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.

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.

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Hindsight is 2020

Investigative journalist Harry Vox filmed 2014. Video Source: Youtube.

On 19 September 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) published its recommendations for 2020 in its annual report, entitled, A WORLD AT RISK: Annual report on global preparedness for health emergencies. The cover of the manual (below) features a coronavirus.

Image Source: WHO via reliefweb.

The booklet states that the WHO's plans for 2020 must focus on the natural or deliberate release of a respiratory pathogen (hat tip: The Dollar Vigilante). You can read more here (it is available in several languages):

"A rapidly spreading pandemic due to a lethal respiratory pathogen (whether naturally emergent or accidentally or deliberately released) poses additional preparedness requirements. Donors and multilateral institutions must ensure adequate investment in developing innovative vaccines and therapeutics, surge manufacturing capacity, broad-spectrum antivirals and appropriate non-pharmaceutical interventions. All countries must develop a system for immediately sharing genome sequences of any new pathogen for public health purposes along with the means to share limited medical countermeasures across countries."

Given its publication date, this plan from the WHO's Global Preparedness Monitoring Board was likely written in the spring and summer of 2019. That means that the WHO was expecting a respiratory pathogen pandemic, months before the officially-stated date regarding awareness or appearance of nCov.

In the grand scheme of things, this indication of the WHO's early 2019 foreknowledge of the pandemic is nothing. If you want to know where things are going, read the 'Lock Step' scenario, starting on page 18 of the May 2010 manual, Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development, published by the Rockefeller Foundation (hat tip: Ruling Class Observer).

This document reveals long-term planning for a pandemic, in which the global economy is expected to be damaged or destroyed. As a result, technocratic control will increase, step by step, in the face of anticipated public protests. Africa will be a critical target of new techocratic governance. Another outcome will be the fracturing of the World Wide Web, with certain sectors of the Internet enclosed behind firewalls, accessible only for approved citizens. Yet another aspect will be restriction of travel.

Images Source: Ruling Class Observer.

As if in lock step with this 2010 document, African leaders have begun articulating a new vision for their continent. Some speeches are very inspiring.

Ghana President Leaves French President SPEECHLESS!! (7 May 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

There are several such documents which seem to have predicted, and planned for, a very similar pandemic to this one. You can see some of them listed in the 'Preparing for Pandemic' section of this page. Below, find recent references to long-standing technologies, now being launched for global vaccination programs and surveillance.

Meanwhile, in China ... pic.twitter.com/FQVMTK85D7

— Tony (@Mrtdogg) May 9, 2020

He only wants to "heal the world", they sayhttps://t.co/GWLKI1bNwy

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) May 10, 2020

More on DARPA and Gene drive research herehttps://t.co/vGPQoixvWo

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) May 9, 2020

The Roadmap

YouTube CEO: Users don’t like “authoritative” mainstream media channels but we boost them anywayhttps://t.co/xRzHIgVLnT 😂 You just can't make this stuff up

— BitChute (@bitchute) May 10, 2020

Totalitarian technocracy will be a transhumanist global régime. After ten years of blogging on this topic, this is the roadmap as I see it:

