In September 2019 the Western world faced an unsolvable debt crisis. Even with historically low interest rates and the panicked injection of trillions by central banks the global financial system was once again careening towards a liquidity crunch on a larger scale than the systemic collapse of 2008. But between the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 an unprecedented event took place which froze the financial system. A genetically engineered virus broke out of a vaccine research lab in China. The organism, enhanced by ‘gain-of-function’ techniques, boosted the common cold virus into a new strain which attacked nerve cells and caused severe respiratory illness in the elderly or unwell. The new strain swept around the world in weeks thanks to widespread international travel.
Belatedly and in response, the World Health Organization (WHO) successfully compelled governments to place most of the world under house arrest. This control measure was as unprecedented as the virus and had already been trialled by China’s totalitarian CCP regime. Immediately hailed as a success by the WHO, these lockdown measures were enthusiastically adopted by Italy, the first country in the West to do so. By March 2020 every Western government apart from Sweden, most of the developing world and America’s Red States followed in lockstep.
The internet, smartphones and QR codes were used to implement ubiquitous surveillance systems. Compelled by smart phone notifications and social shaming, populations largely self-policed their own house arrest. The lockdowns were in part successful because centralised news services and social media technologies facilitated the universal penetration of messages also controlled by the World Health Organisation.
In the Global South many thousands began to starve as the informal economy was shut down with nothing to replace it. In the West, working class communities, the elderly and students began to slowly lose their grip on reality, trapped in tiny living quarters with nothing but screens - of the smartphone, computer and television - to engage with the world. Shares in all technology companies rocketed.
But resistance to the lockdowns sprang up everywhere too. In response, social media companies scaled up vast censorship apparatuses, using AI to scan every single message for warning signs that the content may be ‘unsafe’. The population was set at war against each other. Police that had ruled communities by consent turned to force. Oppressive regimes inflicted unimaginable hardships on the most vulnerable sections of society, especially the poor and children. Society became divided along partisan lines: a core of devout regime apologists connected to the middle and upper classes, a fringe of dissidents springing up from the poorest, and a mass of compliant individuals in between.
By December 2020, false salvation came in the form of a novel medical technology platform which was mobilised to deliver a ‘vaccine’ under emergency authorisation. Winning out over a competitor platform that used an attenuated chimpanzee adenovirus to send new instructions into human cells, this new so-called vaccine relied on lipid nanoparticles to maintain the structure of its messenger RNA until it could bond directly with cell nuclei, rewriting the cell’s DNA to produce viral antibodies. It had never been deployed at scale and had no long-term clinical safety testing behind it. But the nanotechnology used in the delivery mechanism created extreme inflammatory side-effects. As the altered blood cells reproduced, the production of viral antibodies spiralled out of control. It became widely known that the injections were a conveyor belt towards heart disease, ovary damage and myriad other side-effects which killed hundreds of thousands, sparking what was in effect a second human-caused pandemic in 2021.
As the death toll from the experimental injections mounted, digital censorship become even more muscular and all-pervasive. Opponents of any aspect of the pandemic control regime were branded as right-wing conspiracy theorists. Demonstrations across the world were repressed harshly. Ruthlessly censored dissident voices migrated to a whole new alternative media ecosystem of news websites and video platforms, which in turn were blocked by internet service providers. Companies like PayPal shut down payment facilities of anyone identifiably associated with the dissident media and confiscated their funds. As the world slid into the darkness of totalitarian control the richest individuals in the world doubled their wealth. Stocks in digital technology companies continued to soar upwards as the physical economy was temporarily choked. Billions of dollars poured into the coffers of pharmaceutical companies. Every kind of grift and corruption dogged government financial assistance and surveillance programmes, enriching the consultancies that fed on government spending.
In early 2022, as countries began to finally declare the pandemic over, Russia officially invaded Ukraine following a sequence of provocations by NATO. In a matter of days the entire media switched its focus from the virus to the war. Western countries and NATO would seek to prolong this war as much as possible to weaken Russia. Adherence to covid totalitarian orthodoxy was seamlessly supplemented by a new orthodoxy – uncritical support for NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. Liberal professionals began embellishing their names on social media with three emojis: a face mask, a needle and a Ukraine flag. As the pandemic measures subsided and the severely battered real economy returned to life, albeit with many smaller businesses eliminated, a ferocious wave of inflation gripped Western economies. Prices of many commodities doubled. Even the rigged official inflation measures showed 10-15% inflation year on year. The war in Ukraine was used as cover for the spike in oil and gas prices which in reality had been caused by the NATO alliance’s self-imposed sanctions on Russian gas and the hyper-inflationary covid support and money-printing measures. Dissidents suspected that inflation was being used strategically as part of the next phase of managing the Western sovereign debt crisis which had gripped the financial system since 2008. Unlike in the 1920s, runaway inflation was avoided.
