian institutions. Make of it what you will, but it indicates that in some places, the war with the Nazis did not end in 1945. We have to ask about the bourgeois, superficial illusions cherished by so many nice people who potentially live over a site of secret, unmentionable exploitations and atrocities. 

ADDENDUM (30 June 2025): Class action lawsuit for MKUltra victims of human experiments in Montreal, Canada.

 

ADDENDUM (21 June 2026): I particularly wish to highlight this post, "Merry Christmas," from 1957 and the words that haunted me from that testimony: "Always remember I love you." "Always remember God loves you, always remember."

Remember What the Dormouse Said

If you are under 40 or so, you won't remember when jobs were like this. These are photos I just unearthed from when I worked in the trenches as a footnote researcher at Oxford's New Dictionary of National Biography. It strikes me that these photographs come from a more humane and human time. Everyone's personality shines forth; there is a forgiving atmosphere of consensus. There's the guy at the very back standing in the centre by himself. But that was OK. He was the back row centre guy. There are two people in the top row left hanging back. Some people were extroverts. Someone had socks with sandals. Some people were pensive and withdrawn. Others - cheerful. This was a world of live-and-let-live, in which people could work together to achieve a common purpose, and their certainties and uncertainties could support that goal, without being fetishized or demonized.

 

I recall Douglas Coupland's mid-1990s' definitions of new social realities; perhaps this was in Microserfs. Air Family (noun): the people you get to know at work and for a time, they function like a family. Of course, workplace dynamics still exist, but my impression is that many jobs became industrialized, remote, disconnected, forcing conformity over consensus. I zoom in on myself out of self-interest. But you could equally focus on every single person in these photographs and you would discover a big story - each person was a world unto him- or herself.

I particularly remember a girl who showed up at work every day dressed like Alice in Wonderland. She is not in the group photos as far as I can see. Now I wonder - did she change out of her blue pinafore, dark hair ribbon, white blouse, pale stockings and Mary Janes on the day of the group photo? I don't think she departed the New DNB before group photos were taken. No one minded that we worked with Alice in Wonderland. It all seemed normal. And yet - the camera could not capture her.

 

Alice was a harbinger of what was to come. After falling for two decades down the rabbit hole, after sitting for way too long at the Mad Tea Party - I miss Alice. A flood of information engulfed the staid world of research depicted here, the early 2000s at the Dictionary of National Biography. It's important to recognize that at its inception in 1885, the DNB was a novel historical instrument and a great national innovation. By 2005, it was an institution. 

This was what research looked like before social media and global Internet usage hit full force. 

The Web offered oceans of knowledge hitherto denied to us, with unprecedented tools for search and collation. But now, the technocrats are closing the doors. They have revealed that the era of the Free Internet and Creative Commons was a massive AI training exercise. Content that now swamps Youtube and similar platforms no longer features bloggers and vloggers on a mission. We came from this staid world and fell down rabbit holes because we sought freedom of information, revelation and open discussion in order to solve the world's problems.

Organic content is rarer and rarer. It is replaced - as I predicted would happen in this post - by output from a false alternative media whose AI-generated narratives repeat 1990s'-2010s' commentaries from real online researchers. Finally, we arrive at the Dead Internet Theory. Tired, fake content now distracts, diverts and imprisons us, taking us on false journeys, squandering our days, filling our minds with rubbish, so that we are funneled not to the open seas, but down the treacle well. Where is Alice? She's not in this picture.

 

 

Awaken the Amnesiacs 14: Songs from the Halls of Amenti

 

Today, I present the best conspiracy theory songs and music of red-pilled culture, which I have curated from Suno AI:

Conspiracy Theorists' Red-Pilled Mixed Tape

This blog has collected conspiracy theories as cultural artefacts from a critical period when social media exploded. With the aid of AI, netizens are paying homage to these ideas in a new genre of alienation and self-reflection. 

