Intelligence Beyond the Machinery

We live amid an extraordinary amount of noise, much of it carefully arranged to keep our attention somewhere outside ourselves. The machinery grows more sophisticated, the stories more elaborate, and the demands upon our attention more constant, but the underlying question remains much the same: what happens when we surrender too much of our perception, our authority, and our agency to systems that claim to know what is best for us?

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I was listening to a podcast about privacy and the history of intelligence agencies and, in the end, it kind of made me laugh, and not because it was funny. To me, the whole idea that in the modern era, the military-industrial complex and the intelligence-industrial complex, along with their integrated, worldwide web of allegiances, are allegedly racing to develop the best technologies, and specifically AI, to prevent all kinds of imminent threats, is absurd. To achieve this, they’ll need to monitor and keep tabs on everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time — because you never know where a threat may come from, and because every other country is developing its own AI, and its own variation of a “threat assessment infrastructure.” This race is, to me, toward an illusory, non-existent mountaintop that will simply continue to bankrupt societies, further extracting from and stressing those who actually produce and create anything humans actually need.

It’s a cosmic joke, because there will be no satisfaction and no solution on this path of wholly manufactured necessity and demand, only escalation, exponential resource investment, market speculation and instability, and massive destruction and waste to achieve nothing of true and lasting value. What will be achieved is more pervasive fear, anxiety, paranoia, tension, vigilance, misguided nationalism, and weaponized patriotism. The idea that with just a little more leverage, massive data storage capacity, and a whole host of AI tools, we, the “good guys,” will beat the so-called “bad guys” and protect our interests from assaults and attacks, perceived and as-yet-unimagined threats… It’s all a grand fiction, taken straight from the worst science fiction narratives that are played on endless repeat throughout every form of media.

Information, surveillance, and data gathering have been near ubiquitous for about a century now, with governments, militaries, and intelligence apparatuses worldwide pursuing even more of the same, artificially justifying expenditures for new and better and faster ways to store, analyze, and potentially weaponize that information and data against living human beings — the vast majority of whom have absolutely no interest in criminality, violence, war, or screwing over their neighbors.

AI will not save us from ourselves. It will not save nor stabilize the economy, or prevent wars. It will not prevent humans with nefarious and malevolent intentions from doing exactly that, only on a larger scale, without lifting a finger or putting themselves in any real danger.

But they’ll try to sell these emotionally triggering stories and sweeping, fictitious narratives to the public to justify further debt spending and divert trillions in financial and material resources to defend whatever the hell they are pretending to care about or defend. It certainly isn’t you or me.

It’s pretty evident to me that this is a one-world system, with many similar moving parts, expressing as minor variations on the very same theme, regardless of where you go or where you were born. The poorest of nations and their oft-oppressed societies have smartphones in virtually every pocket. They enable network accessibility even for those who have no money for food, housing, or better education. Why do you think that is?

It’s the same fiction perpetuated throughout history by those who consider themselves powerful, those who want to be more powerful, those who believe themselves to be responsible for managing humanity, or those whom we may refer to as the elite. Those seeking power and influence for their own sake are the easiest to corrupt and capture, manipulate and abuse, for they’ll have no qualms (or, perhaps, have no choice) about setting aside morality to step over and lie to anyone and everyone to achieve their aims (or to save themselves from public humiliation), because none of them can afford to care about the human factor — save for the ways in which they may take advantage of, extract from, misuse or abuse, or appropriate their skills, talents, thoughts, beliefs, and other capabilities.

In public, they purport to be forces for good, to be on the side of humanity, and want to improve things for everyone, while all evidence, and all of the machinations expressed through the system we exist within today show exactly the opposite to be true. There may indeed be a bare minimum offered from the top down that keeps the general audience complicit and their suffering tolerable. But it’s not about keeping a balance. It’s more an existential deprivation, by way of epistemic contamination, that teeters on a razor’s edge between chaos and containment, revolution and resignation. Regardless of how you frame it, it boils down to tyranny, even if it isn’t obvious and overt.

It’s concerning and even disappointing that anyone alive and awake today would believe in this nonsense cover story. Perpetual state propaganda and mainstream narrative manipulation keep capturing, coercing, pacifying, disempowering, and dissociating people from their inborn, innate sensibilities and intuition, while weaponizing their imagination and empathy against them. So, I can appreciate that the battle for our hearts and minds isn’t necessarily an easy one, but the evidence is everywhere, if only we’d bother to have a good look. Fear and worry do have their uses, but chronic fear and paranoia are a program; a conditioned response.

What we believe to be reality and “the real world” is shaped by any number of ongoing psychological operations and orchestrated propaganda campaigns from on high. Whether it’s governmental, corporate, or institutional, the effects are the same, and they are cumulative and damaging. It is ludicrous to think that the very same elements of control, the tools being sold to us as potential saviors of humanity, are also being used to perpetuate the same old lies from the same old sources for the same old reasons. If you still need a savior, of any kind or construct, you’d be wise to examine the garden of your beliefs, and get busy weeding out the invaders, intruders, and parasites.

They won’t be able to prevent all the cracks and leaks in their ever-changing story, but the system has many self-protection mechanisms; it can easily cover up slip-ups and political hiccups, even scandals and controversies, to avert our eyes, desensitize our emotions, and confuse our senses, offering us endless distractions to stare at, to complain and fight each other about, every day of the week. This is fatiguing, whether we are aware of it or not. To be sure, if it’s on a screen, in the news, or pushed into your auto-refreshing social media feed, it can be entirely faked, and more convincingly every day, which both subtly and dramatically affects how one perceives reality and the world around them.