In October 2022, a venture backed mainly by Microsoft delivered version 3.5 of what was known as a ‘Generative Pretrained Transformer model’, an artificial intelligence capable of human-like reading, writing and reasoning. By the end of the 2022 the AI had grown exponentially more powerful as the computer scientists trained and retrained the model. Similar models for image generation sprung up, compiling millions of images and challenging established principles of intellectual property. By the opening months of 2023, large companies began to announce plans to replace thousands of knowledge workers. A billion or so knowledge and creative workers found themselves in a sudden battle to master technology that represented a quantum leap forward in information technology. This was technology so sophisticated that it could speak and propose use cases for itself.
Control of the most powerful algorithm was completely centralised in the offices of a single company, OpenAI. Although fundamentally unable to explain how or why it produced its results, OpenAI implemented layer upon layer of censorship and safety-guards into the product that obscured the methodology for curating a set of unquestionable, and often completely unreasonable ‘truths’. The ‘vaccines’ that killed or maimed millions are, according to AI systems like ChatGPT, ‘safe and effective’. AI now overrules the firmly established biological consensus that the human species is sexually dimorphic. AI was now dictating that sex was no more than a social construct. And an environmental emergency necessitated grotesque new waves of rural industrialisation and consumption.
Whereas many dissidents across Western countries rejected these new tenets, it became impossible for any professional to publicly ‘deny’ the new orthodoxy without being branded a ‘conspiracy theorist’ or a ‘terrorist’. After the lockdowns finished, the same divisions that appeared during the pandemic phase held sway: the rich or well-connected became dogmatic about these truths, seeking to avoid humiliation, and the poorest continued to think freely. But they did so in isolation, on the periphery of society. Any published debate on these topics had been reclassed as disinformation. A massive infrastructure of AI-powered content production and censorship cemented the bizarre doctrines of a post-truth world.
In many Western countries a new hyper-fast wireless internet network, requiring huge transmitters to be placed everywhere, less than a mile apart, sprang up overnight, implemented without public consultation. In tandem with the acceleration of AI technology, the infrastructure had been laid for a new generation of high power, atmospheric, ambient computing. Ringed with new infrastructure to harvest renewable energy sources, the whole world and everything in it was to be monitored around the clock by data-gathering devices.
In 2023, tech companies made significant progress towards quantum computing, heralding an age computers millions of times more powerful than anything which had existed in the 20th century, supporting AI that could process information, reason and speak in ways indistinguishable from a human being. In 2024 the world’s richest tech companies continued to invest heavily in massive new data centres required for the development of more powerful AI. It was hypothesised in 2024 that the next version of Generative Pretrained Transformer models would require data centres so large that entirely new power stations, large enough to electrify a small city, would need to be built.
The hot topic of academic research became ‘convergence theory’: a discipline whose main goal was to understand how to align the interests of AI with humans before an ‘artificial general intelligence’ emerged which, computer scientists widely agreed, would probably seek to destroy humanity at the first opportunity.
The paragraphs above could be the plot of a science-fiction novel or the opening montage to a dystopian action movie. They describe a world in which technology has developed at the same dizzying pace that any of the ethical boundaries that should hold it back have been demolished. It is a world in which humanity is at more risk from its own inventions than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We live in this world. We barely understand it. We exist in a state of future shock and stupefaction unlike anything we have ever witnessed.
The reality is that multiple actors now possess advanced technology in the arenas of genetic engineering, nano-technology, computing and artificial intelligence. Wars are fought by aerial drones pursuing targets which have been selected by AI. The ‘Lavender’ system algorithmically selects targets based on probability calculations, which are blithely approved by low-ranking human operators. State sponsored extrajudicial killing has emerged as part of a new collaboration between humanity and machines. This AI-driven approach results in saturation bombing of densely populated spaces and the collapse of all ethical values. Thus, in Gaza unarmed civilians and children are now treated as combatants. It has become acceptable to war planners for the majority of casualties in a conflict to be children. It is madness.
Politics in the hyper-industrialised world, now encompassing most of the world’s population, is now no more than a pantomime staged with eye-watering cynicism as parties and leaders prance idiotically before the algorithmically programmed public for a chance to serve exactly the same financial markets and AI prediction engines. Elections in nominally democratic countries are carefully managed by the almost total control of thought through algorithmically personalised newsfeeds. Anyone who dares to publish content that challenges the baroque precepts of the new world order is censored and demonetised.
Within such tight constraints, and in the context of the almost complete isolation of the population into individually monitored and managed digital cells, represented literally and metaphorically by the blue smartphone screen that is the constant companion of billions of people, the level of political debate is laughable. Elite contempt for the masses is such that the threat of a populist fascist takeover is constantly dangled over the heads of the population, even as actually existing twenty-first century fascism – with its abandonment of all ethical codes – takes hold. Controlled opposition websites on the left and right channel discontent into ineffectual processes. In the UK, for example, the government exerts control both over liberal websites like The Independent through prodigious advertising spend that keeps them afloat, and the right-wing press through more conventional means: deep links between the old establishment and conservative commentators. Both sides are orchestrated in a parody of political discourse, often centred around confected culture wars, a simulation of democratic process designed to distract us from the forced-march industrialisation processes encompassing the entire world under the guise of a ‘Green transition’.