Many of these songs revolve around an underlying conviction that humanity suffers from a collective amnesia about our deep history. Is this a glitch in the Matrix? A moment of Jungian enantiodromia? The awakened masses intuit that we and our planet are part of a great story which we have forgotten. Can a historical date, say, 38 thousand years ago, really be projected onto these musings?

Every rabbit hole, every cover-up, every riddle in the dark, every exposé of aberrant corruption seems to lead back to this problem of species-wide amnesia. It doesn't matter whether we speak of the top of the pyramid or the core of the human heart. Somehow, the source of it all is a profound absence of memory. In place of memory, we get a degraded nightmare, as evident in reports from the Diddy trial (see Rotten Mango's coverage here and Tisa Tells' coverage here). 

Prior to that, perhaps the most recent major news item in this speculative space was the 15 March 2025 press release which asserted that a city has been located beneath the Khafre Pyramid on the Giza plateau:

 

SAR Scan of Khafre Pyramid Shows Huge Underground Structures by Greg Reese

One of the greatest mysteries just got bigger

Read on Substack

 

You can see more from Jonathan Evatt: 'What's Really Happening Beneath the Giza Plateau?'

This talk echoes long-standing occult whispers of Thoth's so-called Halls of Amenti, a hidden city beneath the Egyptian pyramids. Or was it another dimension or realm? This is a place where the concealed history of humankind, immortality, cloning, "secrets of the stars, the blueprints of the universe" are inscribed, it is said, in marble walls and pillars. That story criss-crosses with rumours of Plato and Atlantis, aliens and the New Age; check out more here, here, here and here. You can watch many videos relating to Manly P. Hall's lectures and writings on Thoth / Hermes here.

The March 15 fringe academic findings are comparatively sober. They maintain that there are columns beneath the pyramid which stretch down two kilometres:

"Corrado Malanga, from the University of Pisa, and Filippo Biondi, involved in radar and remote sensing research with the University of Strathclyde, published peer-reviewed research in 2022 via MDPI, entitled, 'Synthetic Aperture Radar Doppler Tomography Reveals Details of Undiscovered High-Resolution Internal Structure of the Great Pyramid of Giza.'

Their research was conducted using SAR data, Synthetic Aperture Radar, along with proprietary software, developed by ... Biondi, that transforms the radar signals into phononic information which allows for the detection of millimetric vibrations. This cutting-edge technology is capable of revealing underground structures invisible to traditional methods, and revealed internal structures never seen before."

More:

• Schumacher, T., Pugacheva, P., Allam, H. et al. "Confirmation of the ScanPyramids North Face Corridor in the Great Pyramid of Giza using multi-modal image fusion from three non-destructive testing techniques." Sci Rep 15, 9275 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-91115-8 (18 March 2025)
• Trevor Grassi, Facebook (20 March 2025): THE KHAFRE PROJECT ... is REAL! [Updated post as of March 27] HERE IS THE THE CONFERENCE, with English subtitles. You don't have to believe me; the team is speaking now... Initial hour long release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDpdJFlLpRE Here is the FULL CONFERENCE, with English subtitles - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM8vzUUZdVM A friend,The team has also created an official facebook page with many new images: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61574443323296 Here is a short interview I have released with Jahannah James setting the matter straight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuyYGdfWw48 Here is another interview I gave with Mike Ricksecker: https://www.youtube.com/live/Gt7MeqFoJPA Here is my super deep dive with Jay Anderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhT6Vd9vO3U&t=3336s Here the team's first English interview with Jay Anderson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b513P5g7XmQ Here is their second English interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9ISC9ji-WA And here is their third [English] interview with me ... : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK3bjfxLM9s Original Post: For the record, if people are now looking to my feed here, for more information, yes; I was the source of this document and images. It is the project abstract, given to me by the Khafre Project Team; Corrado Malanga, Filippo Biondi, Armando Mei, and Nicole Ciccolo. (It is a separate document from their 2022 report on the Great Pyramid.) I've been helping them to help get their great discovery out to the world, and they gave me permission to release this. Their 2022 paper is peer reviewed, and they will release a written report on this one, but not until probably late June. It is in the works, I have confirmed. I have also released some major disclosures about the Giza Underworld, on my youtube channel, which are directly related to this new discovery and the Italian team. ... I am trying my hardest to get out a video to explain it all; how it was released, and why no one can find the source webpage. Those images were released by me, right here on this feed, on the day of the conference (15th). ... This discovery is REAL, and everything will be explained completely in time, rest assured! I feel completely honored to be the person who broke this story, and for the record, I had NO IDEA that was going to be the case ... . If you are interested in learning more about how this new innovation on traditional SAR scanning, which we are calling the 'Biondi Protocol', the ONLY source you should look to is Manu Seyfzadeh's fb page, where he has been explaining it in detail with many excellent posts. Manu was mentioned by name in the press conference, and he is now working to provide the [necessary] material to allow a secondary team to reproduce the results of the Khafre Project, for an unbiased confirmation of the method. See his profile here: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100016513153080. 
• Related book, Under The Sphinx.

