Trends to a New World Order: Part 2

Trends to a New World Order: Part 2

The New Age of the Technocratic Elite

Click here for part 1

"The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values." - Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era

Techno-biological tyranny seems to be the best descriptor for what is emerging.

As the world moves toward world governance in a new globalized era, technologies that enable extended life spans, and technologically augmented abilities are being developed. These upgrades for the human body come at a high cost, and are unattainable for a large number of people, causing additional societal conflict and the rise of new aristocratic classes defined by their level of "enhancement". Diseases are mostly eradicated among elites, while a large percentage of the population is left still vulnerable. A high tech overlay of sensors and monitoring devices tracks workers activities. Their heart rates, facial expressions, and overall state are monitored to maintain maximum efficiency. Supercomputers run Sentient World Simulation software designed to enable testing of efficient social management and psychological operations against the population in a virtual world. Artificial Intelligence makes health, political and educational decisions that were once made by human beings. Advancing technology offers miraculous cures, while opening doorways to new forms of tyranny and manipulation unimaginable in the past.

In the hands of a hubris filled, power hungry elite who exercise control over world affairs, advancing technology presents disturbing possibilities. When examining these developments in technology, human nature, and the nature of power are vitally important aspects that must be considered. Utopian ideas are one of the ideologies fueling both trends to world governance and advancing technology. Will these trends benefit the average man, woman and child as we are told they will? Or, will a New World Order be constructed solely for the benefit of a tiny elite? History tells us that the latter is most likely.

Societal control through technology

The perfection and fine tuning of social management utilizing high technology is a theme that permeates science fiction literature. Today, this theme is moving into reality. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote of "pre-crisis management" in his book Between Two ages,

“Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them." [1]

The Futurist magazine, in its Outlook 2008 forecast lists an intriguing and disturbing trend for 2008. Educational, health, and financial decisions will be increasingly made by artificial intelligence.

"More decisions will be made by nonhuman entities. Electronically enabled teams in networks, robots with artificial intelligence, and other noncarbon life-forms will make financial, health, educational, and even political decisions for us. Reason: Technologies are increasing the complexity of our lives and human workers' competency is not keeping pace well enough to avoid disasters due to human error." [2]

The Sentient World Simulation, developed by researchers at Perdue University - with the help of DOD funding - can be utilized to do just what The Futurist is projecting, and much more. The SWS program allows for behavior modification and anticipation on a scale unknown at any time prior to its existence. By integrating "nodes" representing every man, woman, and child on earth into a virtual world, propaganda, terrorist attacks and other variables can be launched at the unsuspecting virtual population. SWS was originally designed for fortune 500 companies to aid with strategy. The Department of Defense saw the technology as an opportunity too good to pass up. SWS technology has been "...incorporated into the U.S. Army's recruiting efforts by modeling the population of the U.S. that is eligible for military service, thus allowing recruiting commanders to strategize ways to improve recruiting potential soldiers." [3]

The SWS concept paper describes the program's capabilities in depth. Some of the abilities include military planning, and corporate strategy development.

Planning: "SWS provides tools to develop, reuse, and compose action plans into playbooks. A playbook database enables planners to recall playbooks." "Planning tools enable plans to be developed for temporally and spatially fine-grained actions as well as long-term actions and to place combined plans into a single playbook." Operations: "Augmenting real-time information with near real-time and faster than real-time simulations allows RCC to develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners." Testing: "SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP) and Civil Affairs activities, capable of illustrating the impact of these activities on populations." "Commercial users can construct experiments to use proprietary data in a controlled environment." [4]

Simulex inc. provides the SEAS (Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation) technology - which the Sentient World Simulation is based on - to multiple government and private clients. [5]

The list includes:

Government Clients

-United States Department of Defense
-United States Department of Justice
-United States Army Recruiting Command
-United States Joint Forces Command
-Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center

Private Sector Clients

-Eli Lilly
-Lockheed Martin

-Other Fortune 500 companies

Using the SWS system, pharmaceutical companies can test marketing campaigns for new drugs in the virtual world. Military strategists can plan PSYOPS and carry them out against virtual adversaries. As reported by the Register, "...the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how you will respond to televised propaganda." [6]

