The Human Industrial Complex

Authored by Visayas Outpost’s Substack, (emphasis ours)

What Have We Wrought?

Watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical,

Liberal, oh fanatical, criminal.

Won’t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re acceptable,

Respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable…

 – Supertramp

Admittedly, it is no easy task in 2023 determining which end of the narrative Zeitgeist I find myself on.  Not wanting to add unnecessary noise to the buzzing of the hive, it can be best to wait until there is something that feels important enough to say.  And so it is that a few recent article trends in my news circle have sparked such a moment; because they helped put into place a clearer way of thinking about the nature of the threat we Humans face on this Earth.

What piqued my eyeballs as soon as I saw it was an article describing Michael Shellenberger’s testimony to the House Select Committee on what he calls The Censorship Industrial Complex.  A comprehensive and interlocking method used by government and social media companies to engineer what we think and say.  This concept is not new to you, Readers, but it is significant that someone has given it a name, and it has been presented to Congress.

Immediately on the heels of that was further proof of Shellenberger’s observation, in the recent announcement about U.S. Special Operations Command’s involvement with Accrete AI in developing a military-grade “AI” censoring tool which will ultimately run on social media.  These things come as no real surprise either, but the sheer nefariousness of this tool is something to behold.  It purports to analyze all content everywhere, in real time, to determine the threat level to the narrative.  To stamp out ‘embryonic’ ideas as soon as they show up.  The “AI” is able to calculate their likely impact, and stop ‘misinfo’ before it can start.   

A song like Rich Men North of Richmond would not have lived on YouTube, or ever seen the light of day.  Maybe you post something to a forum and it immediately gets altered.  Insidious.  Twitter (‘X’) is now using ‘user definitions’ in a way to not only regionalize content but granularize it to the individual level, such that no two user experiences are the same.  So you may have an echo chamber of one, friends, with all of your followers being bots.

Censorship is not the only Industrial Complex we suffer from however, merely the latest.  

The Military Industrial Complex has been with us since before Kennedy. 

But add to that the recent exposure of the Medical Industrial Complex, which we just called Big Pharma before. 

One could consider the Data Industrial Complex, or the Educational Industrial Complex. 

These all have the same nature; being intertwined with the government, with opaque funding, and control agendas that affect everyone. 

Climate, the Dollar, Energy, Agriculture; all of them are cartel-level industrial strength forces shaping our reality.   

Note that not one of these complexes support liberty or freedom!  They are tentacles of the same hydra, essentially; the one that wants to categorize, classify, assess, and manage you right into a little postage stamp apartment in a 15-minute city.  To keep you in an echo chamber, or immersed in an alt. reality VR game and sipping reconstituted urine.  But at least you’ll have an e-bike.  It occurs to me that we, as humans, are literally just numbers in a balance sheet to someone.  We are animated actuary tables.

“They got a building down New York City, it’s called Whitehall Street,

where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected,

neglected and selected.”

-Arlo Guthrie

We have been thinking about our humanity all wrong, it seems, not recognizing the reality for what it is.  Because we are no longer the Human Race, but the Human Industrial Complex.  We are commodities, in a position somewhere above animals but below the needs of the State.  The term ‘sheep’ or ‘cattle’ turns out to be a rather apt description of what we have become. 

For decades now the business world has referred to us as human capital.  We are an R.O.I. with values like our talent stack, and our skill set.  To the political class we are simply tax payers or votes to be harvested.  To the medical world we are percentages of mRna uptake in the population.  No aspect of our actual humanity matters to anyone in the halls of power, busy as they are classifying us into threat levels and managing us by algorithm.

With all of the stuff we ingest, inject, and absorb, they may as well clip ID tags to our ears.  In a sense we are not very far from that.  Call it vaccine passports, call it mark of the beast, but on this trajectory there is some threshold we will pass where our bodies, even our minds, will not be our own to control.  This is what the ‘brain domain’ battlefield seems to be all about, gaining control of that last line of defense; the human will.

By becoming controllable, we have become the ‘known knowns’ in risk management, the part of the equation they can mold and shape to the desired outcome.  What matters is not the wishes of We the People, but the wishes of Blackrock, the City of London, and others.  We provide essential tax dollars and votes needed to implement the vision these others, and that is about all we are good for.  For a time they will still need us as a labor component, but that too will change with increasing automation.  This is all in sharp contrast to what School House Rock explained to us kids back in the ‘70s, about power being vested in the people.  The illusion may still be there, but not the substance. 

We act self-important, as if still calling the shots.  We say silly things like “politicians work for us”.  Yet we cannot stop the Pharma companies trying to experiment on us, the Data companies from selling us out, and the Education system from targeting our children with ideological nonsense.  Those agendas are above the plebe paygrade, and it looks like nothing short of armed revolution is going to put a dent in it. 

