the shape of things to come
(9 min read)
What happens when something that was once considered to be a conspiracy theory gets labelled as a 'trend vector'?
You may have seen an article doing the rounds recently concerning AI-powered WiFi sensing technology, a technology that has the ability to create a three-dimensional monitoring and surveillance system.
Understandably some people are concerned about the implications of this technology. While the implications of surveillance are fairly self-evident, there are other layers and levels of interpretation that require the integration of other tech technologies and social trends.
In 2020, Microsoft issued patent WO2020060606A1, titled 'Cryptocurrency System Using Body Activity Data'. This patient set out the technology for harvesting data driven by an individual person's activity.
In other words, it proposes that your actions could be translated into cryptocurrency by measuring your body's activity.
If you stick these two technologies together it's not too far a stretch to imagine a factory setting in which the productivity and engagement of workers is measured by AI. All the time you're doing the job you have been contracted to do your physical movements with generate cryptocurrency - a tokenised asset that you will be able to spend on clothing food or whatever is deemed appropriate or necessary for your existence. All the time that you are not then you don't get paid. No more floor manager or supervisor to monitor if you're sneaking off to the toilet for longer than is considered reasonable by management. Now if you don't do the work, you're not generating an income. It's all linked via the WiFi surveillance grid and assessed by AI.
This could be applied to office workers at home as well. Are you sitting at your desk typing? Or are you flicking through Instagram or TikTok reals?
As I say, this is no longer a conspiracy theory but a 'trend vector'.
Add this isn't just potentially linked to work environments either. The social credit scoring that China seems to be enthusiastically adopting not only means that your activities can be commodified or tokenised, but also penalised. Not only could everything that you do or say be processed through an algorithm and measured for its functional efficacy, but also for its social acceptability.
Remember, purely digital programmable currency is a tokenised asset. This means that there are limits as to how, where, and when you can spend what you earn. And with an AI system monitoring your every move, it knows when you're heading for the ice cream for the third time that week. Well, you might be clear that it's just a binge that you're on for six months of the year don't even touch the stuff if it flags up on the AI that you're exceeding what it considers to be a healthy dose then your tokens just won't be able to buy ice cream that week.
In psychological terms it is an extreme form of behaviorism. When you control people's environments or their relationship to their environment you can control their behaviours. For those of you thinking that you just get someone else to buy your ice cream on that day, think again. The surveillance system surveys everything, all human activity. This is not just you as a single data point but as meta data too, all the points of connection that you make in a day, the people you spend time with, the places you visit, how long you spend there, what you do, who you do it with, everything gets fed into that algorithm.
In such a world, when you do things that are considered productive and efficacious to the system you will earn tokens - and maybe the more model of citizen you are you might even get a multiplier in there. If on the other hand you do things that are considered socially unacceptable you will be penalised. You're tokens won't necessarily be taken away but how you will be able to spend them will be limited. This is already happening in some parts of the world.
Of course, none of this is a foregone conclusion, I am simply speculating, but this isn't a conspiracy theory either, this is a trend, and I think it's concerning.
Imagine if the whole world was like this, with every area of life becoming a potential subject of gamification.
There are other applications for this technology team. For those of you who are aware of social impact bonds I suspect you'll be able to see the following connection fairly clearly.
For those of you who don't know what a social impact bond is, it is a financial contract where private investors fund social programs upfront and are repaid by the government, with profit, only in the event that specific, measurable outcomes are achieved. These social impact bonds are most commonly applied in the areas of health and education.
While on the surface the idea of companies investing in the improvement of health and education might seem like a good thing. The investment is, after all in the quality of real people's lives. A question is, knowing how companies work - to generate profit - and knowing how investors like dividends, what happens once these problems are fixed?
If the market is driven by ethical considerations then one might assume that these investors would move on to fixing other social or environmental problems, only, it seems to me that once a company finds a profitable model it tends to repeat it. Some people have raised questions about the link between the promotion of a certain type of diet and the increase in certain types of illnesses over a corresponding time frame. They have also questioned the profits generated by pharmaceutical interventions over a similar period of time. Some have suggested that one helps to generate profit for the other, that they are two arms of the same beast.