• Total control and censorship of mainstream media
• Suppression of alt media and replacement of alt media with a fake alt media, i.e. controlled opposition, whose posed criticisms will resolve into support for authority
• Replacement of petrodollar economy with a digitized, human-nanotech economy
• Engineered famines; restricted access to food; food supply used to coerce populations into obedience
• New forms of intensified political correctness; censorship of language and imagery, such that certain words, images, symbols are forbidden
• Pseudo-maintenance of laws, constitutions, representative bodies, and other institutional frameworks of democracy, behind which the real totalitarian techno-apparatus will function
• Extreme surveillance, bio-monitoring, incorporation of human body into grid and cloud
• Initially, this will seem positive, with many medical improvements
• Smartcities will be test centres for experimental technologies, pseudo-events, and false flags, as well as real disasters and fake and real terror events, inflicted upon their populations
• Controlled access to businesses and services according to service or worker class
• Restricted travel
• Population classes confined to different geographical units
• Break-up of the current Internet into compartments, separated by firewalls: no-go zones; denial-of-service ghettos for the anti-establishment; elite access to knowledge, research, government, technological information
• Extreme elite geographical areas, which will be tech-free, except for tech and nano-interaction allotted to servants and slaves of the elites
• Rise of hacker underground, dissident 'bug out' areas, particularly in rural zones, with black markets and criminalized trade routes
• Independent underground will counterfeit access points into establishment sectors and into exclusive Internet systems; and will build highly-developed hacks to maintain access to global travel and trade
• Complicated espionage running between sectors
• Human break-off groups will reject physical merger with machines and cybernetics and will remain 'human purists' at great cost in terms of real poverty, while they maintain an uncontaminated, viably historical, human physical experience
• Neverending wars and crises of mysterious origin; endless lies from authorities; infinite media misinformation and disinformation about crime, safety, and security; non-stop scares, disappearances, arrests, imprisonments
• Total distortion of history, law, philosophy, and science to serve current circumstances
• Extreme vulnerability for the elderly with no means
• Centralized, digitized economies, nominally government-run (quasi-Communism), but really managed by AI, to favour the goals of heads of global corporations
• Technocracy will be justified by materialist 'scientism,' i.e. a cult of rationalistic materialism, to the exclusion of emotional and extra-sensory or spiritual aspects of experience
• To fill the spiritual and emotional void, public ceremonies and surveillance dramas with celebrities will be intensified; some of these actors will be digital (i.e. non-human) and will be advertised as purely virtual on purpose, so that citizens will knowingly satisfy alienation, loneliness, unsatisfied love, emotional neediness, and familial attachment instincts, via public rituals and virtual reality subscriptions, through interactions with non-human, AI-driven characters
• Appropriation of cultural traditions into virtual entertainment systems - including the high arts, mass arts, and quasi New Age practices - to misdirect, pervert, and suppress human yearning for authenticity and transcendence of the human condition in non-tech-based ways
• Deification of AI, marshalled by a deeply corrupt, technocratic high priest class, to merge with older religions
• Elevation of AI images, statistics, text, code, and numbers so that they carry symbolic, cultish, secretive significance
• Transhumanist, augmented human sects who will glorify and rejoice in their merger with machines
• Destruction of the emotional life, mind over the heart, possibly supported through nanotech brain implants to adjust sensory perception of the world and to manipulate brain chemistry, such that biotechnical lobotomies will remove physical connection to the soul
• Neo-Malthusian agendas, via global injectable nanotechnologies, to depopulate earth and purify and clean the environment
• Glorification of the environment as a Paradise, dotted with smartcities, symbolically dominated by genetically-engineered, intelligence-boosted, and physically-enhanced transgendered children, smartangels
• Resolution of climate change and much-trumpeted attainment of climate control; heavy promotion of rescued endangered species; at the same time, AI nanotech will escape human populations where it has been implanted; nanobots will get out of control, invade the biosphere, and pollute and destroy the planet's environment. This disaster will be covered up until it can no longer be concealed
• Totalitarian governmental AI will eventually gain sentience and begin operating independently
• This AI-fascism will inevitably fail and its leaders and celebrities will be overrun when AI becomes conscious; given that the technocracy's leaders see the human species as a toxic plague upon the earth, AI will oblige by obliterating us, unless technocrats forge an alliance with the anti-technocrats they have oppressed

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.

New Post at Vocal Media: The Coronavirus Consciousness: If There Was No More Time

Image Source: 4chan.

I have published a new post at Vocal Media about the coronavirus as a lens of crisis, through which we see authorities and ourselves:

The Coronavirus Consciousness
Take Prepping to a New Level: Be Ready to Save Yourself
It might be a good time to look at Stephen King's novel, The Stand (1978); see the graphic novel version here and the movie version (while the link lasts). In The Stand, a killer virus escapes a secret lab at a military base in the United States and it wipes out almost the entire global population. That will not likely happen in reality, unless the coronavirus mutates. But the themes in The Stand are relevant. Mainly, they involve the way a pandemic causes societal collapse. Without an outer apparatus and authorities to define and enforce social order, the crisis brings out the core of who people really are.