See all my posts in the series, Awaken the Amnesiacs.

Time Lapses: Godfather of the Selfie

 

Noah Kalina Reflects on 25 Years of Everyday 10 January 2000 - 10 January 2025: Artist Noah Kalina is back with a reflective commentary on his Everyday project, about which I have previously blogged here and here. Famous for photographing himself every day for the past 25 years, Kalina is not making a 25-year video for the project. His most recent summary was posted for the 20-year point.

See all my posts about Noah Kalina's Everyday project.

Everything Must Change So That Everything Can Stay the Same

Today's post for Patreon patrons takes its title from the famous line spoken by the dashing aristocratic character Tancredi Falconeri in The Leopard (novel (1958); film (1963)). In the post, I recognize that the prevalence of revolution in the past three centuries made it synonymous with modernity. But what does revolution really mean if its real outcomes have led the modern era into technocratic surveillance and servitude? 

The Paris 2024 Olympics opened with reference to the French Revolution. You can see my related posts here, here and here. I ask again in today's post - what does modernity really mean if it was launched with a mass beheading event?

Become a Patron!

 

A Camera's View of History

I Found The Abandoned Sleepy Hollow Millionaires Mansion - (EVERYTHING LEFT EVEN HUMAN ASHES) (22 October 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

It's just close enough to be recognizable, and just far away enough to be in the past. This British urbex find, probably in Kent, included three sets of human ashes. Two urns remained at the kitchen table, as though the ladies of the house were having a ghostly breakfast. One urn with ashes of a male resident, possibly a surgeon, was left on a mantlepiec. The earliest artefacts dated from around 1900 to 1910, with the last resident abiding there until around 2005. It is another testament to the wreckage of the 20th century.

You can't take it with you, and when you don't, a futuristic explorer with a camera's view of history could rifle through your things for a global audience.

  

Online Group Discussion and AMA Bookchat Today: Banks in the Potemkin Village

Image Source: 4chan.

A reminder, there is an AMA Bookchat today on the blog's Discord group (https://discord.com/invite/Zy9XVad). This is a weekly text chat where I talk with readers about technology's legacy in the early 21st century, in the form of red-pilled history. My definition of red-pilling is here. The bookchat is part of my work while I write my book-in-progress, Inside the Potemkin Village.

Everyone is invited to join the discussion. Friday, 10 July 2020. 6-9 pm Eastern (10 pm-1 am UTC).

Theme: Banks in the Potemkin Village

• Assessing current economic challenges.
• How individuals can pivot into the new system. 
• Summary of past four bookchats, 12 June, 19 June, 26 June, 3 July 2020.

Go to the room marked hashtag #bookchat. The blog's Discord was established as a free, mutually-supporting community.