Information: Their greatest tool

It took less than a century to advance from Hollerith punch cards to quantum computer tech, but we have paid a heavy price.  Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the day they formed Apple Computer, had no way to know where it would all lead.  And although I am a huge Jobs fan, the question must be asked:  What have we wrought?  Billions of people walking around staring at their little pandora’s box, every day, all day.  We are living, breathing, talking episodes of Black Mirror.  I fully expect Apple to come up with an implant version of the tech.  Then they can think of something really clever to call it, like iSpy, or iAm.  Short of jacking right into our brains with Neuralink, it would be the next logical step.

Fantasize with me and get into the Wayback Machine, tuned to 1976, and show up as a guest speaker in a high school.  I would warn them that as enticing as ‘computer science’ may seem, in the future it would become the backbone of enslavement for a good chunk of the human race.  To the kid in the back row bleeping on his handheld Mattel Football game, I would say we have even smaller devices that can hold thousands of songs and make video calls anywhere on Earth.  The only problem is they monitor us 24/7 and bathe us in EM radiation.  Our brains have gotten so used to blankly engaging and clicking apps that most of us can no longer read paper maps, or have the inclination to read books.  I would tell them that for us, history is whatever the digital library online says it is, so pay attention in school.    

And so here we stand, on the twilight of humanity some would say, no longer shaping our own destiny.  Liberté as we knew it has been obliterated by the failure first of legal protections, and then digital protections.  We seem to be past the point of the majority to think clearly on these matters, programmed as they are by the same little devices.  Lacking concern over where we are headed, and unable to even remember what a boy and a girl are.  Vapid expressions, loss of IQ, meaningless relationships, futile careers, and dwindling earnings compared to previous generations.  It is a burn-it-down level of predicament, to be sure.  I hope gen Z is pretty damned angry about it all.  World War ‘Z’ anyone?

Just Say No

A few weeks ago we watched the new Indiana Jones movie online.  It was pretty mediocre.  But there was an opening scene in which they ‘de-age’ Harrison Ford; Indiana Jones was back in the 1930s fighting Nazis.  The effect was flawless, as far as I could tell, by whatever CGI / “AI” methods they are using now.  Maybe you noticed that we get a lot more movies lately, but at a far lower level of acting and writing excellence.  This is the trend.  We get recycled stars, presumably forever now that they are digitized.  We will be watching Mission Impossible 16 eventually, long after Tom Cruise has gone to Scientology heaven.

To bookend that observation, there is apparently now an “AI” category for the Grammy Awards.  I understand there was a song purporting to be “Drake” but did not have enough human content to qualify, or something.  There are “AI” news writers.  There are “AI” generated sermons for Pastors… now there is a scary thought, let’s just listen to what Jesus GPT has for us this Sunday, please turn to 1st John.  There are “AI” Instagram models so realistic that people still ‘follow’ them even after learning they were computer generated. 

When I visit YouTube lately to listen to music, it is flooded with “AI”-generated muzak.  For example, type in ‘bluegrass’, and it will yield dozens of Appalachian bluegrass compilations — but as far as I can tell most of them are not real bands.  Spooky.  The scene of Times Square at the top of this essay is a CGI / “AI” still shot from an ethereal-looking video walk through.  The narration claimed it to be live when it obviously was not.  Double spooky. 

Normally I will include a plan of action in these essays, but change will not begin to happen until we unplug, and deprogram.  If you are reading this, then there is a good chance you are already on that path.  If not, then let me encourage you.  When everything around us is fake and distorted, then eventually something inside us will click.  It then becomes so easy just to close the lid on the laptop.  Let the phone run down to zero.  Enjoy a book.  I don’t know where you find yourself, Readers, or how you plan to cope with the mayhem coming our way as we get closer to ’24.  Being an election year, you should expect the worst.  Just say no.

In closing, an observational comparison about the 21st century Human Industrial Complex:  Given the emerging state of Serfdom we are facing, are things very much different now than they were in the Middle Ages?  Serfs were valued commodities to the Lords, and privileged to find such work as they could.  They knew better than to bite the hand that fed them, and they were willing to tolerate all manner of dehumanizing treatment to preserve their scarcity-based lifestyle.  The Lords controlled the land, aligned themselves politically, and influenced the way the country was run.  Just like corporations and elites today, come to think of it.  It is as if the experiment of Liberty and Democracy was just a historical aberration, and that it has finally run its course after 240 years. 

As we break ground on the homestead, with a newly-dug well in place, I look forward to the day when we will be off-grid.  It is a special feeling designing the plan yourself, having the fellas at church help build it, and knowing that the soil will be pushing up vegetables.  There are coconuts on the trees, fish in the ocean, and a next door neighbor with chickens.  Readers, until the Lord call us up with a shout, I hope and pray that you have found your own slice of Heaven.            

P.S. A movie recommendation:  The 1971 dystopian classic TXH-1138, George Lucas’ debut. 

Far more visionary than Kubrick’s 2001, in my opinion, and far more chilling than the movie adaptations like Soylent Green or 1984.  The scenes of the Video Jesus were particularly insightful, but so were the robotic policemen, the ‘prison’, the medications — it is fully packed.

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