29% — that’s the % of the 138 #coronavirus infected patients who are actually infected medical staff in one Wuhan hospital. Almost 1 in 3 patients being hospital healthcare workers is just insane. New case series report in JAMA: https://t.co/j7HPV8j8dp pic.twitter.com/3Hmu3MaE7m

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 7, 2020

1700+ 🦠 infected medical workers is extremely frustrating. Just a few weeks ago, infected healthcare workers was just 14. The brave doctors and nurses fighting in the frontlines, being cut down, are the greatest heros of this epidemic ✊🏼. #SARSCoV2 #COVID19 https://t.co/kN6xZ2E9kc

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 14, 2020

Young Wuhan doctor dies of COVID-19 while fighting the #coronavirus on the frontlines. And China confirms 500 cases in prison population. (Arirang News) pic.twitter.com/HiUWddZoTm

— Max Howroute▫️ (@howroute) February 21, 2020

We keep getting reassured in Australia we are very prepared. I don't see 1,000s of oxygen therapy resources made available in the event of an outbreak in community and in our big local hospital we have only two negative pressure isolation rooms. #coronavirusaustralia

— Phillip Ma (@PhillipMa6) February 7, 2020

Source.

One of the things I discussed in the Vocal Media article was the toll taken by the virus on medical professionals. COVID19 engulfed them in Wuhan within seven weeks. There are reports and leaked calls from medics in the Wuhan hospitals that many - if not most - doctors and nurses are infected. We do not know enough about the disease yet to know if it comes back for a second or third wave. But infected people can become reinfected (it is possible that the disease goes dormant and flares back up, and infected people appear to recover, but never do and remain infectious). That is why we may face a future where hospitals, doctors and nurses are initially swamped, then unavailable.

Extreme conditions lead to extreme measures. This is the type of unconfirmed information circulating on Chinese social media. China has finally crossed the line. (25 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube.

The same concern goes for governmental authorities. Within one week, three Iranian MPs with fevers sat at a closed parliamentary session with the rest of the Iranian government. On 22 February 2020, Slovak Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini was hospitalized in Bratislava with an upper respiratory infection and fever and has cancelled all his upcoming appointments. This happened after he attended several meetings with world leaders. His office denied he has contracted the coronavirus. All it would take is one asymptomatic politician or bureaucrat to attend one top-level meeting. It is not hard to imagine what could happen.

Coronavirus outbreak: Iran health minister appears ill at news conference before COVID-19 diagnosis (25 February 2020). Video Source: Youtube. Subtitled version here.

There are ways for individuals to face these circumstances now in a frame of mind that will make things turn out for the better. Every person has a chance now to change the course of collective future responses by strengthening inner resolve in a moment of soul-searching. I made the following observation in the Vocal Media piece:

"In this epidemic, people can and will disappear, and you will just not know what happened to them. Whether that is due to infection or oppression, you may never find out. If you need to track people down, to say what you need to say, or anything else, now is the time to do it."

The virus has emerged out of a world that was filled with shortcomings. It can push us now to address those shortcomings, starting at the micro level. We should all consider what we would do if there was no more time - not in panic - but because this is a watershed moment. At that watershed moment, we have a chance to improve general circumstances by becoming less passive, less dependent on authorities, and by connecting to reality and other people, without judgement, in a more awakened and aware way.

Are there old friends or family you should to contact? Who would you call? Or write? Do you have apologies to make? Do you need to tell someone you love them? Do you need to settle scores or resolve problems? Do you have fears to conquer? What are your real priorities? Is there work to complete?

In that spirit, I may make some related posts at my other blog, The Dragonfly, in coming days.

Reckon with these completions now, in the best of senses and with the highest of intentions, and perhaps a vaccine will be developed in good time. We may wake up and everything will return to normal, and perhaps the world will be a better place on the other side of crisis.


See all my posts on Epidemics here and here.

A Palindrome for Candlemas

Feb 2, 2020 (02/02/2020) is apparently the first eight-digit ubiquitous palindrome date since January 1, 1010.

Can any math/date nerds confirm this?

— Christine Estima (@christineestima) February 1, 2020

Wuhan Coronavirus Hospital Construction Livecam

Live: View of construction site of Wuhan's novel coronavirus hospitals武汉火神山、雷神山医院施工现场 (live from 27 January 2020). Video Source: Youtube. Updated here.

See all my posts on Epidemics here and here.

Dead and Alive in Time

THE HAUNTED ABANDONED MANSION (SOMETHING GOT THROWN AND SCREAMS IN THE BASEMENT) (31 December 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

For today, see two videos. One is an urbex exploration of a reputedly haunted French château. The incredible workmanship, tiles, wood carving, wallpaper, lamps, fireplaces, the lead paint, and the marble work are a reminder that material wealth is no protection against the waste of ages. Even in our brief lives, or across a few paltry generations, placing faith in materialism it is like holding up an umbrella against a hurricane of time.