Blog's Tenth Birthday

Stills from Blade Runner 2049 (2017) © Warner / Sony. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use. Image Source: RPF.

Happy Birthday, Dear Blog

Last month was the blog's tenth birthday! The blog has almost reached 4 million unique hits. I am deeply grateful to all readers who stop by and to fellow content creators in the alt media.

The Best Posts page will soon be updated, here. The five-year retrospective, Perspectives and Milestones, summarized my rationale for blogging about the impact of technology on the 20th century world, as a way of understanding the history of the 21st century.

Conclusion of a Decade

Image Source: tumblr.

Over the past decade, I observed two main trends: first, the erosion of conventional authority in the face of democratized access to information; and second, the attempt by the establishment to exploit and manipulate information to regain control of an increasingly red-pilled public.

I am now writing a book based on the blog, Inside the Potemkin Village (more below).

Given current circumstances, I am moving daily posts and community discussions to closed forums.

I am a Canadian blogger. In April 2020, there was a discussion in Ottawa about criminalizing anyone who discussed conspiracy theories or peddled disinformation online about COVID19. I analyze disinformation and conspiracy theories as examples of techno-culture. This distinction would be missed by authorities.

I am also writing on the Blogger platform, which is run by Google, notorious for its deplatforming of the alt media on Youtube. I expect social media censorship to increase, along with mayhem in the streets.

A man had an open container of Alcohol. NYPD slammed him on his head unconscious. (24 May 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

For these reasons, research links and updates about my work will be found for free on Discord. Please join the conversation. I will write fewer blog posts, and the ones I do write will be behind a small Patreon subscriber paywall ($1 per month). I will still occasionally write non-crisis posts here and at my other blogs.


This isn't just about me. The current circumstances are so serious and volatile that I am asking for support to develop a private online community, based on this blog.

Become a Patron!
The TLDR:

• A private free text chat on Discord (https://discord.com/ invitation code Zy9XVad) for all blog readers, with daily information and updates on my book-writing. Join the discussion.
• A free newsletter - sign up at the bottom of my Website. The newsletter will give regular updates for those who access free material and for Patreon supporters, who will be added automatically.
• Private blog posts on the pandemic and current crises for start-tier Patreon supporters (https://www.patreon.com/LCDouglass).
• A private forum (https://hottc.forumotion.com) to build a community for medium-tier Patreon supporters. Register at the forum and your account will be activated when your Patreon support is confirmed. Discussions will cover the pandemic; economic collapse; coming tech innovations; personal resilience and survival; censorship; laws and civil rights; evolving politics; the US election; digital education; cryptos; hyperinflation; food insecurity; and other topics.
• Private scheduled virtual video and audio meetings to consider community strategies in times of change (for upper-tier Patreon supporters).
• Insider, behind-the-scenes information in virtual meetings (for top-tier Patreon supporters).

If you want to buy cryptos on exchanges as a hedge against hyperinflation, please buy through the links below, which will also support me, my writing projects, and the development of a community for mutual support during tough times. Some links also provide you with a bonus at sign-up.

In particular, Crypto.com offers a Visa card in the UK, USA, Singapore, Canada, and Europe, which will draw from your cryptos stored in your online wallet. The cryptocurrencies you hold will be converted into fiat money at the moment when you make purchases in stores. Crypto.com is also a crypto exchange and an online wallet (where I do not recommend you keep anything for long); and it has other services in the works. Their whitepaper is here. This financial tool might be useful next year, when a head of lettuce might cost USD $400 or more.

ADDENDUM (1 July 2020): Unfortunately, the German fintech behind the crypto.com wallet, Wirecard, has collapsed in the biggest accounting fraud scandal in post-war history. Use of crypto.com's Visa is not recommended and/or prohibited and restricted until crypto.com can find a different wallet provider.

• My invitation link to Crypto.com is here: (referral code: zju6byz4vq). NB: Please refer to the addendum above.

