The End Of Humanity

Behind the daily barrage of media distractions and inane corporate advertisements, the ruling oligarchs are planning to radically change how the human race functions. The U.S.-NATO military power establishment has started cold wars with North Korea and Russia, exacerbated by the likely accidental but terrifying false nuclear alert that Hawaii received this week. Our state of techno-tyranny is being prepared for enormous expansions as policing and surveillance technology become more advanced. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in the world and the owner of the Washington Post, is now using Amazon to control the structures of our economy through his company’s deals with the military/intelligence complex.

As tech plutocrats like Bezos prepare for vast shifts in currency, energy and the global economy, replacing the “old money” plutocrats of earlier stages, the only change ordinary people can discern is one where their rulers become more efficient and intrusive. Touch screens and social media, insidiously addictive to the human brain, act as portable surveillance and mind programming devices. Drones are used by the government as skillful spying and assassination tools. (This is being expanded on with Alexa, Amazon’s line of household helper bots that can monitor people’s private conversations.) A DNA database of the citizenry has been constructed, giving the NSA theoretical mastery over our biology. We are almost completely exposed to, and at the mercy of, a Huxleyan monstrosity of a government.

When another one of these tech plutocrats Mark Zuckerberg announced his censorious plan last week to redirect Facebook users away from politics, he said the new measures would be “good for our well-being.” Similar language came in the EU vice president Frans Timmermans’ statement last year about why EU countries will soon be under control of an anti-“fake news” authority: “We live in an era where the flow of information and misinformation has become almost overwhelming. That is why we need to give our citizens the tools to identify fake news, improve trust online, and manage the information they receive.”

If we listen to these commands to turn our thoughts over to elites, humanity will soon cease to exist, either by going extinct or by losing the qualities that make us human. Around 15,000 nuclear weapons exist right now, and Russia, China and the NATO countries might now be more ready than ever to set off a nuclear war. The rapid destabilization of Arctic Methane, caused by drastic temperature increases in that region, seem destined to create worldwide crop failure and massive warming in the near future. The global oligarchs are preparing for doomsday scenarios like these, building luxury survival hideouts and evidently fortifying their militaries in case of social upheavals. When the crisis comes, it will be seized upon to destroy the last remains of our freedoms.

“As we move closer to climate chaos, we can expect increasingly severe isolated natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, and eventually temperature spikes and freezes which will kill crops and decimate industrial agriculture, causing mass famine,” wrote Caitlin Johnstone during the hurricanes and fires of last summer. “This will cause people to get desperate for solutions, which will be the power establishment’s chance to swoop in and save the day with global energy policy overhauls and probably geoengineering as well. World governments will be forced to sign onto this in desperation, handing unmitigated control of the world to the oligarchs. Such plans almost certainly exist, and the technology for it is almost certainly being developed and warehoused for this eventuality.”

This is why we need to recognize the significance of the censorship measures being imposed by elites around the world; what we’re seeing is the slow-motion snuffing out of independent thought. As social media companies and Google suppressdisfavored material, the U.S. and European governments target dissenting voices under guise of fighting “fake news,” and the FCC comes close to destroying net neutrality, the alternative media and its journalists are being increasingly erased from the public eye. If or when they disappear, we’ll be left defenseless against the most extensive and sophisticated oligarchic propaganda network in history.

When they go away, what will remain is a mainstream media that’s owned by fifteen billionaires. What will remain is a landscape where the CIA can secretly putpropaganda into the content of these media contents, and even, under a 2013 covert propaganda reform, privately recruit and train figures in the media for promoting the state’s agenda. The White House, as admitted by George W. Bush in 2005, will also be able to secretly produce videos for the TV networks to show.

What will remain is a U.S. government that, under Obama’s Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, now has a center for attacking disfavored media while advancing what the Act calls “truth-based narratives.” A government that can use voter suppression and vote tally hacking to steal the presidency from a candidate like Bernie Sanders, then completely erase what it did from the official history. A government that’s both more militarized than ever and under unprecedented corporate control, particularly through its new fourth branch in the American intelligence community.

The U.S. intelligence agencies, hailed as reliable authorities on the supposed Russian hacking of the 2016 election, have been in direct partnership with dozens of large corporations since 2005. The Domestic Security Alliance Council, the organization created for this merging of corporations with law enforcement, has carried out surveillance on peaceful Occupy Wall Street organizers. When the dissenting voices are forced underground, DSAC and the rest of the corporate state’s police force will be able to attack disobedient people with virtual impunity. This police force will include, because of Obama’s signing into law Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, a U.S. military that the president can use as a domestic policing tool. It will also be able to use covert government spies and disruptors, as it did during the WTO protests, to sabotage movements.

A litany of other means for crushing dissent will be ready, including a White House that can prosecute and torture government whistleblowers, an array of heavily militarized local police departments, and a surveillance state that monitors every text, email, phone call, and social media post from the population. A deeply corrupted court system, and a prison system that can send convicts into solitary confinement for completely trivial reasons, will act as a brutal and barely challenged police state.

We had our chance to prevent this when the military-industrial complex wholly took over society during the mid-nineteenth century by creating a paradigm of permanent war. We could have risen up when the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the IMF imposed neoliberal economic reforms that put much of the world under corporate totalitarian control. We could have resisted when 9/11 was used to explode the private security complex and build an all-reaching surveillance apparatus. But the past is the past, and we might need to forgive ourselves for not acting earlier. Then we can focus on rising up and regenerating.