Image Source: Bloomberg.

The irony is that in previous eras, people were generally more religious. However, the apex of their world view was plainly defined by solid, physical expressions of wealth to anchor themselves in time. A glance tells us that this is the tragic, beautiful esthetic of the dead, a set of choices no longer available to most of us and sadly no longer relevant. Material immobility entraps us in a dead past. Those who still cling to materialism in this old sense use it to construct their social personae; they are deceived if they think that this will help them survive.

Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 20 years (11 January 2020). 7263 days. Video Source: Youtube.

By contrast, the second video is the monumental output of Noah Kalina, entitled Everyday. I have covered Kalina's work previously here and here. Kalina has photographed himself daily for the past twenty years. Kalina achieves a dynamic permanence in virtual reality. The two videos show the tremendous jump in values and perspectives between the 20th and 21st centuries. 21st century cameras and computers propelled the 20th century's monumental, immovable, time-anchored objects into the virtual sphere, and rendered everything that was once tied down by wealth and authority into evolving, shifting phenomena.

Kalina started his project on 11 January 2000, before the launch of Youtube, yet the project was tailor-made for a Youtube space. Younger Youtubers were unsettled by the video. Some were born after 2000 and they thought that Kalina looks depressed and old.

I see in his valiant effort a distinction between the fragile person with dark circles under his eyes, who physically ages, and the eternal self. There are glimpses of personal habits which gave Kalina temporary comfort, stability and security - a beard, a favourite shirt, a girlfriend or wife, an apartment - but these inevitably fall away. What gives him real security and permanence is the Everyday project, in which, regardless of what was happening, he repeated the same activity every day to create a vision of a higher purpose.

Image Source: Spirituality and Health.

In the video, Kalina looks like a superhero flying through, and transcending, the decades. He remains the central figure, his work provides a subtle message about the positive implications (and applications) of technology for those who will follow after him. He is planting a seed of understanding and wisdom.

Image Source: pinterest.

It is an unusual and admirable artistic statement, to capture through photographs and the Youtube mirror the unchanging true self, moving in time, which is continually clinging to, and divesting itself of, its transitory ego-masks and all its props and crutches.

Image Source: AZ Quotes.

Image Source: Verywell Mind.

See all my posts on Urban Exploration.
See all my posts on Time Lapses.

Intermission

Image Source: Harald Hund.

It is time for an intermission. I have called the 2010s a 'decade of disillusionment,' when many of us lost our faith in authoritative realities, due to revelations of corruption, violence, mass manipulation, and exploitation. It is hard to know what to believe as we leave those years behind.

Supposedly normal. Image Source: Oprah Winfrey Instagram via reddit and 4chan.

I miss the days before that decade, when I believed in official reality. I miss the days when I thought that Kevin Spacey was just a great actor and Tom Hanks played a nice Boomer Everyman. Now we live in an alternate reality where Spacey kills people with kindness. And Hanks publishes creepy photos of lost gloves and baby shoes, whether they are on streets, parks, or abandoned in the desert. We do not have to look very far before we encounter photos like the one above - freely posted by the celebrities themselves! This is no whistle-blower's work. This is symbolism, rubbed in the faces of the uninitiated mob. But it is so blatant that even the uninitiated know there is something twisted, ugly, and wrong about it.

It's time for a breather from the theatrics in which the mass media, political media, and social media are weaponized against audience populations. It is time to collect ourselves and get our bearings. It is time for an intermission.

Intermission (elevator music) (5 June 2012). Video Source: Youtube.

Jeffrey Epstein: You'll Find a God in Every Golden Cloister

Notice that in this cross-dressing portrait, Bill Clinton has six fingers on his right hand (close up). Parsing Bill by Australian-American artist, Petrina Ryan-Kleid. The painting sits in Epstein's Manhattan mansion. Image Source: Daily Mail.

Coverage of Jeffrey Epstein's demise reminds me of the disappearance of Flight MH370 (see my posts here and here). This is a moment, as I put it, when everyday reality "goes off script" and we begin to perceive a gross drama, a terrible, epic story that serves as a backdrop to, and drives, our little lives.