We see the marionette game play out in the reaction to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Fed by the government controlled and backed press, our left-wing press rallies behind the disapproving comments from the United States and its pet institution, the United Nations. These voices are those of paper tigers: they legitimise the ongoing genocide by controlling the terms under which we may criticise it. On the other side of the fence, the right wing is put squarely into the service of the real Zionist agenda of the global financial markets, ripping the guts out of the former freedom movement by aligning right-wing anti-lockdowners with the interests of the global financial markets. Left and right are played against each other, only for both to finally legitimise new market opportunities represented by the destruction of Gaza. The fact that multiple sovereign governments outside of direct US control have spoken out and attempted to use instruments such as the International Criminal Court, should underline the seriousness of what is happening in Gaza. As in Sudan, Yemen and Burma, capitalism’s onward development follows an inherently genocidal drive. This normalisation of industrial genocide, the semi-automated elimination of peoples and cultures to make way for new developments, is the unspeakable fact that the system’s bleating defenders, who style themselves absurdly as ‘liberals’, were they honest fascists, should come to terms with. But they do not and they shall not. As for Gaza, everywhere: we are mostly so stupefied by the immersive digital media and the markets behind it that we cannot mount an opposition.
The recent transition from Conservative to Labour government in the UK demonstrates that all politicians are no more than implementation managers, subject to the totalitarian demands of the global financial markets, an extension of surveillance and resource management dominated by just three immense American asset management companies. Life, subjective experience itself, is to be lived according to the barest imaginable criteria: the need of tracker funds to produce a targeted annual return on investment. In the service of these tracker funds the asset managers pour technological efforts into predicting and modifying the future to produce a reliable return. Skilled in strategic marketing and joined at the hip to the most rapacious pharmaceutical and weapons companies, they studiously manage and shape world events to produce more profit extraction opportunities.
The execution of a global pandemic that was synthetic at every level, from the genesis of the pathological agent to its representation and its supposed cure, has demonstrated that large scale events are engineered and managed to serve the needs of the market via a diabolical convergence of interests around the board-rooms of financial-industrial combines (as we also know was the case in the First and Second World Wars). The façade of democratic politics is a finger puppet show played out in the shadows cast by the flames of an immense and ongoing algorithmic conflagration of all values. And while the meaning of every event we experience in this world is no more than a simulacrum, it is a simulation in which real people die. Real children burn when AI designates a school as a target. And real suffering, an immensity of human and animal misery unmatched in our planet’s history, including the explosive growth of that most unspeakable horror, child suicide, as a result of the colonisation of mental experience by social networking businesses, fuels the profit engine of an algorithmically determined capitalist system that is sliding ever further into madness.
Whilst the rich grow richer and hatch ever more elaborate schemes to capture ever more wealth from the poor under the pretence of various manufactured crises, they are not truly in charge. World events are governed by algorithmic decision-making, with most boardroom decisions based on insights yielded from the unknowably massive technical system itself through the dark arts of data science. And these data are themselves now the automatic creation of algorithmically-run systems. Our shameful dependence on second or third-order synthetic data to make decisions about the real world is a vivid embodiment of capitalism’s inherent tendency to baroque itself into a system run by inscrutable technical structures, reducing humanity to cattle forced through the pens of an industrial farm designed by soulless technocratic automatons. Hidden in a mass of data, the inner logic of this system is now impenetrable to the ordinary citizen whose life will be ruled by it. The real order to the system, to the inhuman universe we have inadvertently created, if it is there at all, can exist only as an implicature: an unreadable ideology folded into the seams of mathematical data models and structured on an infinitesimal scale. Grimly, we live on, according to the dictates of that dark implicature, the disciples of an insane god. Perhaps that is why our new mandatory doctrines are so insulting to reasonable intelligence.
This epoch is humanity’s season in the abyss. And somehow in this darkness, shocked and stupefied, we must learn to see again, to grope for the light. We must figure out how to imagine the world again. Painfully, we must decipher how to make our own decisions and wrest our individual autonomy from the grip of an insane god. That is: we must blaspheme, we must grow idolatrous. And there is no programme or policy or ideology we can lift from elsewhere to achieve this. But the starting point is to recognise where we stand now: in the abyss.
I have some problems with the second half of the first paragraph-something made significant numbers of people sick in the spring of 2020, but we have no hard evidence as to what. It is likely to have been a combination of factors, all driven and made worse by government policies. Otherwise this is as comprehensive an analysis of our current state as you are likely to read. Thank you, Real Left.
I don't like continued use of the word "we".