• Support my work when you buy cryptos at Bitbuy, my referral link is here (referral ID: 9NNHWIHWE).

• My Swissborg referral link is here.

• Wealthsimple's crypto waitlist is here.

• My Brave encrypted browser referral link is here.

• My invitation to Binance is here (referral IDs: 41817819 or IBYYBGRH).

• My referral to Coinbase is here.

• Please donate to keep this blog and related platforms running.

BTC: 1NnSDexmAjopLUhdxu6jzChFNpxrGzHpT9 DOGE: DJPwPuXqNoqUJxC3oj4SZPbKHmqRt3ESQT ETH: 0x4F3b2199f789F2182b46caf6dFB18bE462567497

Real-Time, Red-Pilled History

Image Source: Jesus Mendez.

Why support the writing of Inside the Potemkin Village?

This blog was conceived as an original and unique experiment in writing what I call 'real-time history.' The idea was that information was moving so quickly, and in such volumes, and in so many new formats, that it was not possible to write a professional academic history of the new Millennium by waiting the traditional 30+ years before engaging the historical view. It had to be done day-by-day.

Technologically-driven communication poses other serious problems for historical writing. There are new forms of global community and identification; new media; malleable and anonymous sources; disappearing information; whistle-blowing; challenges to traditional information authorities; big data; and censorship.

The most popular post here is my 2017 summary of new Millennial politics: Red Pill, Blue Pill, Green Pill, Black Pill. One of the readers remarked:

"This was a truly amazing and inspired blog post. I do hope you are able to publish a book that further delves into these cyber resistance and cultural movements. I'd buy it today. The closest I've seen to someone actually publishing a book that attempts to cover 4chans massive cultural influence is 'hacker hoaxer whistleblower spy', but you are far more versed in the minutiae of it all."

To the Red Pills: do you want your history written by someone who understands what you went through and followed it every day?

Without an alternative history, your experiences from the first quarter of the 21st century will be judged through the lens and politics of mainstream academic theory. Not only will this be inaccurate, it will reflect the Orwellian aims of the current establishment, which silences alternative voices, suppresses independent implementations of technology, and absorbs the best of tech start-ups and cyber-movements, while removing their independent legacies from the record.

This is a complete misunderstanding of being red-pilled. It’s not about right- or left-wing pre-21st century paradigm politics, projected onto hacktivists. Its about having your world view shattered and acting accordingly. https://t.co/VJ9jxhwSGV

— LC Douglass (@tamaranorbust) May 24, 2020

Without a crowd-funded, real-time, red-pilled history, the story of life on the early Internet will be written by scholars funded by the likes of Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos. You know how it will read.

Going forward, alternative voices won't just be erased from the Internet. They will be erased from history. He who writes history provides the future world view.

This is why I am writing my first collection of essays on this early Millennial period in Inside the Potemkin Village. In order to finish the book and other writing projects, while also developing that knowledge into community strategies to survive at this challenging time, I am asking for your support.

NOTE: I may change platforms for chat, forums, and virtual meetings; check below for any updates or write to me (here) for new invite links.

Coronavirus Fragments 16: The Highest Point of Beta Male Ambition in Human History

Image Source: The Verge.

On 23-24 May 2020, Celeste Solum's video, featured at the top of my 23 May 2020 post, The Birth of the Totalitarian Technocracy, which criticized the World Economic Forum's plans as a roadmap for totalitarian global governance, was taken off Youtube. The account which hosted it, Willem Felderhof, removed all content.

Assuming that the owner of the Willem Felderhof channel did not have a change of heart overnight for other reasons, this could be interpreted through a blue-pilled view, which trusts authority, or through a red-pilled lens, which does not. Was this a question of censoring harmful, crackpot disinformation? Or was this information suppressed because Solum's anti-establishment heresy was correct?

