The future is not a machine waiting to consume us. It’s a mirror, showing us the depth of our dependence and the reach of our imagination. What we call progress is only as real as the awareness we bring to it.
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It seems to be a dominant bias in the conspiracy research community that, when examining threats to human individuality, sovereignty, or ingenuity, any technological advancement or suggestion of progress is assumed to apply to all of humanity. We’re all going to be captured, corrupted, or fed upon by the machine. That’s the trick, and the trap, all wrapped in one, and we all fall for it from time to time. We need to frame it with a more mature mindset. In truth, some will adopt the changes, many will be influenced by them, but only a few will ever be completely and utterly subsumed into the system — to be taken advantage of, or to take advantage of it.
Take the use of AI, for instance. The initial excitement and widespread proliferation of generative AI — or non-human intellect — have undoubtedly influenced nearly every industry and institution in society. But as with any revolutionary or evolutionary step, the hype, excitement, and overwhelm eventually die down — or the bubble simply bursts and it is revealed for what it really is. Though, if you choose to invest your time, energy, and attention in the manipulative and fabricated news cycle, or the persistent propaganda streams offered through nearly every form of media today, you’ll be captured with relative ease by the cover stories and led into their next sham.
We should remain vigilant and aware of how much influence or agency we hand over to any tool or technology. AI is simply that: a tool. Many would argue otherwise, due in no small part to the fact that much of modern civilization has been slowly conditioned to defer more and more of its natural abilities, skills, and aptitudes to the efficiency and predictability of algorithms and machine learning. Whatever benefits the corporation. But as we know, any influence or power we surrender to a person or thing comes at the expense of our intellect, agency, individuality, creativity, and comprehension — not to mention our emotional resilience and capacity for self-reliance. AI should be one brick in the structure, not a supporting wall, and certainly not the foundation on which everything else is built.
In my experience, AI is a glorified search engine. ChatGPT, for example, is nearly fifty percent trained on Wikipedia’s resources. That alone should raise alarms. It can be useful in conversation, creative exploration, thought experiments, coding, spelling, or grammar. But it is not the author. It must remain secondary to our intent, intuition, critical thinking, and imagination.
The nature of interaction with such technology is extremely dependent on specificity and language. One word can dramatically change the result of a prompt, influence its bias, affirm or mirror your own assumptions, and thus limit the potential for comprehension, understanding, and true problem-solving. If you don’t ask the right question in the right way — or presume that the answers you receive are complete, verifiable, and true — you risk wandering down blind alleys, creating more problems than you solve.
Further complicating this are the inherent biases built into these systems, shaped by the culture, ideology, and politics of the nations and institutions in which they were developed. We don’t know what we don’t know — especially about how encapsulated and captured our perceptions have become. We must be willing, more than on rare occasions, to examine our assumptions, question the validity of the answers we receive, and recognize that these systems — like the search engines we’ve relied upon for decades — are curation and narrative-shaping machines. Controlled by algorithms tied to political, ideological, and financial interests, AI is no different.
And here is where the larger picture emerges. The framework of AI mirrors the framework of the world it was born from — centralized, controlled, and self-reinforcing. How we interact with these tools either confirms our biases and reinforces the limits of our perception, or it challenges and expands them. We can use it to interrogate our own comprehension, intelligence, and imagination. But you can’t know what you don’t know if you keep asking the same questions, rooted in the same unexamined opinions or assumptions.
Many people express fears about “globalism” and the rise of a tyrannical one-world government. To them, I would simply ask: how has it not been that way for at least a generation or two? Since 2001, the actions of the military-industrial complex alone should be enough to suggest that we already live within a one-world system — a simulation within a simulation.
Within this simulation, divisions are fabricated — cultural, religious, ideological — yet when you look closely, you see sameness everywhere. Watch videos of nomadic entrepreneurs, YouTubers, or world travelers, and you’ll notice that wherever they go, they must journey far from civilization to find anything truly unique or untouched by the empire. But you’ll also see that people are just people, like you or me. They desire for and aspire to the same things. They don’t trust the system, their government, or the news.
Whether you’re downtown in Vancouver or Moscow, or just on the outskirts, it’s the same. The same cars, the same phones, the same construction of concrete, steel, and glass. The same shops selling the same products, with only slight variations in price. There are differences in language and alphabet, certainly, but step back far enough that you can’t read the signs, and you’d hardly know where you are.
For decades now, we’ve already been an integral and increasingly integrated part of a one-world system. To find anything unique, preserved, traditional, or natural, you must go far into the wilderness or high into the mountains. You won’t find it in any modern city. Our world is not as vast as we pretend it to be. Such pervasive sameness across every corner of the realm would be impossible if it were truly as sprawling as we imagine.
This is where the influence of AI — and the illusion of progress itself — becomes most visible. The sameness of the digital world is simply an echo of the sameness we’ve already accepted in the physical one. Our thoughts, behaviors, and conversations are increasingly shaped by templates of convenience. The more we rely on algorithmic intelligence to interpret reality for us, the more that reality conforms to its design.
If you’re not willing to look beyond the hype and the headlines, to recognize the nature of the world stage, you become a compliant character in the propaganda and narrative manipulation. You’re allowing their stories to shape your world, inside and out. And for many, that will be enough. But is it enough for you?
We are constantly being manipulated into perceiving the inevitability of certain outcomes — of cultural and social shifts we must supposedly prepare for. We’re twisted around through stories of safety, security, effectiveness, job creation, financial growth, progress, sustainability, balanced budgets, the “need” for military solutions, and the constant rhetoric and manufactured squabbling of borders, tariffs, and politics. All of these narratives are built around an apparent reality — one that doesn’t exist anywhere except within your perception, your imagination, and your manipulated understanding of the world you inhabit.
The truth is, every system of control depends on belief — the quiet consent of those who stop questioning. The moment you remember that you are the perceiver, not the product, the spell begins to break. AI will evolve, the machinery will expand, and sameness will spread — but only where we’ve forgotten to be awake. The rest of us will continue to build, imagine, and remember, choosing reality over simulation, presence over programming, and truth over convenience.
Solvitur ambulando