Homeland Security is currently using the technology for a variety of purposes. In a slideshow shown to Homeland Security - presented by the co-author of the SWS concept paper cited previously, Alok Chaturvedi - graphics are shown that describe the uses for the technology. Experimentations with Engineering, Economics, Public policy, Law, Management and Psychology are listed as possible inputs for the virtual population. A graph that displays the emotions for the population reads "Sad," "Content," "Aroused," and "Happy". The "impact of globalization" is also listed as a variable in "modeling an adversaries viewpoint". [7]

Microsoft "monitoring group activities"

The workplace will soon be infiltrated by a technology developed by Microsoft that will, as the Register reports, act as "...some sort of "activity monitoring system" that keeps an eye on worker productivity using various "physiological or environmental sensors." These sensors would track everything from heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, facial expressions, and blood pressure to brain signals and galvanic skin response."

The purpose of this technology, according to the patent, is to enable assistance to be sent to those workers who need it, or assign the task to someone else who is able to complete it. The Register also points out that the information will be stored away in a database for future reference. This enables "...user performance [that] can be readily compared..." [8]

The Microsoft patent states,

"For example, the system can infer through physiological and activity sensing that a user is becoming more frustrated with his current activity and thus could benefit from assistance from another user who has experience with the same or similar activity. This can be accomplished via parameter and/or threshold settings whereby the detection of parameter violations or satisfied thresholds can indicate a particular frustration level or at the very least that the user has become "frustrated" or "stressed"." [9]

Surveillance and anticipatory conformity

In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, surveillance has expanded exponentially. A phenomenon called "anticipatory conformity" is becoming more prevalent as the surveillance society grows. The term, coined in 1988 by Harvard psychologist Shoshana Zuboff, describes a process of self censorship as a result of constant surveillance. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon style prison in 1785 which put this principle to use. The prison included a central tower constantly manned by guards that stands in the center of a circular building in which inmates are unsure whether they are being watched. Bentham saw the Panopticon system being used in "...punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools." [emphasis added] [10]

Lynn Duke quotes Soshana Zuboff, coiner of the term anticipatory conformity, in his Washington Post article, Uniqueness lost in surveillance society,

“I think the first level of that is we anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with awareness,” she says. “We know, for example, when we’re going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or we’ll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke. It’s within our awareness to self-censor. And that self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom." [11]

As surveillance becomes more prevalent, Zuboff says that anticipatory conformity will "become more intense". Zbigniew Brzezinski, again writing in Between two Ages, sees a dictatorship eventually forming in a new technocratic era of electronic surveillance and control,

"This [surveillance and data mining] will encourage tendencies through the next several decades toward a technocratic era, a dictatorship leaving even less room for political procedures as we know them." [12]

Future Eugenics and life extension

The Human Genome Project has given rise to promising developments in the realm of medicine, allowing personalized treatments for disease. The project has also opened a doorway into genetic tinkering with the unborn. Selecting embryos that are disease free has been made possible by genetic screening. Genetic manipulation, unlike screening, may allow in the future a selection of specific traits for an unborn child. Professor Michio Kaku, writing in his 1997 book Visions, warns that there is a danger of a new eugenics emerging from genetic enhancement technology. Kaku states,

"One long-term danger for the far future is that those who are the wealthiest will be able to afford to improve their germ line, while others will not, leaving the rest of society behind, eventually creating a new biological caste system. Gregory Kavka, a philosopher at the University of California at Irvine, says, "Any such move toward genetic enhancement has the potential of reestablishing social inequality, though along new lines. Old aristocracies of birth, color, or gender may dissipate, only to be replaced by a new genetic aristocracy, or 'genotocracy.'" "The deep fracture lines of society could become chasms if only the wealthy have access to choosing their germ line..." [1]

This scenario of a society divided by advanced genetics was also seen by the U.K. Ministry of Defense strategic trends 2007-2036 report. The report stated,

"The application of advanced genetics could challenge current assumptions about human nature and existence. Initially employed for medical purposes, breakthroughs in these areas could be put to ethically questionable uses, such as the super-enhancement of human attributes, including physical strength and sensory perception. Extreme variation in attributes could arise between individuals, or where enhancement becomes a matter of fashion, between societies, creating additional reasons for conflict." [2]