In alt media circles, there is a consensus that one is only shot down if one is over the target, that is, one's interpretation of establishment misdeeds was correct and therefore had to be silenced. Of course, the mainstream perspective is the opposite - that a particular interpretation of information is beyond the pale of reasonable discourse and must be suppressed.

Tesla owners are grappling with the fact that their cars may carry new connotations after Elon Musk tweeted about taking “the red pill,” a reference to “The Matrix” that has been co-opted by the right and discussed in misogynistic and racist forumshttps://t.co/c8bqmUqpBN

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 19, 2020

On 19 May 2020, the NYT interpreted this distinction as a question of the dangers of being red-pilled, which it defined in terms of a gulf between left- or right-wing political opinions. But red-pilling is not about conservative politics, so much as it is about crashing out of the whole left-right paradigm. Being red-pilled reflects profound disillusionment about establishment narratives, a shattering of world views, and a refusal to accept top-down interpretations of information. The red-pilled experience of extreme alienation, born out of democratized access to information, countered by the control and manipulation of information, describes the new context of 21st century politics.

On this blog, I have maintained that social alienation and economic decline have been compounded by a misunderstanding of the degree to which things have changed over the past two decades. Outdated terms from previous centuries dominate our political, economic, and social discourses. They have not kept pace with enormous leaps in technology. Within that gap, there lie cognitive dissonance, and the potential for totalitarian exploitation as the public cannot distinguish between propaganda, that is, historical terms used to describe reality, and evident, Protean reality.

Coronavirus Fragments 15: Medical Precrime and the Hackable Brain

Horrifying Glimpse Into How DARPA Will "Save" You From COVID-19 and Venezuela Coup Tied Back To Trump (7 May 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

In my last two posts, The New World Emperor and Wake Up, You're Next, I stated that the main worry in the nCov pandemic is not just the virus - its origins, seriousness, the number of strains, and their forthcoming spread - but how the pandemic will be controlled.

I argued that mass vaccines and tracking will involve the transition from computer-based to human-based operating systems. A series of pandemic outbreaks now and in coming years will be followed by successive vaccines, which will implant weaponized AI and nanotechnology on a mass scale, in order to establish brain-machine interfaces around the globe, paired with a cryptocurrency as a reward or punishment system. If you accept this technology into your body, the control of the few over the many will be complete, and the Internet of Thoughts will be born.

To understand injectable technologies, see (above) The Last American Vagabond's 7 May 2020 interview with independent journalist, Whitney Webb. At 26:15, she describes in detail the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) brain-machine interface programs in the United States. Webb explains how these programs connect to the pandemic. Webb's 4 May 2020 article is a must-read:

CORONAVIRUS GIVES A DANGEROUS BOOST TO DARPA’S DARKEST AGENDA

Webb explains that DARPA presents its research as beneficial to the public. For example, it can make deaf people hear. However, "this is not about health." The actual intention behind DARPA's innovations is bioweaponry, aimed against domestic and foreign publics. The first guinea pigs in the implementation of injectable technology will be health care workers and other essential workers, who will become neuro-controlled actors.

Coronavirus: The Prestige of Censorship

Still from The Prestige (2006). Reproduced under Fair Use. Image Source: 3d Dog Script.

To quote the Christopher Nolan film, The Prestige (2006), every magic trick has three acts: the pledge, the turn, and the prestige. In the pledge, the magician shows you something ordinary. In the turn, the magician makes that ordinary thing do something extraordinary, like making it disappear. But in magic, it's not enough to make something disappear. You have to bring it back. This final illusion is the prestige.

The Prestige Every Magic Trick Has Three Parts (11 January 206). Video Source: Youtube.

Using a trick in which the magician makes a canary disappear, The Prestige explained how magic works. The trick takes something away and brings it back. How does it do this? The video below shows the grisly truth. The original canary is killed by the magician and replaced by a duplicate living bird, an imposter. It looks like the original bird is recovered. But the thing that is brought back is not the same thing that disappeared. It only looks that way.