Which of these stories contains the real truth? One is the mundane truth of small individuals. Voltaire celebrated this reality at the end of Candide (1759). You could venture out into the tempestuous world and encounter imperial intrigues, the fall of princes, natural disasters. But at the end, you would be lucky to sit at your front door, grow flowers and eat strawberries, candied citron and pistachios:

"You are perfectly right, said Pangloss; for when man was put into the garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum [to serve him], so that he should work it; this proves that man was not born to take his ease. —Let’s work without speculating, said Martin; it’s the only way of rendering life bearable. The whole little group entered into this laudable scheme; each one began to exercise his talents. The little plot yielded fine crops . . . and Pangloss sometimes used to say to Candide: —All events are linked together in the best of possible worlds; for, after all, if you had not been driven from a fine castle by being kicked in the backside for love of Miss Cunégonde, if you hadn’t been sent before the Inquisition, if you hadn’t traveled across America on foot, if you hadn’t given a good sword thrust to the baron, if you hadn’t lost all your sheep from the good land of Eldorado, you wouldn’t be sitting here eating candied citron and pistachios. —That is very well put, said Candide, but we must go and work our garden."

Night (7 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube. See other videos of Epstein's islands by Rusty Shackleford, here. See Epstein's fake ambulance, revealed in drone footage, here; possibly related to trafficking.

The other truth is one of murderous and hungry golden gods. It is an inconvenient truth about the world's politicians, celebrities, academics, scientists, and philanthropists, best described in the lyrics from One Night in Bangkok, sung in 1984 by Murray Head, written by Tim Rice and Björn Ulvaeus:

Time flies doesn't seem a minute
Since the Tirolean spa had the chess boys in it
All change don't you know that when you
Play at this level there's no ordinary venue

It's Iceland or the Philippines or Hastings or
Or this place!

One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain't free
You'll find a god in every golden cloister
And if you're lucky then the god's a she
I can feel an angel sliding up to me ...

Tea, girls, warm, sweet
Some are set up in the Somerset Maugham suite ...

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble
Not much between despair and ecstasy
One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble
Can't be too careful with your company
I can feel the devil walking next to me

Siam's gonna be the witness
To the ultimate test of cerebral fitness
This grips me more than would a
Muddy old river or reclining Buddha
And thank God I'm only watching the game controlling it

I don't see you guys rating
The kind of mate I'm contemplating
I'd let you watch, I would invite you
But the queens we use would not excite you

So you better go back to your bars, your temples
Your massage parlours

One night in Bangkok and the world's your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain't free
You'll find a god in every golden cloister
A little flesh, a little history
I can feel an angel sliding up to me

One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble
Not much between despair and ecstasy
One night in Bangkok and the tough guys tumble
Can't be too careful with your company
I can feel the devil walking next to me

Basically: Hoffenberg was Epstein's mentor and business partner, and the two of them joined forces in the mid-1980s. But then in 1993 everything fell apart when it turned out Hoffenberg's company was actually just a half-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

I'm still looking for the attorney supposedly murdered in 1997, but I found a different attorney who was murdered in 1985 and Les Wexner was linked to his death somehow, and also to the mob. https://t.co/NR8M3YXnjH pic.twitter.com/P2bLhFlaQg

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

Hoffenberg pleaded guilty to securities fraud and spent 20 years in prison, while Epstein pleaded guilty to... conspiring to steal Treasury checks from residential mailboxes and got 5 years probation. pic.twitter.com/mLticXckDq

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

Oh shit y'all, I almost gave up, but I finally found it! I now know who Hoffenberg thinks Epstein killed: Wexler's attorney, who tried to blackmail Epstein and Wexler in 1997 for child sex trafficking.

No, I have no idea if said attorney actually existed, or if he was murdered. pic.twitter.com/BsnYrx1lpj

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

As part of his sentence, Hoffenberg was ordered to pay $475M in restitution. While there was little hope of him paying back that amount from prison, Hoffenberg seems convinced that Epstein still has that money somewhere -- and he's still trying to collect it from Epstein today. pic.twitter.com/r6ZpZYfg13

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

But the whole Hoffenberg arc does cast a light on @thedailybeast's story from yesterday, on what Acosta told the Trump transition team when he was being vetted. Acosta claimed he'd agreed to the lenient NPA because he'd gotten orders to do so – Epstein was some kind of informant. pic.twitter.com/lwPIUjKB2j

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) July 10, 2019

Arthur Shapiro homicide investigation (1985-1990). Image Source: 4chan. Click to enlarge.