The point being, if a problem can be solved cheaply and simply then how does that affect those who profit from the delivery of a more expensive solution? Might they intervene by creating more problems to solve?
It's not a stretch of the imagination to consider the plausibility of this. We can see the activities of organisations like the IMF stretch back over decades doing just this, profiteering and asset-stripping countries off the back of extreme social and economic unrest. Extreme social and economic unrest that in turn can sometimes find its origins in questionable political or covert interventions.
I think you know the pattern I'm talking about. Organisations with power, influence and control can act to destabilise a region by setting one side against another by creating conflict, sometimes supplying arms to both sides. When the infrastructure is duly decimated they intervene with some sort of arbitration between the conflicting sides, but not so much that they resolve all of their differences. Then they step in with an economic support package - a loan in other words - stipulating that reconstruction be done by reputable contractors, generally those connected in some obfuscated way to the same organisation providing the loan. When the time comes to repay the loan, which the country generally can't afford to do, a deal stuck for rights to some natural resource that country owns, at a reduced rate of course. Paper trails run off in circles, doors revolve, offshore accounts get bolstered, and cocktails are drunk on the decks of yachts by men with greasy palms.
It's a clever model, and a profitable one, all be ethically questionable.
And what happens on a geopolitical level also plays out at the individual level too. The industrial food that makes you sick and the industrial drugs sold to ease your symptoms are the same economic colonialism played out by corporations at the level of the individual. All this before we even touch on the economic system and how the same principles of debt used to compromise nations are used to effectively enslave millions of individuals around the world.
I trust that by now you know this isn't leading to me coming at you with an ideological solution. Nor am I wishing to convince you of some amorphous 'they' who might be controlling everything. Whether this system operates by design or default concerns me little - what concerns me is the health of life, with that collectively or individually, and that one cannot exist without the other.
What I mean by this, is that if we have a system that promotes the health of the individual by dictating what a healthy individual is, at the cost of the individual determining what a healthy expression of life means to them, then we lose something in that process.
By the same token, if the individual lives their life without any attention or concern for those around them then that is not an effective solution either because invariably they end up destroying the connections that sustain them - be that to themselves, to other people, or to the wider world.
So where I do see a solution is in our capacity as individuals to synthesise the oppositions that are all too often used to divide us - be they political, cultural, ideological, economic, sexual, or circumstantial.
As such, there is a solution in connection - in recogniseing the ways in which we are.
Alongside this I also believe in your Creative Instinct - which is nothing more complex than your innate ability to adapt and evolve as a form of life, and that as an individual, how you do that is your responsibility. Not exclusively as an individual entity that exists separately from everything else, but as an individual expression of something greater too. While this perspective seems commonly aligned with spiritual and religious belief systems - that you are part of something greater - I see also as an expression of a material truth. That we are all part of one thing, that is different and unique in its parts but unified as a whole. In other words, we are one universe experiencing itself from multiple unique perspectives, as such, what you do to it you do to the thing that you are.
Just knowing this information doesn't mean that everyone will act for the betterment of all, but it does provide a moral compass that negates the need for dogma, and to my mind, supporting an expansion of consciousness in this direction is a much healthier strategy overall than turning us into token generating automatons.
Of course, we live in the best of all possible worlds. We have to meet the world and ourselves where it is, and we are at, but we don't have to accept certain 'trend vectors' if we don't want to. Based on experience it seems to me but by far healthier way to live is for each individual to seek the truth themselves and to discern what the right track means to them based on whatever light they manage to cultivate within themselves, and let that shine out to illuminate what path might be best for them to follow in life: To live the life that life is calling them to live.
Again, none of this is considered conspiracy theory anymore but rather a 'trend vector' that seemingly more investment groups seem keen to bet on and geopolitical technocrats seem keen to promote.
Of course, nothing is a foregone conclusion, but for this not to happen, something needs to shift in the conscious perceptions and actions of individuals, away from division and towards connection, away from centralised authority and towards personal agency, accountability, and responsibility. Whether that would be enough remains to be seen. I happen to think it is the best place to start.