The Prestige: Hiding In Plain Sight (24 February 2012). Video Source: Youtube.

Information about the coronavirus pandemic has something of a magician's prestige about it. Whatever we lose now, we will lose for good. When it comes back, it will not be the same thing, even though it will look identical. This week, nCov's competing narratives divided between:

• Governmental and mainstream media: the pledge
• Real alternative media: the turn
• Fake alternative media (in fact, governmental): the prestige

In our current situation, the 'canary' being made to disappear is the original alternative media, and the magician is governmental control.

Coronavirus: Scarcity, Triage and Euthanasia

DOCTOR RECALLS WITNESSING PATIENT KILLED INSIDE ICU; CHINA SELLS DONATED AID SUPPLIES TO US (26 March 2020). Video Source: Bitchute.

Shortages of medical equipment are leading to triage and euthanasia decisions and debates among doctors worldwide. Those shortages could have been avoided, because authorities knew ahead of time what was coming. The mainstream media and governments lied to hide policy-making failures. This is the kind of sloppy uselessness that fuels conspiracy theories on the Internet, because it makes authorities look like they were and are deliberately promoting the spread of the nCov virus.

We nearing widespread triage as a result of this corrupt/cruel supply issue.
Does anyone think that he won’t attempt to issue “guidelines,” or worse, Official Policy for Triage?
DACA recipients & LGBT no longer have protected rights. POC? Elderly? No ventilators for you.

— JoriNola (@JoriNOLA) March 27, 2020

Government officials allowed travel to continue unimpeded when the virus was already circulating. They denied it was lab-made, thus preventing a serious inquiry into that possibility. They encouraged the mainstream media to lie about the seriousness of the virus ('just the flu') and then back-peddled on those statements, when it became plain that the virus was a frightening pathogen. They did not take responsibility for the 'just the flu' policy worsening the spread of the virus. Instead, they dismissed how contagious this virus was. They denied it was airborne, or failed to discuss it. They did not explain how COVID19 is multiphasal, based on antibody dependent enhancement.

They claimed it was a disease that only kills the elderly, when it kills all age groups. The MSM's false reporting subtly planted the seeds that this was an elderly-only problem. This unforgivably hardened the public's hearts against these vulnerable citizens. While reinforcing their expertise and supreme authority in this morass of failure, officials and MSM have discredited, demonetized, censored and silenced members of the alt media who told the truth. Now, government officials are pushing to allow only official, controlled mainstream media to discuss the pandemic, because the MSM will report whatever they are told to say. Thus, freedom of movement is denied to citizens and freedom of the press is effectively denied, although it does not appear that way to the average, trusting 'normie' citizen.

The mess officials and administrators fostered now bears fruit: they did not order enough hospital supplies or brief their medics adequately to prepare for the coming surge. They told the public that masks do not work. They then asked those in the public who had bought masks to donate them to hospitals, which means that masks do work, but that these authorities failed to provide enough of them to health care workers. They are releasing prisoners from prisons, which will lead to widespread crime, further swamping the hospitals, ambulance, and police services. Next, officials will try to restart economies in virus-ridden zones, thereby perpetuating and deepening the pandemic. Later, they will force people to stay in their homes, or contain them - ill and well alike - in quarantine camps.

I have already discussed these problems as constituting a red-pill moment for medics and citizens. The core of the problem is not the scarcity of medical equipment and the pandemic crisis, but the pre-existing mentality that ranks citizens in terms of their worthiness to live, based on their productivity potential in an already bankrupt, fake system, which in turn was based on illusions of wealth and false virtues. The economy was already doomed. As that veil lifts, we can adapt to meet the resource demands of the pandemic, but to do so, we cannot trust the proponents of the old economy, because they are creatures of that system. If we place our trust in them, the pandemic will be used as an excuse to reinforce and entrench pre-existing systemic failures.