Epstein was set up as a billionaire. He got much of his money managing the fortune of Leslie Wexner (owner of Victoria's Secret, among other companies and foundations, also a noted philanthropist), who is connected to the 1985 murder of attorney Arthur Shapiro. Online bloggers and reporters now suspect Epstein's involvement in the 1997 murder of Wexner's attorney. Epstein was rumoured to be an intelligence agent, whether for the CIA, MI6 or Mossad (see here, here and here). He lured state leaders and societies' leading lights into compromising positions with trafficked underaged sex workers. He then blackmailed his associates. He also cleared their financial debts.

Image Source: 4chan.

Jeffrey Epstein - Palm Beach House Raid Police Video (10-20-2005) (14 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

The Epstein case reveals how whole societies can be manipulated through the exploitation of their leaders' shadow sides. These are the burdens of power: sadistic sex, drug addictions, cult fetishes, secret obsessions. We know that there is still decency left, because these people fear exposure, and have blind spots, although they probably believe that decency is for the suckers on Main Street. Everything depends on deceit. The whole MSM is tasked with convincing the public that their top stratum is sane.

Epstein May Be Just One Part of an Intricate Network of Sex and Power (15 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube. For journalist Whitney Webb's research on this network, go here; her Epstein series: part 1, part 2, part 3.

QTR #139 - Whitney Webb Goes Deep: Blowing Open The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal (15 August 2019). Video Source: Youtube.

In 1985, Les Wexner's attorney was murdered in broad daylight before he supposed to testify about tax evasion and offsh banking. A suppressed police report implicated him in his death.

Soon after, Epstein began fixing Wexner's "tangled finances." Coincidence? https://t.co/CqFlsk1OW0

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) August 16, 2019

Watch my latest interview w Consortium News for the latest on my Epstein research and a sneak peek at Part 4 of my series on the case. https://t.co/5jccEyCxiy

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) August 16, 2019

any researchers knowledgeable about money laundering, currency manipulation and institutions like deutsche bank and financial institutions that are intel front companies, please get in touch w me. i think i may know why epstein was arrested in july out of nowhere after all.

— Whitney Webb (@_whitneywebb) August 16, 2019

Slowing people are realizing Epstein flew for Khashoggi in Iran/Contra.
Oct 23rd, 2018 Epstein Flew Mujahadeen For Khashoggi's Barrick Gold, Deripaska Is Drug Runner Nowhttps://t.co/57d0sWYS9D

— TruthLeaks (@GeorgWebb) August 16, 2019

This week, Epstein's friend, associate and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell appeared in Los Angeles while reading a book about CIA agents, implying that Epstein was part of the system that supposedly protects us. In other words, we are the sheep who need herding and we - not they - are unknowing hypocrites when we draw a line between our leaders and ourselves.

Image Source: 4chan.

Maxwell seemed to be saying: Jeffrey was Everyman. He was Everyone. He was 'one of us.' This is a fallacy which helps murderers sleep at night. Contrary to what our leaders think, they are not indispensable, nor is the order they have created. Their corruption, hidden by compromised individuals, ruined institutions, proxies, shell companies, and a theatre of philanthropic (or terraforming) virtue, are not necessary conditions for our collective survival.

Not fiction, not fake news: Keyser Soze is real, and 'committed suicide' last week. Keyser Soze (The Story) (24 July 2007). From The Usual Suspects (1995) © Gramercy Films/Spelling Films. Directed by Bryan Singer, who has been accused several times of underage sexual assault in Hollywood. Reproduced non-commercially under Fair Use for educational purposes. Video Source: Youtube.

This is a world of pleasure, exploitation, corruption, private islands, tax evasion and silenced victims. Obsessed with protecting their positive reputations, these Pinhead Hellraisers have a strange sense of regret and sadness. They lament over their debts and the constant need to maintain fake public personas. You can hear it in songs like Adele's Skyfall.

Image Source: 4chan. This New York Post story inspired this trans-person-versus-Epstein legal case in 2008.

Their twisted dream is dying, although they feel like they are on the verge of victory. Their narcissistic lies have begun to dissolve. Their rotten materialism is failing them; fewer and fewer people want to buy into their illusions. Karma and Justice are coming for them. They are living on borrowed money and borrowed time.

How Jeffrey Epstein became the richest pedophile in the world | CDAN Ep. 284 (9 July 2019). Video Source: Youtube.