Many scientists and proponents of genetic enhancement realize that the cost of this technology will be immense. Some of them see the exorbitant cost as a eugenic policy in and of itself, as it would only allow for the "most successful generative lines" to have access to the enhancement. John Campbell of the University of California writes in his paper The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution,

"The costs [of genetic enhancement] will be enormous, far beyond what most people could afford. This has kept our democratic society from appreciating that these possibilities will be used and will be important. However, their feasibility cannot be judged from what the average person will be willing to pay to procreate. What matters are the resources that the most successful generative lines will be able to apply to their goals. A million dollars per conception seems a great underestimate to me for the beings who hold evolution's frontier." "We should not imagine that people will just dabble in their evolution. Another generation will fan autoevolution into the all-consuming endeavor of the intellectuals, scientists and economists. The resources of the world probably will suddenly be shifted to this enterprise. Remaining "humans" will realize that they have been displaced from their former privileged status as the masters of destiny." [3]

Advanced genetics also offers a tool for the creation of subservient workers, though an intent to do so is met with denial. The Times Online reports that, "Aldous Huxley may have got it right. In Brave New World, his classic futuristic novel, the author envisaged a society divided into castes from Alpha at the top to Epsilon at the bottom."

The Times Online reports,

"...experiments conducted on rhesus monkeys have shown for the first time that animal behaviour can be permanently altered, turning the subjects from aggressive to “compliant” creatures." The scientists did so by blocking the effects of a gene in the brain called D2, which cut off the link between the monkeys’ motivation and perceived reward. Humans have an identical gene. [4]

A doctor working for the project denied any attempt to modify humans into becoming slaves, saying, "Genetically manipulating people to become slaves is not in their interests, but other changes might be."

Life extension

The Ministry of Defense also identified the possible uses of life extension technologies in the aforementioned strategic report. "Dictatorial or despotic rulers" are named as being interested in acquiring such technologies.

"Developments in genetics might allow treatment of the symptoms of ageing and this would result in greatly increased life expectancy for those who could afford it. The divide between those that could afford to ‘buy longevity’ and those that could not, could aggravate perceived global inequality. Dictatorial or despotic rulers could potentially also ‘buy longevity’, prolonging their regimes and international security risks." [5]

The CIA's Global Trends 2015 also discusses life extension, stating, "Biotechnology will drive medical breakthroughs that will enable the world’s wealthiest people to improve their health and increase their longevity dramatically..." [6]

In summary of parts 1 and 2 of this report, humanity is facing dramatic, challenging, and dire times. Techno-biological tyranny seems to be the best descriptor for what is emerging. As we move full speed ahead into the future, lessons of the past cannot be forgotten. Memories of the slavery and bondage of our ancestors as subjects of royal elites must not fade from our minds.

Citation:

Societal control through technology

[1] ] Brzezinski, Zbigniew. Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era. Penguin books, 1976

[2] "Outlook 2008". The Futurist. Nov-Dec 2007. Available at

[3] Cupp, John. "USJFCOM teams with Purdue University to add the human factor to war game simulations". United States Joint Forces Command. February 4, 2004. Available at

[4] Chaturvedi, Alok Dr. "Sentient World Simulation (SWS): A Continuously Running Model of the Real World". August 22, 2006.

[5] http://www.simulexinc.com/

[6] Baard, Mark. "Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale". The Register. June 23, 2007. Available at

[7] "Towards a Synthetic Environment for Computational Homeland Security". Available at (requires flash player)

[8] Microsoft Patent #20070300174. Available here

[9] Ibid 8.

[10] Clark, Robert. "The Panopticon". The Literary Encyclopedia. Available at

[11] Duke, Lynn. "Uniqueness lost in surveillance society". Washington Post. December 10, 2007. Available at

[12] Ibid 1.

Future Eugenics and life extension

[1] Kaku, Michio. Visions. New York, New York: Doubleday, 1997. page 257.

[2] Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre/Ministry of Defense. "The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036". January 2007. page 80.

[3] Campbell, Thomas. "The Moral Imperative of Our Future Evolution". Available at

[4] Rogers, Lois. "Scientists find way to make us slaves". Times Online. October 17, 2004. Available at

[5] Ibid 2.

[6] National Intelligence Council/Central Intelligence Agency. "Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts". page 9. Available at

By Daniel Taylor

Old-Thinker News | Jan. 9, 2008