And now, with this rapid technological proliferation, the race toward systemic collapse is progressing at a record pace. They have no interest in slowing the hemorrhaging of finances and material resources that they can’t possibly distribute among their corporate and industrial friends fast enough to build all the bullshit alternative energy infrastructure for the bullshit data centers that maintain the bullshit “we’re doing this for you” narrative. All of this nonsense and noise, rather than doing what is right and good and just for the human family. Hell, even the AI C-suite has admitted they’ll ask AI how to make AI profitable after everything is integrated with AI, and when AI apparently becomes “intelligent enough” to conceive of such a thing. But, by then, one may fairly argue, it’ll likely be far too late. It may simply have to come to pass, so that the machine can eat itself from the inside out. What remains after all is said and done, however, may not be the world we know today. Whether that is better or worse remains to be seen, and there are many theories and predictions in this regard, dependent on the crowd you’re surrounded by and associated with.

So I would strongly recommend that we don’t buy into this “there are numerous and perpetual threats” narrative or this idea of technological supremacy, that your nation or your state is going to care one whit about you, your family, or what you truly need and desire to achieve in this one short life. Western Empire has made new enemies with every encroachment, every bent diplomatic rule, political imposition, sanction, invasion, “peacekeeping” mission, “spreading democracy,” and more for generations. It’s all a put-up, but it’s challenging to stay sane and discerning when you’re exposed to the fear-based and terrifying stories, headlines, and troublesome ideas pushed into public consciousness every minute of every day.

“They” are guiding a collective experiment. They are both defiling and endlessly redefining your paradigm, your priorities, and your values, shifting you away from what is authentic, real, and true. This is only possible if you keep deferring your agency and your authority to the system, to the machine, to the data-driven, and to the faster-than-thought, and impractical-to-falsify synthetic and artificial.

Centralized governments and authorities, centralized banking and economies, centralized institutions and industries inevitably fail. That’s simply an unfortunate part of the cycle, wherein the philosophy of “there can be only one” seems to be the default rule, concentrating power and influence in favor of monopolistic and autocratic force and collective control over all other options. And while it’s difficult to know exactly where we are along this particular cycle, I think it’s fairly evident that we’re nearing the end of something rather significant, but perhaps toward the beginning of something broadly disruptive and transformative, something uplifting and life-affirming.

It has, and will have, little-to-nothing to do with technology, AI, spying on or tracking everyone and everything they do, or commoditizing everything and then turning around and selling it back to us as some cheap synthetic knock-off, because it’s marketed as “smart” or “efficient,” when in reality, it’s handing off administrative work and associated costs to the consumer.

Keep your head. Keep your wits. Be informed as to some of the rumblings, occurrences, and events, but don’t give them unnecessary weight or priority. Question the story, consider the offer, and if you have the time, dig into the claims a little bit. As to world events, unless you’re seeing and experiencing these things in person, you have no idea what’s really happening “over there.” That noise is agenda-driven, and rarely represents the lived reality for those involved.

Focus on what you can control, and, as always, that starts inside of you, with your spirit, inside your home, your family, your community, and, really, that is about it. Anything beyond that is more likely to be siphoning off your limited material resources, creative and productive output, and your emotional, psychological, and spiritual capacity. And that’s by design.

Stop mindlessly feeding the machine. It will never be satiated, even if it kills you and destroys everything you love and care about. And don’t get caught up in the fallacy of saving the world. The grand story will continue long after everything we may achieve, or believe ourselves to have achieved, is forgotten.

Your legacy is what remains, and what is timeless is the essence. What remains is something that is true, that which cannot be authentically represented through the means of the synthetic and artificial; that which has been bought, borrowed, or stolen from lived human history, human creativity, and human productivity, from our imagination and intuition, simply to exist. It’s all an inferior knock-off, a facsimile, a curated database, but one that comes at a tremendous material, financial, epistemic, and ecological cost.

All of these exorbitant debts will be handed down to our children and future generations, as any great sociocultural missteps are. Whatever catastrophe and collapse is currently underway is what they will have to deal with, because we didn’t have the foresight, the wherewithal, the courage, or the presence of mind to see through and beyond mere stories, fictions, and fantasies.

Know where you stand and get clear on what you stand for. Think critically about whether you’re standing for something that you actually want and desire, value and prioritize, or whether you’re acting on behalf of what’s been handed to you, programmed and conditioned into you, and you’re just going along to get along because it terrifies you to be or do otherwise.

The feelings of fear and terror are signals, useful information through which you may reorient and realign to something deeper, something more substantial, something primary and pure about you and why you’re here — and maybe why we are all here. The machines can’t give that to you. AI can’t solve that for you, but it will happily assume an authoritative position over you and decide for you if you accept the offer.

AI, and all of this technological chaos and the race for some fantastic future, is just a story. You have a choice to make. Either you will buy into the fear-based narratives telling you that this is a last-ditch effort to have total control and total surveillance and that you will have no choice but to bow down to your digital or synthetic masters… or you will see it for what it is, for the fiction, distortion, and deception that it really is.

You will either stop moving forward blindly and blithely or get busy engaging, entertaining, and creating with the real. The lasting. The unbreakable. The genuine and authentic.

There is no AI for that.

Lux et veritas